my life, as far as i know.

or should i call it phone-camera. i just uploaded the 115th phonepic to my blog directory. this one i made from a new trick i learned. put your thumb over the camera’s lens. when you’re ready, quickly move your thumb out of the way and immediately press the capture button. my cell phone can hardly re-adjust exposure in time and you end up getting a washed out image. my phone’s camera tends towards blue images. some of them look sort of solarized. this is what idle time on the train gets you. you might see some others on the random phonepic mosaic.

since we own a deep fryer now, ryan and i made tempura and tonkatsu (one of my favourite meals). as my friend anthony knows, tonkatsu sauce holds a special power over me. the tempura turned out so-so (we learned we probably should put the pieces into the oil one at a time so they don’t stick) but the tonkatsu — awesome!

tonkatsu–

thin sliced port chop, boneless
powder in flour and pepper and salt
dip in egg batter
cover and press in panko flakes
deep fry, 3 minutes per side

i’ve never had such juicy breaded pork before.

and of course, everything goes well with ruby sake.

life is moving at both speeds for me now. i’m dealing with a complicated and swift housing situation, and nothing else is going on. at work, i am buried up to my ears in projects still. i haven’t had enough energy/motivation for photography lately. maybe things will be up next weekend. oh, i have been adding phonepics, but that’s about it. that and a few offramp things.

time to go home and decompress. parents are coming up soon for financial stuff. in need of “me time”.

so, umm, i went above my original budget for our little wine-tasting trip this weekend. between three of us, we bought about 10 cases of wine. half of that is pictured here on my kitchen counter before it got inventoried, tagged, and most of it put away.

it is all awesome wine, it will be difficult to forget about it. i put most of it away in taped-up boxes labelled by year. at least a case every year for the next several.

read on to see the see the haul.

Continue reading…

tonight i did some catch-up on my sheet developing. still have some left over from the party.

then i did my first contact prints from the party portraits. oh man, contact prints of portraits are fun! this portrait is of my friend anthony.

first darkroom run tonight. notes:

now i need to get my negs in order and start shooting again. i’m thinking about getting a contact printing frame. i really miss darkroom work. now i need to spend a lot of time organizing the room so you can move around

today i got my powerbook scanning. my tools aren’t that great and i’m working from a laptop, but at least i can get some scanning done for posts. this is a 8×10 sheet shot with a kenro k lens, a pretty sharp wide angle lens that seems to work on 8×10 with movement! i can’t wait to do real shooting with it. i took this shot quickly while i was getting ready for dinner.

as you can see, i forgot how wide angle the lens is. i had the standards racked back a bit and the front it showing in the image. oops.

the lens is pretty sharp. my scan isn’t the greatest.. but you can at least make out the screws on the lens mounting ring!

today i gave my personal blog some tender loving care. it now sports a random image from my phonepic folder, a drop-down for archives (since i have now 28 months’ worth of archives), cleaner formatting/stylesheet, and i fixed a layout bug in the banner.

the phone pics are great. forever consistent in size, and small bits of moments from my own life.

this morning my awesome ipod has been playing-and-replaying one of my favourite freezepop songs, tracey gold.

i want to touch your permed hair
tell “boner” life just ain’t fair.
stare at you without a care
now u are mine, now I am yours

tracey gold - where have you gone girl?
tracey gold - where in the world?
tracey gold - what have u done girl?
tracey gold - my heart’s in a whirl over u -
my brain’s in a swirl over u
- my hair’s in a twirl over u…

lately i’ve gotten a new deluge of blogspam. the spam machine has found old entries on my blog that had trackback enabled. they exploit this feature of MT and post spams to blogs. luckily, my blog is database-backed and i was able to change 106 blog entries with a single command.

mysql> update mt_entry set entry_allow_pings=0 where entry_allow_pings=1;
Query OK, 106 rows affected (0.04 sec)
Rows matched: 106 Changed: 106 Warnings: 0

yay!

today i finally got around to setting up my etrade account and managing my stock options. turns out the stock was worth more than twice my strike price, half my options are vested, and now is a good time to execute and sell. so i did it. this is my first time ever doing things like this. with some guidance from the money-wise don, it was easy. etrade executed the sale in three seconds.

tonight don came over for dinner, with his mom and aunt. i made a good bread dip (EVOO, balsamic, kosher salt, ground black pepper, LOTS of fresh minced garlic, plenty of oregano) and wine (the good chianti the woman and k+l had me try). i worked on twice-fried french fries (salt, fresh rosemary), while ryan worked on the steaks (red cayenne, paprika, sea salt, pepper). it was a good food, and way too many embarassing stories of don’s childhood. mom, if you’re reading this — you’re never meeting this woman! you two would get stuck in competitive mother-son stories for days, and don and i would have to leave from embarassment!

last night i had the excellent experience of attending a beer tasting dinner. the brews were all belgian, picked by a brewer. the brews were matched with food by the talented jacob, of bistro la moone fame. all the beers were incredible and exceeded my expectations. the highlights (if i could pick any) of the dinner were the beer-battered prawn with edamame-crab risotto (the prawn was so fresh, it was very tender.. honestly the best i’ve ever tasted) and the kriek boon belgian lambic ale (a cherry infused lambic.. a dessert beer!).. it was served with a tangerine glazed cream puff with hand made cherry ale truffles.

a fabulous five course meal, paired with five distinctive belgian ales (including commentary on each from a well spoken brewer). you can’t have it any better on a monday night!