grateful, i guess

Posted in Adventures on February 23, 2009 by sequoiaredd

I complain about my little redneck nudist bubble, but at the end of the day considering where the rest of the country seems to be according to that last article I posted, I guess my little 8′ x 16′ shed is better than having to wait in a mob of people for government housing.  Woo!


a sign of the times?

Posted in Adventures on February 23, 2009 by sequoiaredd

Chaos after crowds swarm Fort Lauderdale street for housing help

Thousands try to apply; police shut down the line

FORT LAUDERDALE - Thousands of people seeking government-subsidized housing packed the street Saturday morning in front of the Robert P. Kelly Housing Authority building until police shut down the line because the crowd had grown unmanageable.

Officials estimated that 4,500 people were waiting in line at 8 a.m. when the Housing Authority of Fort Lauderdale began distributing the 3,000 available applications for Section 8 housing, a federal program that provides rent subsidies to landlords to help low-income people find affordable housing.

But the application process was shut down earlier than expected because of the overwhelming turnout, police spokesman Sgt. Frank Sousa said.

“It was a much larger crowd than anticipated,” he said, adding he was unsure if all the applications had been distributed.

Though the crowd grew unruly, only one person was arrested for trespassing, Sousa said. He had no details.

Outside the Housing Authority building at Sunrise Boulevard and Northwest Fifth Avenue, discarded blankets, fast-food containers and plastic chairs littered the curb where thousands had gathered.

Carmen Garcia arrived too late to get an application. “It’s really unfortunate. Times are really hard right now, and this could have helped out,” she said.

Applicants were told specifically in fliers and ads not to arrive before 7 a.m. Saturday, said Tam English, executive director of the Housing Authority. But the number of people who showed up after dark Friday grew out of control, he said.

Police said they cordoned off the entire block early Saturday morning with barricades to organize the crowd, which included children and elderly in wheelchairs.

“It was a big turnout and it shows what the need is right now in the current economic situation,” English said. “There’s a lot more need than there has been in the past.”

Broward had the eighth-highest foreclosure rate in Florida in January, with one of every 182 households in some stage of foreclosure, according to a recent RealtyTrac report. Though home values continue to drop, the battered economy has kept those prices still out of reach for many, who then are left to navigate a rentals market in most cities that have not seen rates drop as drastically as many home values.

Applicants were allowed inside the building at 8 a.m. one at a time, and about 2,800 forms were handed out before 9:15 a.m. The crowd outside had grown considerably since 7 a.m. and police decided to shut down the operation, fearing the crowd would storm past the barricades to get the few hundred remaining applications.

With the voucher, low-income applicants would pay 30 percent of their monthly income on rent, while the housing authority would pay the rest, English said.

English said he would consult with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development officials in Miami to determine whether to distribute the remaining applications and, if so, how.

“If we take a few hundred less applications than we had anticipated, that won’t significantly impact the people on the wait list right now,” he said.

The owner of the first application picked following Saturday’s handout could be called by the Housing Authority in six months, English said. The 2,000th voucher could be called in about three years.

The situation Saturday morning mirrored the huge turnout in 2003, when the Housing Authority passed out a limited amount of applications at a single location at a Fort Lauderdale apartment complex. “I was told it was a disaster then,” English said.

For Saturday, officials chose a nonresidential location with better parking. “The big difference is the demand now. We thought we had fixed one problem, but then another came around and bit us in the rear end,” he said.

It also marked a change from the last time the organization passed out applications, in 2006, after advertising online and accepting mail-in applications for up to 10,000 people. By limiting the applications and by spreading the word through limited advertising and word-of-mouth, English said he hoped fewer residents from outside Broward County apply.

“It was crazy here, just so unorganized,” said Karen, a single mother from Pompano Beach, who declined to give her last name because she didn’t want people to know she was seeking government assistance.

Karen said she saw one woman buy an application from someone for $10. “I would’ve given $50 for that,” she said.


its feeling breezy over @ IFM

Posted in Adventures on February 23, 2009 by sequoiaredd

check out my latest installment at IFeelMyself.com called breezy_1

ifmscreenshot1

ifmscreenshot2

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(my concentration face)

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(sorry for melting your coffee pot, breanna :-P )

private blogging circle?

Posted in Adventures on February 21, 2009 by sequoiaredd

would any ladies be interested in starting a private blogging circle?

lately I’ve been feeling like I should be dividing my writing between personal and sex/sex work related. any thoughts on this?

there are so many things I would like to write about my personal life but not things I would necessarily want a customer to know about. but the thing I like about blogging is having the instant feedback to your writing and/or ideas.

any thoughts?

sexy witch 1800s

Posted in Adventures on February 19, 2009 by sequoiaredd


image via Sexy Witch

image via Sexy Witch

I love this painting.


absence of late

Posted in Adventures on February 19, 2009 by sequoiaredd

Lately I’ve been busy with helping out the camp a lot. This week will be my last big effort of work and then I am pretty much done.

How do you balance volunteer/activism and helping out with projects that really need it with working and getting ahead and making more time to futhuring your own career?

This year I have decided to make a leap and go to the Sex 2.0 Unconference. I’m not sure what to expect but I’m desperately seeking community within the sex work field and there just doesn’t seem to be any down here. There isn’t much of anything down here and that sucks. Part of me wants to be apart of helping South Florida evolve with the rest of the world and the other part of me wants to escape back to Cali-fuckin-fornia where all the sane people live and grow pot. Like in the movie Humboldt County, in which I actually got teary eyed watching when someone used the term “tweakers” in the movie.

I was born in California, San Francisco to be exact. The epicenter of everything cool, don’t deny it. Northern Cali is where all of the sane people have escaped to despite the high cost of living out there. When I was younger I actually thought California was magickal. Like real magick. Where there were mountains and lakes and seals and pretty views. My mother forever had a plan of moving back out there someday and I always believed it. Thats where I thought I could really live life. South Florida has always been the place where I sit and mold until something better comes along. This year I was actually thinking when we moved to this camp that I could be apart of the first cool thing down here that ever was. Something that would pull people away from the malls, shallow nightlife and South Beach. But here, the biggest battle is fighting something I like to call Redneck Syndrome. Its waking up to find budweiser beer cans floating in your pond. Its trying to convince someone that recycling is a good thing even though you can’t get paid from sorting your trash. Its having five different conversations with people about how the raccoons and iguanas are just hungry which is why they go through your trash and eat your flowers, if you feed them regularly they won’t come looking for more and no beating them to death is not fucking necessary. Its frustrating.

So where do you draw the line? Are these people for the most part past being helped? I feel angry watching them abuse this property and part of me can’t help but get involved and say something and do something.

What do you do when you’re living on the perfect property for community and organic gardens when all the owner sees is more concrete pads?

asshole of the day

Posted in Adventures on February 19, 2009 by sequoiaredd

nf1

whats funny is that in order for them to receive the payment message they would have to click on the payment button.

hardy har har har.

I feel important when people find the time to send me asinine messages to try and prove to me how cool they are. Awesome, seriously. So cute, keep up the good work little boys and girls!

recessions suck, let’s fuck!

Posted in Adventures on February 18, 2009 by sequoiaredd

more craigslist fun. this ad is serious though.

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truth be told

Posted in Adventures, Container, Gardening, Green Issues, Organic, Urban with tags container gardening, naked outdoors, naked women in nature, naturist, nudism, nudist, organic gardening, Sequoia Redd, trailer trash, urban gardening on February 18, 2009 by sequoiaredd

Jean-Paul Says:
February 15, 2009 at 9:21 pm e

As a person who lives in a high-rise filing cabinet for service industry slaves, do you think that it is possible for a person in my position to both reconnect with nature as well as establish a modicum of self-sufficiency as you have through your gardening? Honestly, I read your blog as a fantasy; the idea of having a place to grow food, to connect with nature, to be anything other than a slave waiting on his next scrap of food with all the dependency and desperation of a caged animal — that is a dream from the spot that I currently stand.

My question is: how can a poor urban dweller reconnect with nature as you have? Is it a lost cause? Has the life been sucked out of me?


I don’t live in the country.

I live in Davie, Florida an area which was at one time a booming agricultural center but is now slowly turning into an urban nightmare.

Its a cross between rural cowboy wannabes, trailer park trash and yuppies with horses.

The property I live on basically amounts to at the end of the day as a naked trailer park.

I see potential in this place, alot considering its probably the last 10 acre alternative lifestyle parcel this far South.

And if anyone knows anything at all about South Florida is it absolutely, positively STARVING FOR ANYTHING THAT IS REMOTELY COOL OR EVOLVED.

Actually, it is the most Southern Nudist Camp in the USA.

The property is located in the direct path of runway nine of Fort Lauderdale International Airport (hence my irritation in my gardening blog because they literally zoom over head every fucking five minutes), there are high tension wires all over the place (yes thats right the same ones that cause brain tumors), and not to far away is 595 a major highway which pollutes the air with car exhaust.

I live in an 8′ x 16′ SHED (!!) that was actually converted to be a living space (but they left out the insulation and the wind blows right through the walls) with wavy paneling and crappy formica cabinets.

I have a giant concrete pad as my front yard but was extremely lucky for the tiny as 4′ x 12′ dormant dirt/junk pile that was left from the previous occupant that we converted to a tier garden. The last row of which I found is the only place where food will grow because not enough sunlight reaches this area during our Winter season which is the only time anything will grow down here because the rest of the time its too freakin hot!

I have not bought any of the pots that I am using to grow my food in. They were all salvaged or donated. I am a scavenger! You can too!

I use my pots to grow all kinds of plants that I’ve lined up along my concrete pad.

The owner of this camp has no vision for nature and is more concerned with pouring more concrete pads and collecting rent than he is in gardening or landscaping. He owns other parks and keeps remarking on how much easier this place would be to fill up if it were a textile park.

There are a few things that city dwellers can do without any space at all. You must have windows some place which allow some type of sunlight to enter your space? You can use mirrors to reflect the light back into your apartment and use the reflected light to grow things. You can make a little jungle, right in your living room with plants! Check out TreeHugger’s List of the Top 5 Plants for Improving Indoor Air Quality! And you can grow things to eat! Wheatgrass for instance (the same plant that WholeFoods will charge you $4 per juiced shot of) is an excellent source of chloryphyll and greeny goodness in general and costs like nothing to grow, all you need is trays, water, wheat seeds (berries?) and voila! A non-electric juicer will run you about $50, but thats it. Lettuce is ridiculously easy to grow and grows well in pots.

Seeds of Change sells organic seeds and they have some interesting stuff for sale, like anything from heirloom tomatoes to purple bell peppers and edible flowers.

Another easy seed trick is to buy organic produce that comes with its own seeds and just plant them in the ground. Sometimes that can actually work out to be cheaper than buying the actual seed.

Organic seeds are important to buy, they may run a little pricy but if you know anything about genetic engineering and the monster that is Monsanto then you’ll agree. If not, a must-see-will-freak-you-out documentary is The Future of Food. Another good one is King of Corn.

Anyways, as far as the life being sucked out of you bit, I connect a lot, personally with the plants I grow. I go outside, I talk to them everyday, I stroke their leaves and I connect.

I may not have the privilege of living in the country or going outside and seeing a forest but me and my tomatoes are best friends. I love looking at my colorful zinnias that I started from seed and I like watching my morning glories grow (3rd generation seeds, I’ve been growing them every place I live and keeping the seeds).

There are alot of urban community gardens. Have you researched your area?

We’ve been slowly trying to reclaim gardening space away from more alleged concrete pads. So every time we dig, we find more rock, we make another bed and we plant something that will look so pretty that they could only rip it apart if they had no heart.

In conclusion, I am not too far away from where you are I just have chosen (up until this point) to try and not blog about the negative aspects of where I live for a few reasons. I want to be a solution. But now I realize that maybe instead of blogging like I live in a fantasy world I should share some of the more realistic aspects of my life because maybe it could help other people that live in similar situations.

For instance, would anyone like to hear about/relate to someone who has to deal with/try and eco-educate French Canadian tourists (snowbirds) that drive a 5,000 mile journey to be naked while they dump their beer into the park’s pond, leave their trash for the fish to swim through, threaten to kill the wildlife, build their own septic without asking and are just plain old ecological retards in general? I could write volumes on that!

the first radish

Posted in Adventures on February 12, 2009 by sequoiaredd

thefirstradish1

(haggard model/farmer pictured above: shaman hawk)

homegrown is the shizzle. thanks for making the shot, babe.