Up To My Usual Tricks

And I'm back, *ish*, and back up to my usual tricks. Meaning, of course, lots of close-ups of nature and random ramblings about whatever irrelevent topics happen to be floating around the head at the moment. We're going to try to take up the Photo-A-Day challenge again after a hiatus that was supposed to be brief but turned into ... well, almost 100 days, it would appear. 1/3 of a year. Geez. Where did the time go? Let's hope I can maintain this the second time around. Things may get kindof sporadic around here, although I have to say, I think I can see some improvement in my photography even as I flip back through the blog archives, so that, if anything, should be motivation to continue.


144. More of the Same. I seem to like taking photos of purple flowers. This was taken at the park near work. I think I stopped becaue I liked the unusual shape of the petals.


145. Calling Out. What could that be?


Oh look, a close-up of this! My camera died [sniff, sniff] so dad's is on 'permanent loan' for the time-being. Of course, it might be a good number of months before I can afford to replace my old trusty point-and-shoot with a new one ... and I was so familiar with that camera; I'm still getting used to all the settings and functions on this one.

So anyways, what is this? I went and massacred a book is what I did. Awhile ago I picked up some books at a thrift shop with the intent of turning them into art journals, and late last month I finally got around to it - tearing out pages, glueing pages together [if you keep all the pages in the book, the collage will make it too fat and ruin the book. Of course, I forgot that you're supposed to look for books with sewn spines and not glued ones, I was just so taken with the plant illustrations and science textbook feel of the book], and now, every couple of days or so, I take it out and do some art journaling.

Sometimes I like to use it as much for journaling as for anything, forget about 'art' ...

Or just to play with colors and themes ...



Yes. Relaxing, fun; I may teach a class this summer on collage. How awesome is that?


146: Make Do With What You've Got.This is what laundry days around the apartment look like, at least the view from the bathroom [the toilet seat, to be exact. No, I wasn't multitasking when I took this photo, but it did offer the best vantage point for the shot.] I usually wind up drying about half of my clothes and lugging the rest back to the apartment while those are in the dryer [this neighborhood seriously has everything you need - I love it] and hanging them up around my room on clothes racks and hangars. A couple get relegated to the shared bathroom.

I do this for environmental reasons, but also because a lot of my clothes are from China [<3<3] and frankly, most clothes sold there are not made for the dryer. Nobody uses a dryer in China, and as I had the sad misfortune of discovering, if you dry clothes that weren't intended to be dried, they shrink in the funkiest ways, and this is not a good 'funky' that we're talking about. Sometimes a little inconvenient, but I don't really mind since it coincides with my personal values anyways. If it wasn't China-clothes, there would definitely be other clothes that would get air-dried instead.


My poor roommate, he's always gotta push my pants and miscellaneous other clothes aside whenever he wakes up in the morning for his shower [cuz he leaves before I do and I am usually not a morning-shower-person, unless I've been out for a run, in which case my coworkers greatly thank me for showering.]


When I cook, I generally don't follow any recipes. Which ... turns out mediocre most of the time, occasionally surprises me, and sometimes makes me very glad that I am not cooking for anybody but me. This pasta salad here is no exception. Steamed broccoli, fresh tomatoes, olives, a little shredded cheese, pasta, a little olive oil and a sprinkling of salt. Small things like, hm, maybe you should test out the pasta before removing it from the water - never really occurs to me. But luckily it came out well enough in the end, it cooked up really quickly, and best of all, LEFTOVERS.

The olives are from the grocery store down the street [literally; I love this place!]. They carry quite a number of Mediterranean goods, and while I'm often tempted to 'hm, let's try something totally new and exotic,' when you're epicurean-adventuring while blindly creating recipes with no previous experience, even though it may be tempting to try all three types of olives each packaged and preserved in a different way, really, in the end, it is probably best to reach for the one tin can because that looks closest to what you're used to. Although - foiled anyways! - these aren't pitted, so that's a little extra entertainment when munching away.