This is post One Thousand and One, I’m glad 1000 wasn’t another ‘sorry I haven’t been posting much’ type entry but instead a handy guide to kale and slugs. I only logged in today to post that I’ve added an Archives page to my photoblog and that it was lovely and frosty this morning.
The screenshot will also serve as a reminder of what my desktop looked like in December 2008 with WP 2.6.5. It’s a typical day. I like looking at screenshots of other people’s PCs, just to see what’s installed, what the background is, what OS, what programs are open, what they’ve been searching for… Okay, so I’m as nosey as the next nerd.
Righty, that does it. I’m starting a new meme. Consider yourselves tagged, Flash, Mario and Ale and anyone else who fancies it. Upload a screengrab of your desktop as it is when you read this. Then tell 3 other people to do likewise. Hopefully it will have an infinite cat project feel to it eventually 😀
There was frost in the garden, and probably if I’d been inclined to go further afield, it was elsewhere too. Couldn’t resist a few pictures… Here’s one 😀
In other news, I’m starting to make navigating this phlog a bit easier. Phase one is an archives page which will display 77 day’s worth of thumbnails for your viewing pleasure.
So far my little tract of land has yielded about half a dozen edible radishes. Lots of kale** and today, the tiniest little cauliflower ever. I’ve failed to break even with the original cost of the seeds (about 6 of your Earth ‘dollars’ altogether). The slugs are having a field day though. I posted the problem on Facebook, and I’ve been inundated with slug serving suggestions from slug salad to mezcal with a slug in the bottom. I’m going to try putting a tin can of beer in the garden and luring them away to their boozy deaths. Nanny would have just put a dusting of slug pellets down and salted the stragglers to within an inch of their lives. That’s Welsh practicality for you.
Your 0.005 a day
I went on a nice walk this morning though to take my mind off molluscs and am slowly flooding Flickr with pictures of wintery trees reflected in the Willamette. There was a steam train too, if you’re into that kind of thing. Bloody huge it were. My camera sensor is still giving me gip, I think I’ll have to get it professionally cleaned but I don’t want to be cameraless for 3 days at the weekend, so it’s a good thing that Picasa 3 has a very simple ‘retouch’ button perfect for removing dark areas of dust from your pictures. You only see them in the pictures of sky and water, which is 80% of what I seem to shoot…
** (though I don’t like kale, so it’s purely ornamental. I don’t think I encountered it before coming to the US and I’m not sure it’s available in the Youkay… Anyroad, it was one of the designs I put together for Nourishing Nutrition’s T-Shirts t’other day, get them while they’re hot… The “I dig beets” is my favourite…)
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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…
Atticus giving thanks for the bright new morning...
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.
Autumn leaves through a transparent balloon with autumn leaves on 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 😀
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…
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…
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?…
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…
