After reading about photography a bunch lately, and finding a good online exposure calculator, I hoped to find a similar program for my Palm Pilot. When I couldn’t find one (for free), I wrote one. Check out Exposed.
It was an up-and-down weekend for me. Highlights included:
- a great dinner at Rif and Anna’s place on Friday night
- dinner at Addis Red Sea
- the first half of Fahrenheit 9/11
- a trip to Chez Henri for my parents’ 30th anniversary
- getting caught in the torrential rain on Saturday afternoon biking home from the Arboretum
The downsides:
- Addis Red Sea was completely out of honey wine
- the second half of Fahrenheit 9/11
- getting in to a semi-nasty bike accident on Sunday – on the bike trail!
- waking up this morning at 7 AM to my neighbor hammering siding on his house
It’s a happy day – WERS (the Emerson College radio station) is now available online! The workday line-up is great, especially if you’re not looking for pop music: folk and indy rock in the morning ’til 10 AM, then jazz ’til 2 PM, then world music ’til 5 PM. Check it out…
I got my share of our farm share last night, and made a tasty dinner and a (hopefully) good lunch for today.
To accompany my dinner, I boiled the carrots in a enough water to almost cover them, salt & pepper, a little bit of sugar, and a little bit of butter – just wait for the water to all evaporate. Sooooo good.
Lunch today is a reconstruction of a salad Anna made a few months back – sugar snap peas & radishes in a dressing of rice wine vinegar and toasted sesame oil, sprinkled with sesame seeds. (Now that I’m online, it looks like the salad she made might have been this one.)
The farm share (through Parker Farms) is definitely a good deal – fresh veggies for only $5 a week!
I got pictures back from the weekend, and the “at first glance” review of the new lens is mostly positive. The longer distance photos I took came out quite well, and a few of the macro photos look good. The rest of the macro photos were pretty blurry, either because of the very short depth of field (making it hard to get exactly what you want in good focus) or because of vibration due to the shutter/mirror. I’ll use a tripod, a steadier hand, or faster shutter speed in the future.
While at the camera store, I picked up some film for my old Rolleiflex Standard, a camera my grandfather gave me about 10 years ago. It’s a beautiful camera, and considering it was made in the 1930’s, it’s impressive that it’s still in working order. I’ll let you know how my foray into the world of medium-format (bigger than 35mm film) black and white photography goes.
I had a good, busy weekend:
I went up to Keene, NH on Friday to visit a friend and do some hiking. While Keene isn’t exactly a hotbed of activity (especially during the summer, when all the college students are away), it was a nice enough visit.
We hiked Mt. Monadnock (which, according to this site, has surpassed Mt. Fuji as the most climbed mountain in the world) on Saturday morning. The weather wasn’t great, but that kept most other folks off the mountain; we pretty much had the trail to ourselves. By the time we reached the summit, it had cleared enough that we could see some surrounding towns and countryside, and it was sunny & hot when we got back to the car.
The hike was a good opportunity to try out my new camera lens. Ever since my trip to the Olympic Peninsula last summer, I’ve been wanting another lens for the camera – lack of zoom on the old lens meant bald eagles were just specks in the photos I took. The new lens zooms in much more than my other one (70-300mm vs. the old 35-80mm), but that makes it much bigger (physically), much more succeptible to camera shake, and it requires a good deal more light to get a good photo. It also has a pretty impressive macro mode that lets you get amazingly close shots. We’ll see how the pictures came out.
I saw Dodgeball on Saturday night. Stupid as parts of it were, there were some real high points, including a fantastic sequence on the (fictional) ESPN 8 and a spectacular cameo appearance by Lance Armstrong. Caleb and crew will be interested to learn David Hasselhoff also has a cameo role.
Yesterday, we made a polenta pound cake from Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone to accompany some fresh strawberries – it turned out very well!
I was introduced last night to Bottega Fiorentina, in Coolidge Corner. What a cute little cafe! They’ve got great pasta dishes (and good panini, I hear) for cheap and a friendly, homey Italian feel that we had a hard time finding in Italy. My friend had the gnocchi (perfect) and I had the spaghetti carbonara (also perfect). Definitely check it out if you’re in their neighborhood.
In my tired, hazy state this morning, I mis-read not one but two signs on vehicles this morning. The first was an “honor student” bumper sticker that I thought read “My child was honor student of middle earth.” The other was a truck for the “Friend Box Company, Inc.” that I thought read “Fried Box Company.” Mmmm… fried boxes.
Love Child had a great game last night against Hucky McThrowandcatch (great name, eh?). It was a close one, and Hucky won in the end, but we all had a good time. We’ve got another game this week on Thursday, against Swingers.
Matt put up a page with the rules to Cadillac, a fun pub game. I can attest to its addictive nature having been introduced to the game a few weeks ago. Give it a shot…
I’m headed up to New Hampshire for a Saturday climb of Mt. Monadnock – I’ll let you know how it goes.
I was down in northern Virginia this weekend for my high school principal’s retirement party. Much like the school’s graduations, there were speeches, gag (and real) gifts, and plenty of singing. I was glad to have gone for the event, especially since H-B doens’t have reunions, making this the only time to catch up to a big group of high school folks for some time.
You can read the well-written article (by H-B alum Dusty Horwitt) about Ray that appeared in Sunday’s Washington Post here
I updated the piano bench page with some pictures of the failed design. Work on the new design will commence next week.
Greg and Scott hosted a very fun poker game last night. Unlike the game I played in with my brother a few months ago that was just Texas Hold ’em played tournament-style, this game was more free-form. The deal rotated around the table, and each dealer chose the game to play. Ante was a dime, maximum raise was fifty cents.
I was down a few bucks pretty quickly, and bought another $5 worth of chips after only 45 minutes or so – things weren’t looking so good. I held on to my money (but didn’t make any back) for a while, and then it was Scott’s turn to deal. The game was the house variant of baseball.
Their version is a 7-card stud game, with the following provisions:
- any 9’s are wild
- any player who is dealt a face-up 4 gets an extra face-down card on the spot
- any time a 3 is dealt face-up, the player either has to fold, or match the pot to stay in the game. If they stay in, their 3 is a wild card
So, I’ve gotten two face down cards, two face up cards (including an ace), and the next face up card I get is a three. The pot is $5 (a fair amount of money, for this game), and I’d just bought my second round of chips a few minutes prior. I had to choose whether to fold or buy the 3 as a wild card for $5. I shocked everyone by buying in, knowing I had two more aces in my hand (for a total of four). I won about $5 on that single hand, and came out a few bucks up on the evening. Not bad at all…
Last night, Rif & Anna and I really enjoyed our dinner at O’Cantinho in Inman Square. I can’t remember if it was a recommendation from my parents (they definitely told me to go to one of the Brazillian cafes in Inman) or if I had heard about it elsewhere, but the fact of the matter is, everyone should go there. The food is great (and cheap!), they let you sit all evening long, and they’ve got really good “cupcakes” for dessert. What more could you want?
After dinner, I ended up in Harvard Square. It’d been way too long since I just people-watched in the Square – I sat for an hour enjoying the sights and listening to Lisa Bastoni play (check out her new CD – “Your First Sweetheart”). To top off a nice night, I walked home from Harvard.
Two things from the frisbee tournament this weekend that tell me I’m getting older:
1. I got up before 7 AM both Saturday and Sunday, and didn’t really think too much about it. Yeah, it was early, but not so much earlier than usual. This morning, I woke up without my alarm at 6:15 or so. Yikes!
2. When I pulled some muscle in our third game on Saturday, I actually stopped playing instead of just continuing on in pain. I stretched, rested and was in good enough shape to play on Sunday. In my reckless youth (and probably even last year), I would’ve just kept playing.
The tournament was a fun one, though we were definitely in the bottom half of teams there, skill-wise. We ended up coming in three places ahead of our seed (21st vs. 24th), and had a good time.
Last night, Matt and Micaela made me a really nice dinner: a great cheese to start (Berthaut Epoisses), excellent roast chicken, a tasty mushroom risotto and sauteed pea tendrils. They also put together an awesome dessert of chocolate pots (slightly soupier than a mousse, and equally tasty) served with orange polenta biscuits. Thanks!
Love Child had a tough frisbee game last night. We won in the end, but only after lots of running and diving. Unfortunately, the field we played on was comprised primarily of rocks and goose poop, making the “laying out” (diving for discs) portion of the game rather injurious. When I came in to work today, I felt like Ed Norton’s character in the movie Fight Club. I was bruised, battered and happy. Sadly, much like in the movie, no one at my office actually cares what I do outside of work, so other than drawing a few funny looks, the source of my limp and scabbed leg remains a secret.
Tonight is our first pick-up for the Community Supported Agriculture program we joined. I’m ready to be innundated with veggies…
Last Friday, Rif came over to put the finishing touches on the piano bench and assemble it. There may not be a better example of a project that demonstrates the importance of building a model before the full scale version; the bench turned out not to be stable at all! Though it looked gorgeous with the nice wood and shiny metal, the top flops back and forth and it’s useless as a bench! Back to the drawing board…
The BUDA Spring League tournament was on Saturday – boy was it windy. This coming weekend is Mixed Easterns. Lots of frisbee to be had!
I was out in Connecticut for the remainder of the weekend enjoying the great weather and the fam – a good combination.