Who can resist…
… a Parker in a box?
Author: doug
January 12
The moon is a harsh mistress. It’s also famously difficult to photograph. It’s so much smaller in the frame than you expect, and despite the fact that it’s dark out, the moon is in direct sunlight, so it’s quite easy to overexpose. It’s also moving fairly fast, so tends to drift out of your carefully-composed frame.
Tonight’s moon is supposedly larger than usual due to being close to perigee, and so I figured it was a good candidate for today’s photo.
I have an old manual-focus 500mm reflex lens for my camera. I attempted this shot a couple years ago with my old camera, but the new one has a few technical advances that make this lens easier to use. Even with this extreme focal length (equivalent to 15x binoculars), today’s photo is cropped.
January 11
We had a minor snowstorm last night. It did not live up to predictions, which was disappointing for me because I set up to take a time-lapse of the snow coming down. The camera took a shot every 90 seconds for 16 hours or so, which I glued together into an AVI. Pretty cool. What I’ve posted here is just 11 frames at a small size; ping me sometime if you want to see the whole thing.
The little bit of motion you see is from me having to change the battery in the middle of the process.
January 10
I went up to our storage unit today. We packed away some stuff that we didn’t think we’d need — winter clothes, holiday decorations, spare computer parts, that sort of thing. We had to retrieve our winter clothes a while back, and never did bother fetching holiday decorations. But I stole a cable from my desktop system a couple weeks ago to fix my father-in-law’s computer, and now I need it in order to install tax software. So I went to get the spare from storage.
Stacked cardboard boxes don’t hold up that well under heat & humidity changes, so I also re-stacked things that had fallen over.
With luck our house will sell soon and we’ll be able to empty this out before we need our summer stuff.
January 9
Tonight’s picture is of nearly full moon shadows on snow. I actually first took this photo (or one like it) last night just before bed, but Lis made me re-take it today to be within the letter of the rules for this project — which worked out well because the shadows are more interesting.
For the photographers: Nikon D300, 35mm f/2 at f/2.8, ISO 1600, 1 second exposure. Shot in RAW and processed to JPG in-camera.
January 8
Recycling is somewhat difficult when one’s house is on the market and must be presentable at all times, though we’ve found ways to make it work. It’s doubly difficult when yesterday’s 3″ of slush has frozen up into 1/2″ of ice over most everything overnight. I hope the last week’s boxes & bottles are happy in their new home.
January 7
Weather! What a mess we had this morning. 3″ of slush all over everything. I had to be in the office for some meetings today, so I took the train with Lis. On such days, I often stop at Eatin’ Healthy, a place right across the street from my building, to get some breakfast.
For this picture, I revived my nearly decade-old Coolpix 950. Two megapixels, baby! Much more pocketable than the DSLR, and somewhat nostalgic to use.
January 6
For a few years now, we have been grinding all our own ground meat. This practice allows us to control the cuts and fat content of our burgers, sausages, etc., as well as allowing us to cook our beef burgers as rare as we like them with a reduced chance of contamination. Just-ground meat also tastes fresher. Tonight’s dinner was turkey burgers; here I am grinding turkey breast, which I mix with a pomade of bread and milk for moistness, and cook in a very hot pan.
January 5
I gave a training today at work. We are switching to a new software package, and I am the one driving the change.
To encourage my coworkers to not drag their feet about trying out the new software, at the end of the training I gave them a Cookie Challenge: accomplish one of a number of tasks and earn a cookie, an actual physical cookie that I baked myself. Here they are, ready to go to work this morning.
These are my family’s oatmeal chocolate chip raisin cookies, minus the raisins because I think they’re better without (sorry Mom!)
Preheat the oven to 350 F
1 stick butter
1 C granulated sugar
Cream the sugar with the butter in a stand mixer until pale yellow and airy.
2 eggs
1 Tbsp molasses
1 tsp vanilla extract
Add the eggs, one by one, and the molasses & vanilla and beat until thoroughly combined.
1 3/4 C all-purpose flour, sifted
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
3/4 tsp table salt
Sift the dry ingredients together.
Add the flour mixture gradually to the butter mixture with the mixer running on low speed until combined.
Proceed by hand, or delicately with the mixer.
2 C rolled oats (quick-cooking or old-fashioned, not instant)
6 oz chocolate chips (1 small bag)
1 C raisins (which I left out)
Add the oatmeal, chocolate chips, and raisins, and mix until just combined. The mixer will tend to crush these ingredients, so be careful.
Drop by spoonfuls onto a cookie sheet and bake each batch 10-12 minutes until just starting to brown. Cool on a rack.
Makes 4 dozen smallish cookies.
January 4
We went to a house showing today, an open house in Newton. This is the latest in a long series of house showings we’ve gone to, keeping on top of the market while our own house is taking its sweet time to get sold.
Today’s listing was a nice house, only 7 years old, built on the slab of a tear-down 1950’s ranch. It’s too big for us, and in the extreme southeast corner of Newton not really convenient to much that we care about. But it did have a nice modern, sunny and bright kitchen:
It’s the picture that is curved — taken with a fisheye lens — not the kitchen! I find the fisheye very useful for capturing the feel of a house or room, since the field of view is so wide.