It's Cloud Cleaning Time!

Cloud cleaning? Did you read that right? Why yes, you did! But no doubt you're wondering "what in the world does that mean?". Well have no fear, I have the answers you need~!

Every day, our lives revolve more and more around the phenomenon that is “the cloud" whether we realize it or not. It's where everything we do on the grand ol' Internet is stored -  our email, music, the photos we share online, saving our video games, our status updates and more. The Cloud plays a major role in how we connect with our family and friends online.

But there's a dirty secret to this. Our Cloud isn't clean like a good cloud should be. Rather than being powered by clean, renewable energy, it's being fueled by dirty coal power! And if we don't demand major technology companies like Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft to clean our cloud, we're looking at huge, expanding databases burning more coal and emitting more carbon pollution into the atmosphere. All that just to keep our amazing Internet constantly humming for millions of people to frequently access.

Of course, it doesn't have to be this way! There is always a solution and the solution for this problem is getting Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft to quit coal and power their growing databases with clean, renewable energy. If we can get them to commit to this, other tech companies will surely follow suit. Sounds fantastic, right!? Who doesn't love breathing clean, non-polluted air!?

Thus, I introduce to you Greenpeace International's newest campaign, Clean Our Cloud! As you already picked up, Greenpeace is working to get these big tech companies to go clean in their energy resources now. That way, as they expand their databases to support this growing Cloud, they aren't relying more and more on disgusting coal energy in the process. Now then, I'm just going to stop right there and let a lovely, awesome video do the rest of the talking~ (And while you're at it, visit the Clean Our Cloud website for more information; trust me, it's interesting and you're going to want to know all about this campaign since this is just the beginning).

This campaign was just launched last week so it's still a baby as far as campaign years go, haha. But it's one kickass baby!! So to spark off this new awesome campaign, on Tuesday April 24th, 2012, I participated in my first (relatively) large action!

There were four different roles during this action.

The first is obvious and crucial: the photographers, videographers and the Tweeter (who took awesome photos on his iPhone and tweeted them on the CleanOurCloud Twitter page).

The second was the Clean Our Cloud reps who dawned blue shirts with one of our main campaign logos to appear as Apple employees. I was not one of the reps, but I still got an awesome shirt just for being a part of the action.

Check it out!!

Pretty awesome, I know~

Most of the blue shirted reps were on the balloon releasing team. Their mission: let go of over 200 black cloud balloons into the Apple store and up to the skylight!

Look at 'em flying!

On that note, just in case you're wondering, all the balloons used are biodegradable and were not released outside. Therefore, they did not impact the environment in any way (we wouldn't do anything stupid like that of course, haha).

The third role were the oh so dutiful cloud cleaners! Suited in black skinny jeans and a black long sleeve shirt with their title Cloud Cleaning Crew on the back, these activists took squeegees, brooms, rags, and a mop to help clean up Apple's dirty cloud.

Check them out in action!

Aah yeaa, squeegee on that Clean Our Cloud decal~!

Careful where you walk, there are some dirty clouds around here.

The fourth role is where I came in. Well, actually, I was in from the very beginning without any of the employees or customers knowing~ Along with two others, I played the "civilian", just your average customer browsing around in the Apple store. Or was I just browsing and pretending to compare features on different products? As the civilian, it was my job to assist the blue shirted reps in changing the background of every iPhone, computer, laptop and iPad to this:

That way whenever a customer walked over to check out a device, they would see the logo of our very important campaign.

But before entering the store to do this, part of my job was to help carry one of two of these large Clean Our Cloud cones and place in near the front of the Apple store to draw major attention!

In addition to changing backgrounds, us civilians also nonchalantly re-setted the homepage of laptops and computers to our campaign homepage (which looks rather similar to Apple's advertising page)~

Check me out in "secret ninja in an obvious red-jacket" mode!

A big thank you to Mr. Action Tweeter DanS [that's his nickname, haha] for this awesome photo! He even said that this was one of the cooler shots he took that day. Whoo!

The funny part about going from one device to another was that the Apple employees were onto us. They noticed that the backgrounds and homepages were being changed and therefore reacted by resetting each device so that they were no longer displaying our message.

But that didn't stop us. We just went back and did it again and again until the action was over. At one point, some of the employees got suspicious that I was one of the culprits. In order to lose their trail and make them actually believe I was just a customer, I pretended to just have fun with the computers and laptops by checking out the Apple websites. Then, I just walked away to the next device without having changed anything. After checking to see if their computer was tampered with, the Apple employee would find that everything was okay and that I was not another activist messing with their gadget. The moment they left, I changed the background and homepage of the next computer I was on. They didn't even see it coming, ha!

And that's basically the gist of what went down on Tuesday. At first, I felt pretty cheated out of a good and fun role when I found out I was just a "civilian" and had to wear regular clothes rather than the cool blue shirts or even a cloud cleaning crew shirt. But it was either stay annoyed by it or make the most of it and obviously I went for the latter (I still got a shirt so yay). So in the end, I had a super awesome time and even if none of the customers, employees or media folk knew that my two other "civilian" friends and I were in on it, we still played a major role and had fun acting like undercover agents, haha.

The best part is that this action got great news coverage! The L.A. Times has an especially amazing article all about this event and I highly recommend that you read it. It even talks about the prep/planning meeting the night before the action. So go go go, take a break from this blog post and reaaaaaad iiiiit (it really won't take you that long)!

While we're on the topic of media coverage, check out these articles later if you like (if you want my opinion, I say read them after you finish this blog update)~ They're pretty awesome:

• Greenpeace Shames Apple With, Um, Fake Window-Washing
• Apple stores targeted by Greenpeace activists

And there's your super awesome update! Oh and before I forget, no I didn't get arrested, haha. But I could have although the chances of anyone getting arrested was very slim. Actually, it turned out that the Apple employees were extremely cordial and let the reps and cloud cleaning crew hang around in the store a bit before nicely asking them to leave. The only three who didn't leave until the very end were us civilians, hehehe~

So there you go~ Hope you enjoyed reading about my awesome day as much as I enjoyed experiencing it, haha!

Until next time~!

~Sara

Did I Mentioned I Got Into UCLA?

Because I got into UCLA and I totally forgot to mention that in my last blog update. The decisions for UCLA admissions were released on Friday, April 20th and as you already know by now by both my title and the first sentence of this post, I got accepted!! WHOO!

Aaaaah yeaaaah~! I sent in my "letter of intent" or whatever you call it and I am now officially a Bruin. A big, fluffly and scruffy brown bear~!

Here's a photo of my digital acceptance letter~

It's most likely hard to read but all you really need to care about is the fact that is says "CONGRATULATIONS, SARA! YOU'RE AWESOME!" :D

So yeah, there you go. I'm transferring to UCLA in the Fall. Let's hope I'm able to nail a room to myself and if not, hope I don't have a horrible roommate (I've had my fill of those, haha).

Love to you all!

~Sara

Earth Day~

This past Sunday was Earth Day and San Francisco had an awesome Earth Day festival in the Civic Center Plaza. I got there at about 1pm and help out with the Greenpeace booth for two hours asking for people to sign a petition to get the EPA to enact a stricter limit on limiting carbon pollution from existing sources. That was fun since I got to interact with some pretty cool people there who were more than wiling to sign (others, not so much, but hey, you win some and you lose some, haha).

Some time after 3pm, I started to walk around on my own and experience every booth there. It was pretty awesome and I sampled a few pretty delicious tasting vegan food (much to my surprise since I've never really cared for vegan food). Most of the booths there were informational which was pretty cool. Other booths were clothing, jewelry and other small trinkets.

There was one pretty awesome booth called From War to Peace.

As you can see in the pictures (if not, I'm about to briefly explain anyway), this booth was selling necklaces, bracelets and a few other simple things made from recycled copper from dismantled nuclear weapon systems. In case it's hard for you to see, this is what it says in the second photo (which I find absolutely beautiful):

"Turning weapons meant to destroy us into art meant to restore us, swords into plowshares, bombs into beauty, hate into love, & war into peace."

I told you; super awesome and beautiful right?! I almost bought a necklace from the man, but I was turned away from the $40 price tag and I wasn't that much in love with it (plus the pendant was a little too big for my taste). Nonetheless, I think the idea and concept behind this is amazing, creative and super eco-fantastic!

However, despite not buying something from this booth, I did buy an awesome shirt! I got it from a cool booth called Playback that sold t-shirts and jackets. The shirt I got makes me feel so nerdy and eco-awesome~

Nerdy~

One cool part of this shirt are the silly environmental messages on it, haha~

 

"Jumping Copernicus! Daresay there;s more soot in the azure than a chimneysweep's beard!"

Hehehe, yeah, I really love this shirt. Best part is that is made out of recycled clothing scraps which turns out to be more eco-friendly than growing organic cotton! What's also cool is that they have other shirts with green and blue colors but no dye is used at all. Instead, they combine recycled PET bottles (Mountain Dew bottles to get green, water cooler bottles to get green and beer bottles to get brown) with recycled cotton to get those pretty nice color blues, greens and browns.

I totally recommend checking out their website just to see what the rest of their products look like and some cool facts about how eco-friendly their business is. It seems that the booth on Earth Day was selling cool special made printed shirts for the occasion since their website only shows plain shirts. Plus, it's just a tad bit more money on the website than when I bought mine (which was only $15!! the website is about $22 if I can remember which is still a pretty great price for an eco-friendly garment~!).

After buying this shirt, I wandered around for a bit more. I kept passing this same henna booth and I finally went over to check it out. I almost, no seriously, I almost got a henna tattoo (which are temporary for those who aren't aware, last about 1-4 weeks). And when I say almost, I mean I seriously would have gotten one on my arm near my wrist if I actually saw a cool design in the girl's folders (or if she took simple requests which, honestly, I highly doubted). But alas, nothing struck me as something I would want stuck on me for 1-4 weeks are worth the $15 for a simple design. Now that I think about it, maybe I should have bought that $10 small pack of "make your own henna gel" and just do it myself. But then again, I would most likely just screw it up and suck at applying it on myself, haha (well, probably not if I used my right hand and did it on my left pfff). Ah well~ (And no parents, this doesn't mean I want or am getting a tattoo. I just thought henna would be cool because it's temporary and natural, haha).

So that's basically the sum of my Sunday. It was pretty relaxing, easy, and fun. Didn't do much afterwards other than come back to the flat, relax a bit and then sleep. So yeah, there's your update, haha.

Before I leave you all, just going to leave you with a horrible, horrible tease~

I did something pretty cool today. Actually, I participated in something awesome this morning, buuuuuut I can't quite give you the details just yet. I'll be typing it soon after this, but I won't be finalizing it (with photos) and publishing until after this event has been officially released into the press (which really shouldn't be too long)~ So stay tuned for that!

~Sara

P.S If there are typos in this, deal with it. I was waaaay too lazy to go back and proof-read this, haha.

Barnes & Noble and APP and Tigers, Oh My!

To start this blog update, it only makes sense to tell you all what APP is. APP or Asia Pulp & Paper is a giant Indonesian paper company that is extremely unsustainable in its paper manufacturing and is destroying old growth rain forests in Indonesia. Within this old growth forests are ancient species of trees such as the ramin trees which are being driven to extinction despite it being illegal to cut them down. Also being pushed close to extinction are the beautiful Sumatran tigers. Other species living in this quickly depleting habitats are becoming endangered and are in risk of extinction, including the orangutans.

While many big companies have suspended further purchases from APP until this paper company cleans up its act and goes sustainable, there are still some who are refusing to do so. Barnes & Noble is one of those companies where it has been found that the pages used in quite a bit of the books they sell contain ancient and protected trees due to purchases from APP. Therefore, Greenpeace is urging that Barnes & Noble cut their ties with APP until they finally decide to switch to sustainable practices.

To read a bit more about APP and what they're up to, go here. I'd also suggest going here to get a bit more detail about Barnes & Noble and their connection with APP.

Now then, onward to the point of this post (other than the fact that APP needs to stop destroying ancient forests, killing tiger and other species, and demanding Barnes & Noble and other companies to quit ties with APP), I took part in a Save the Sumatran Tigers event this past Saturday morning. It was at first going to be something that including tiger facepainting, but we ran into a bit of 'trouble' when we got to the Barnes & Noble over in Emeryville (East Bay area). Seems that when the small group of Greenpeacers practiced the song once, the security nearby came up to us and demanded that we shut down what we were doing because where we were was a "private area with public access" and we weren't allowed to do any sort of protest there. For quite a while, one of the head Greenpeacers talked with the security woman and eventually the Emeryville city cops were called in. All I will say is that the cops were waaay nicer than the security woman, but I won't go into detail with that.

Basically, in the end, there was no facepainting, but that's okay. I did make last minute tiger ears out of cardstock paper and my Copic markers the night before (this was an event I just barely found out about two days before haha). They worked awesomely until I accidentally ripped one off when running my fnigers through my hair, pffff. Oh well. They were pretty cool though and I was quite proud of them (my Greenpeace friends even thought they were clever~)

Here's a webcam shot I took Friday night of them, haha.

And the back of them, of course~

I didn't really serve much purpose at the event other than moral support and helping with taking pictures as well as video taping the small group while they sang their awesome tiger song to the tune of Eye of the Tiger by Survivor (which was just amaaazinggg). Which brings me to tell you that in the end, we were able to stall security enough to sing the song several times in front of Barnes & Noble and get people to do our text message petition for the short time we were there.

I don't have the video, but once I do or come across it on the Greenpeace website, I'll be sure to give it a nice post of its own here to show you guys. I'm not in it since I was the one recording it, but hey, my presence was still there and that's all that matters~

Here's a couple pictures from the small event (sorry, I'm not in them, haha).

So that's about it. Not too eventful, but still something very important that was also a lot of fun.

Until next update~!

~Sara

So I'm 21 Now

So Monday was my 21st birthday. Already came and went so quickly, haha. Despite how fast it seemed to end, I had an amazing birthday. It was fun, relaxing, and spent with my awesome family (including my aunt, uncle and two little cousins).

The day started off slow. I slept in which is something I always love to do when I get the chance. After waking up, I had a delicious breakfast and sat on the couch for a while just relaxing and watching tv. In the afternoon, my mom, uncle, cousins and I went to watch Hugo at the theater (my baba, aunt, and bro stayed behind to do some work).

Hugo is a pretty good movie. I liked it; I found it very cute. Quite a long movie too, about two hours, but again, I liked it. After the movie, the whole family and I went to Outback for dinner. In a nutshell, we had great food and we headed home for presents and cake.

Speaking of cake, my mom did a fantastically brilliant job on ordering the most amazing cake ever!!! Excuse me while I spam you all with several photos of this superbly amazing cake of Sherlock Holmes awesomeness~!!

Nothing is fondant except for the magnifying glass. Everything else is delicious buttercream~~

One of my favorite Sherlock Holmes Stories aaaaahh!!!! ♥♥

Awesome purple "book" haha~

Look! Even detail in the pages!!!

Awesome iconic Sherlock Holmes side profile silhouette with his
awesome pipe!!

So that was my cake. I can't stop saying how amazing it was. Forever the best cake eeeeveeerrrrr!!! A big thanks to my mom since it was her idea, my baba because.....he's my baba and he helped with it in some way, and Jana who is the amazing young woman who made it~~!!

Stepping away from the cake now, I got some cool presents (most of which I already knew about because I asked my mom for them, haha). Most of them were books (minus the one game: Assassin's Creed which is something I've been wanting to play since it first came out in 2007 haha); awesome books of, go figure, with Sherlock Holmes relations. But rather than these centering the great consulting detective himself, it focuses on the Napoleon of Crime, Professor James Moriarty (one, The Hound of D'Ubervilles, is in the perspective of his "right hand man" Colonel Sebastian Moran). The only book I wasn't expecting is something called Rivals of Sherlock Holmes. Mom says it's an "antiquey book" and it sure looks like it since the book cover/sleeve is a bit tattered, but it still looks really cool. It's basically a compilations of mystery stories that were written in the same time period as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes. It looks like it's going to be an awesome read because, if you know me, I love me some good mystery stories~

♥ My awesome books next to my awesome cake books~ ♥
♥ Happy eatings and happy readings~ ♥

I also asked for a cool shirt that my mom ordered for me. It's a simple gray shirt that says "Bullies Suck" on it with an image of what would be some face of a bully. It's really cool and I like what the t-shirt company it comes from stands for (pro-human rights for the LBGT community). Unfortunately, it didn't come in while I was here which just sucks. It would have been cool wearing it around in San Francisco (for really no particular reason, it's just a cool shirt, haha), but oh well, nothing you can do about it and it'll be here, at home, for when I come back in a month.

For now, if you want, you can check out what the shirt looks like by clicking here.

Well, I think it's about time to wrap up this blog post. Not much else to include other than repeating myself and saying how Monday was an awesome day full of fun and loud laughing. So I think the best way to end this is to post a ton more birthday photos (and that way you can see what else I got from my aunt, uncle and cousins because those are cool gifts too).

My three new awesome books & my new (not so new) game~

My little cousin Erik got this for me. It's the most awesome piggy bank~

Piggy eyepatch. Piggy Pirate. Pirate Piggy. Ohoho~

I thought it was awesome that I happened to wear my Sherlock Holmes themed shirt on my
birthday and then I had a Sherlock Holmes themed cake. Awesome coincidence ~ 

Big bro being a big dork as always~

I couldn't not get a picture of me doing something silly with the fondant magnifying glass haha~

So yeah, that pretty much sums up the bulk of my birthday. This turned out to be a very image heavy blog post, but who doesn't like photos? Photos are always awesome.

Anyway, there you have it. Again, awesome day with a more than awesome cake with my super awesome (and loud) family~ ♥

This is 21 year old Sara (who still feels like she's 17 or 15 or 12) signing off.
For now.

Until the next blog update~

~Sara