Category: photos

she takes after me

I’m not sure I was ever that cute, but Phoebe certainly takes after me in many ways. For one, she has inherited my deep love of artichokes. (These were some photos from April. I had this idea to try using the water from steaming artichokes as an Easter egg dye. Usually the water is an intense, often bluish, green. Of course, that time the water was a dingy gray brown, so we opted not to try for olive drab eggs. Remind me to tell you about the cabbage experiments, though. They were more colorful.)

Tonight, we finally got around to eating the artichokes I trimmed yesterday, the most lethal-looking of which was featured on America’s Most Dangerous Vegetables. Theo, who loves to eat breakfast but has decreasing interest in food over the course of the day, has been wary of trying new foods at dinnertime. This was the first time we managed to get him to try artichoke. I’m quite happy to say that he was instantly taken with them, too. (Though it is a happiness tinged with sadness, as we will no longer be able to eat his unclaimed artichoke. And, alas, our pan can only hold 4 artichokes.)

(I have more to say, about artichokes, even, but I need to get to bed. I’ve had an exhausting day of digging through cabinets and closets looking in preparation for Saturday’s event of terror.)

America’s Most Dangerous Vegetables

I think that would be a catchy name for a TV show. America’s Most Dangerous Vegetables. Each week, the show could highlight some sort of menacing produce: murderous-looking rutabagas, carrots with vicious points, or dainty new potatoes that pose a threat as choking hazards. All of them would pale in comparison with this week’s monster:


This artichoke does not want to be eaten.

Check out the size of those spikes! This thing tore through a reusable produce bag…and drew blood! I felt like I was declawing it rather than trimming it.

shades of gray

The world is a complicated place. Many people find life easier to see good and bad as clearcut cases of black and white. I’m much more likely to see both sides of the issues, to see good in the bad, bad mixed in with the good. To see that both sides of a conflict can be both right and wrong. All of this has nothing to do with my affinity for shades of gray.

When I was a little girl, I loved bright colors. I liked to be surrounded by color. The more colors, the better. I even went through a rainbow phase. I still love color, love to find it in artwork and nature, but I’m less inclined to wear a lot of colors. Bright colors make me feel a bit too on display. Most often, I like to wear black and gray. Especially dark gray. Charcoal gray. Most of all, I love items that combine black and charcoal gray. Or black with varying shades of gray.

My affinity for gray and black clothing items sometimes borders on compulsion. I find myself wanting to buy any shirt I can find with black and gray stripes. I own, at this time, at least 3 shirts and 4 sweaters with variations of gray and black stripes. I have 2 winter scarves with black and gray stripes (but they have different widths of stripes! They are different!) and another scarf that is a plaid of grays and black. Okay, I have more than 3 scarves with grays and black. I’m not sure how many. (It’s fewer than 30. Really. Maybe only 6.)

There was the longest time that I was hunting for just the right charcoal gray and black scarf. I learned to knit at one point in part so that I could construct that perfect scarf. (But then I found 2 scarves that were close enough.) I’m sure that at some point, I will acquire more black and gray striped scarves, maybe one that is more gray and black than black and gray. (Have you ever watched Despicable Me? I coveted Gru’s scarf.) Sometimes I will buy items that are gray with white stripes, or gray with other color stripes. But these items always feel somehow lacking. They do not have the magic for me of charcoal gray and black.

Here I am wearing Theo, who is wrapped up in one of my black and gray sweaters.

This was a picture from yesterday with my current black & gray sweater favorite.

One thing I realized, while digging through my photos looking for me in my various gray and black clothing items, is that I have many very unflattering photos of myself in those gray and black clothing items. Those you don’t get to see. But I did find this cute picture of me that John took when we visited London in early 2005. Notice the charcoal gray jacket and black and charcoal gray hat. At that time, my quest for a black and charcoal gray scarf was as yet unfulfilled (though that was the trip when I found the gray plaid scarf). My scarf in that photo appears to be only gray.

(This is my first installment of a project to write 40 posts about things that I like.)

I should probably post something…

…seeing as I just said yesterday that I’d be posting every day this month. And today is the second of the month. So here are a bunch of photos I took on Monday, during the drive back from my in-laws’.

Bridge.

Reflected bridge.

Pretty prison.

Truck with intriguing big tubes.

They look like they will be part of a building, somehow.

Something about these stacked round things made me think of Vienna sausages packed in a can. Except really big. And green. (Which would be really, really gross for Vienna sausages.) (Especially given that they are pretty gross on their own.)

They turned out to be tanks, and not sausages at all.

balancing acts

I have a work deadline tonight, so shouldn’t be blogging this evening. However, I have a few minutes left of my train ride home, so thought I would share this picture I took a few days ago. I also had this wacky idea of trying to post every day this month. And this being the first of the month, it seemed a good place to start with that goal. I’m not sure how all this will fit together, as I have a busy month planned ahead…

forty somethings

In less than two weeks, I’ll no longer be a thirty-something. In anticipation of this transition, I’ve decided to give myself a present. Not a thing, because as I’ve said many times before, I have way too much stuff. What I’ve decided to do for myself instead is to do so some blogging. Because, though you can’t tell by the frequency of my posts (only 2 the whole month of March, and 4 in April!), I still really enjoy blogging. What’s more, I still really like my blog. What I have in mind is to put together 40 posts about things that I like: things I like to do, things I like to eat, things I like to see, and categories of things that I like to categorize.

There won’t be any particular order, nor will there be any strict time limit. I just want to write some of the posts that have been rattling around in my head since I started this blog over 4 years ago, and write about some things that make me happy. (And if I don’t get up to 40 by the time I hit my 41st birthday, then I’ll just shoot for 41 things.)


I wanted to put some sort of photo in this post, but spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to figure out which. Here are some pomegranate seeds on the palm of my hand. I took this photo a couple of years ago.

fiddleheads

Having taken up violin lessons again this spring, it seems only fitting that I should give fiddlehead ferns a try. Here are some photos from dinner this weekend (and from Phoebe’s and my fiddles).


Raw fiddleheads.


Boiled fiddleheads. (Apparently one needs to boil them for 15 minutes, or steam them for 10 minutes, prior to eating. I’m not sure whether this is for health and safety, or for palatability. I just went along with it.)


Sauteed fiddleheads, post-boiling. (Verdict: they were pretty good. I’m not sure I was bonkers for them, but they were indeed tasty.)


These fiddleheads were not eaten for dinner.


I hadn’t really spent much time admiring the shape of my violin before.


The shape of the scroll is quite expressive. And indeed very much like the expressiveness of emerging fern fronds. (See Sue’s very expressive fronds, which she neither ate nor played, to the best of my knowledge.)

case reopened

A few months ago, I felt a strange and sudden urge to pull out my violin and show it to Phoebe and Theo.The case had been closed for many weeks. And when I say “many,” I mean a number greater than 52. I vaguely recall having had the violin case open at some point in early 2009. Or maybe I’m remembering a lunchbox. Something was open then.

But that evening a few months ago, I indeed opened up my violin case. I pulled out the violin, and the strings were totally loose. It may shock you to know that I barely know how to tune my violin. My teacher always did it, at the beginning of each lesson. I managed to tune it once, when it got so badly out of tune that I couldn’t practice, and I did a decent job. But this time the strings were so loose they might as well have been just lying on top of the violin. I decided to give it a whirl, anyhow. John pulled out his iPhone with a tuner app, and I started to turn the pegs and the little fine-tuny-screwy-things (that is the technical term), and I was feeling quite pleased with myself…until the E string snapped.

So much for that demo.

But I got to thinking, and the next day or so, I called my violin teacher. For the first time since Theo was born. I asked her about strings, and while I was at it, about starting lessons. For me, and for Phoebe, too. My teacher said she’d work on finding space in her schedule. Eventually, she found a time when she could put our two half hour lessons back-to-back.

Tonight, Phoebe and I started violin lessons together.

I can’t say it was all a joyful, magical experience. Phoebe was tired. She’d had a full day at daycare with no nap, then we’d rushed off to a 45-minute karate class, before rushing home for a rushed dinner, and rushing back out the door. Plus I think she found the process of starting the violin to be pretty anticlimactic. We got her set up with a violin of the right size (quarter-sized). Then it was about learning to hold the violin with her chin, and how to properly hold the bow. That was about it. By the time we got to my part of the lesson, which ended up being only the last 15 minutes of our hour, she was pretty much done for. She collapsed on the floor next to me, periodically rallying herself enough to tug on my arm while I attempted to play. In spite of this, I enjoyed myself. I remembered more than I was expecting. (Not that we tried any of the more advanced things I’d worked on when last I’d had lessons, over 2 years ago. We worked on stuff that was probably from my first or second year of lessons.)

Next week, we go back.

I feel like this post needs some sort of snappy ending, but I’m too tired to think of an ending, and I need to make Phoebe’s lunch and get to bed. So I’ll post a completely unrelated photo to distract you.


Hey, look. Tires. ‘Cause I’m tired. Ha, ha, ha.

more with the bellows

(I had more fun playing with the bellows the day after I took those dandelion photos. The top photo shows the bellows with a lens, but not attached to a camera. The bottom photo was taken without the bellows. (For that matter, the top photo was taken without the bellows, too, seeing as the bellows is in the photo. But you probably figured that part out…))