Oaks Park
At least I think that’s the name of it… Sellwood, between the river and the railway… can’t miss it. This is another zoom-while-you’re-shooting, small aperture shot. Less pronounced than the last one I took in Tryon Park.
Moon rise
This was taken at 800 ISO, aperture 8.0 for about 10 seconds on RAW for a change and had a huge amount of ‘noise’ on it. And not the good kind, so it’s been through a bit of processing. I’m including it here because although it’s not amongst my best, what it lacks in technical accomplishment I think it makes up for in atmosphere.
Countdown continued…
Notez bien! You’ll probably need to refresh the page (hit f5) to get the new link everyday… and some days will doubtless be better than others. It’s coming up to day 3 and I’m running out of ideas. Any requests?
Here’s that link again: http://agaveweb.com/atticalendar.html
Looks like it’s going to be a full week again, once I finish at lewis and clark I’m heading off to localise some more UK English stuff.
Countdown to christmas with ‘Cus
Word Magazine just published an advent calendar with links to videos and suchlike. I thought, I could do that:
Presenting
Countdown to Xmas with ‘Cus
One more thing for me to update… 🙂
Practice, practice, practice
I went on a walk round the Hawthorne area on Saturday afternoon and about 30 kids were shooting hoops. With varying degrees of success.
Autumn turns to winter
I bought the domain name www.vintageviewfinders.com today. A bargain at 99cents for a year and I’ve set it up to forward to this category. Wish I’d thought of it before I got my business cards printed, but hey ho.
Potatoes. It’s what’s for dinner, elevenses, lunch, breakfast, tea, supper
They turned out nice I reckon. As did everything else. We could have fed a small army and their horses but we still made a fair dent in the supplies. And had cake for afters too.
Then we watched “What’s Cooking” (2000) set in the ‘burbs of LA about several families of various ethnic backgrounds and the family drama that unfolds on your average thanksgiving. I’ve seen worse films on a full stomach and at least it was seasonal.
Mexican Colours
Oregonian temperatures… I liked the way the shadow cast itself across the decidedly Mexican looking paintwork. It’s a photo from my ‘thanksgiving’ stroll yesterday morning.
Here’s a photo from Guadalajara to contrast with…
There are many schools of thought on blogging
The vast majority state if you’ve nothing interesting to post, don’t post anything. But that’s only advice for professionals, I reckon. Amateur, personal blogs are exempt from golden rules like providing consistent, interesting content. And with that in mind…
It started off bright today and well nippy, Atticus’s water bowl had a thin layer of ice around the edges. I got a picture of the sunrise, but that’s nothing too impressive because it happens at about 7.15am these days…
I played about 10 games of scrabble in an hour with a 60% win rate, posted that I was going to post and nipped off round the ‘hood with my camera and brownie-starflex-pringles-tin contraption. Only joggers, dog walkers and the Starbucks crowd were about but I was afforded very nice views looking over the Willamette wetlands towards the town centre. For the record, those looking for American etiquette tips might want to take note that joggers ignore you. Dog walkers wish you Happy Thanksgiving. Starbucks only wants to know if you’d like room for cream.
We’ve got a friend coming over at 3ish which’ll give me ample time to fulfil my homework for the day. Make potatoes. DrSita asked me how many to buy and I said, get loads, and when you’re looking at them thinking did I get enough? Double the amount. So I’ve got a lot of spuds. Half are destined to be mashed and the other half will be perfectly par-boiled, rolled around the pan to encourage an absorbant outer layer, drizzled in olive oil, be-sprigged with rosemary and roasted to perfection. Probably. You can’t go far wrong with our tuberous friends. We started on the CostCo ham on Sunday and have been eating it every day, frankly I’m sick of the stuff now, though I’m looking forward to making a (split) pea soup with whatever’s left by the weekend. Still reading?
Erm… what else? Work’s been going grand. I’ve been adding intrusive javascript to several pages to make them fancier. Though an overhaul of the entire site is due in a few months to a tablefree CSS so it’s all pretty academic. law.lclark.edu is the site I spend .60 of my week on now. TV? Colbert’s Christmas Special was fun, but we’re discovering (8+ years later than most) Freaks and Geeks. I think we were in Spain when it was on telly the first time round, and it’s great stuff. Music? Looking forward to getting hold of Guns’n’Roses’s 13-year-in-the-making album. I heard a track on the radio and it sounded great. The beginning riff is the same as The Darkness’s I believe in a thing called love, you know the one…
Forgot how much I liked that one… Also I’ve found I now fully fit the demographic for Chris Hawkins’ show on Radio 2. He plays a nice mix of music from when I were a lad peppered with the occasional new offering. Thanks to that programme I got into Elbow properly.
Books? Just finished Nick Hornby’s latest, Slam. It’s about a teenage boy who gets his girlfriend pregnant. And I get the impression it was also aimed at teenaged readers but was harmless entertainment. I’ll be nipping out and getting Making Money by Terry Pratchett tomorrow so I have something similarly lightweight to replace it.
Photos? I’m still obsessed with Through the Viewfinder shots and checking on camera prices and hoping the whole worldwide-economy-going-down-the-toilet has some kind of fringe benefit regarding the price of a Pentax KD20.
Films? Quantum of Solace were grand, I thought it was a leaner, better film that the last one. Hellboy II was also a treat and Guadalajara native, Guillermo Del Toro’s trademarks were all over the film. I watched From Russia with Love too and it holds up very well. I especially liked his miniature tape recorder housed in a camera not unlike my Kodak Duaflex.
Plans for the weekend? A drive to the country somewhere, it’s meant to be nice weather.
Alrighty, that’s it for now. Thanks for bearing with me as I find my blogging feet again. I’ve got competition from my dad now so I’ll try to post more regularly… hasta pronto 😀
I’m off out
to take some pictures and then promise to write some kind of proper post.
Looking across the Willamette
Nothing much to say about this one, but what do you reckon to the google map? Worth persevering with?
Local Nutz $2.49/lb
Not sure what that is in metric, but it seems like a bargain. Let’s do the maths… 2.2lbs in a kilo so… $2.49 x 2.2= $5.48/kilo and today that’s £3.67 in pounds sterling for a kilogram of walnuts and hazelnuts. Is that a good deal?
I’ve not had a comment on this photoblog for weeks so I’m trying to invite interaction…
Cusp of Winter
This is from wandering round Portland’s Arboretum, where they have a fine selection of trees with their Latin names emblazoned on plaques. Though this here photo could really be from anywhere…
Stop
I’d never seen one of these road signs before, seems like it could do a fair bit of damage to your car if you rolled over it at night. It was in a part of town with very little traffic, near Clackamas Correctional Centre, for the record.
I’ve been playing too much late night scrabble lately. I look at this and mentally I’m thinking, hmmm. STOP, POTS, OPTS, TOPS, SPOT, POST… they’re all worth 6pts, but should I use up my S on something so low scoring?…
Blue Demon y el Rallador Sonriente contra las Bruselas de la Muerte
There’s a fine tradition of Mexican wrestlers starring in B-Movies with titles like El Santo Vs. The Mummies of Guanajuato. Here’s a picture I took on Sunday evening. Dr.Sita had bought some sprouts on the stalk and I thought they looked very cool. Turns out they don’t, but anyway I noticed our Blue Demon money box containing Atticus’s college fund peering over, so then I got carried away adding our anthropomorphic cheese grater and titling it “Blue Demon and the Smiling Cheese Grater vs. The Brussel Sprouts of Death”.
Hope you like it. It may be the only post this week as I’m working at least 3 jobs…
I love the smell of Bokeh in the morning
Bokeh in Wikipedia…: Bokeh (derived from Japanese boke, “become blurred or fuzzy”) is a photographic term referring to the appearance of out-of-focus areas in an image produced by a camera lens using a shallow depth of field.
It’s a catch-all term commonly employed in the expression, it’s not blurred, it’s bokeh. This particular shot was just happenstance since I’m buggered if I’m lying facedown on the frozen lawn to take a picture at 7am on a Sunday and happened whilst holding the camera down by my shoes and hoping for the best.
Theys me daps mind
Me daps are falling apart and no longer providing the comfort and style onlookers have come to expect so we nipped out today to Ross (Dress for Less) to get some new footwear. Footware? No. Footwear. Anyroad, on the way back we stopped at Albertsons to pick up some essentials and there was turkey bowling in full swing.
I’m sure I don’t need to elaborate as everyone’s certainly au fait with the minutiae of the sport, but just in case… It was basically a way of collecting phone numbers and trying to get people to sign up for banking. Imagine skittles but instead of a ball, a frozen turkey (in a plastic bag), instead of 9 pins, 10, and instead of a skittle alley in some frozen outpost of a local pub, you’ve got a supermarket aisle with rolls of kitchen towels as buffers. I got 2 strikes and 1 gutterball (Butterball?) and won nothing but did better than the old couple before me who risked their health and well-being for an Albertsons T-Shirt. I’d left me camera in the car I’m afraid so no pictures…
Last night I was coerced into attending a Project Runway Party. Couple of points. A runway in the US is more likely to mean a catwalk than a landing strip. And Project Runway is an American programme in its 4th season or so where designers are deprived of sleep for a few weeks and then bullied by a bunch of European fashionistas into designing and making clothes in some pseudo-darwinian battle of who can sew the fastest. I can usually stomach about 10 minutes. Anyroad, last night some colleagues of DrSita organised this party. Everyone was split up into teams of 2 and then sent off to the charity shop to buy 5 dollars’ worth of materials then put together an outfit themed “Presidential Inauguration 2008” in 20 minutes. I refused point blank to take part. Or be a judge. But found a nice little dive bar near the house while everyone shopped. Yeah, I’m an aguafiestas, but that’s how I roll. I don’t do dressing up or public speaking. It says as much on my CV. In true Portland style, everyone won.
This morning it were gorgeous, fog slowly lifting, heavy dew, a nip in the air. So I took a few pictures and am quite please with this one which’ll probably be tomorrow’s post for me photoblog. (sign up to be emailed a daily e-slice of Portland here.)
I’ve got it as my screensaver at the minute, please help yourself.
And that is the news.
Portland City Centre
Quantity not quality… 9 shots from wandering round downtown Portland after work yesterday.