Roster

These are the camera lenses I’ll be taking to Alaska: 10.5mm fisheye, 16-85, 70-200 f/4, and 300mm f/4 lenses, all stabilized except the fish; 1.4x & 1.7x teleconverters; and a tripod ring that will fit either long lens. That’s coverage from 16 to 500mm plus fisheye. With camera all told it’s 9 pounds.

But first a bonus photo: 500mm handheld has never been this easy.

And here are the lenses:

New grill

After 20 years, I am retiring my old gas grill. The new one has more bells & whistles — infrared rotisserie burner, built-in smoker box, etc. — and is enough bigger that I don’t have to remove the grates to spit a chicken, and can fit my full-size cast iron frying pan in there besides. If I get 20 years out of this one too I’ll be more than pleased.

Gene’s

Gene’s Chinese Flatbread near my office is a bit of a darling of the Boston food scene right now, and for good reason: their food is unusual, delicious, and cheap. It’s a tiny little cash-only storefront widely known for their hand-pulled noodles. I’ve been going there for almost a year and had yet to get the eponymous lamb-stuffed flatbread. I remedied that today (the Millennium Falcon looking thing on the left) along with a bowl of their plain hand-pulled noodles, served with spices and a ridiculous quantity of minced garlic. The flatbread was good, but does not hold a candle to the noodles.

Mourning dove

I like to think that there is an alternate universe somewhere, where these birds undergo two metamorphoses daily, becoming morning doves overnight and evening doves by late afternoon. But in our universe, there’s an extra ‘u’ in the name and so the birds look the same throughout the day.