Experiements

For Christmas, I got some fun toys. One of them was a stand mixer... so many opportunities have opened up with that! The first thing we baked was some banana bread, but it was gone so quickly that there are no pictures.

Then, there happened to be these granny smith apples sitting in my fridge that I'd accidentally gotten a few weeks ago that no one was eating. They needed to get used up, after all... so, I asked Google if it was possible to make pie crust in a stand mixer. Turns out it is! And, taking it one step further, I happened to have a bit of leftover crust from my current favorite recipe in the freezer that needed using up. So, I figured: An Experiment! Determine which is better: traditional or that made in a stand mixer. I've been hankering to try out making hand pies, so it was decided.

First step: Make some yummy filling. Most of the pies were apple, but I did sneak in a few cherry ones for me.

Next step: Filling the pies with yumminess. (some were prettier than otheres)

Finally: Ready to bake.

Then, enjoy the fruits of your labors!

End results? The crust from the mixer was lovely and flaky, and quite as tasty as the more traditional sort. Though, it wasn't a true *scientific* experiment since I used different recipes for the crusts. So, perhaps another round is needed in the future, just to be sure......

New Project

So, a while back, my Hubby and I traveled to the Marshall Islands, which is nearly to Australia. It's funny planning a trip like that from a distance. It's a rather remote and really small place that doesn't have a ton in the way of tourism (and the little bit of info to be found online, we found on arrival, isn't exactly current or necessarily correct).. but we got around just fine and it was an amazing experience neither of us will ever forget.

Since the info to be found on stuff to do in the Marshall Islands was limited, I wasn't 100% sure what to expect, and when planning I tried to manage expectations and not set my heart on doing any one specific thing. And, as it turned out, there were some things we wanted to do which we got to do and some we didn't.

However, one thing that I really wanted to do was collect some sea shells. I'm not sure why exactly, but there was something special about the idea of bringing home pieces of the ocean from halfway around the world that made shell collecting more appealing than if we were to stop at some beach on this continent to collect shells.

We stayed, for the most part, on Majuro. We drove from end to end and took walks as well. What sort of surprised me was how unsandy the beaches were there. I suppose it's from watching too much LOST, but I always pictured remote islands to have gorgeous sandy beaches, and Majuro really didn't.

But, then, we went to Eneko. This was basically a little sandbar of an island, about 30mins by boat from Majuro, which our hotel used as a resort for its guests (probably the only place my Hubby and I went where my brother - who lived there 2 years, hadn't been). Here was the sandy beach and the littering of shells of my imagination. It was simply gorgeous.

And, so I gathered up handfuls of shells and brought them back to Chicago with me. My objective: create a mobile with the shells as my own souvenir from our trip. Then, for Christmas, my Hubby gave me a Dremel (oh baby, you know what I like!) making the dream of creating a sea shell mobile possible. I'm so excited to get started!!

Christmas Booty!

Most of my life I have thought of storage tins as only being these pretty things mostly without a practical application. Sure they have cool artwork, but what would I do with one? Store stuff in, sure.. but what?
However, this year, I found a purpose.

I realized that I bake a lot of cookies around Christmas time. Happily there are many parties and such that I can dish out the majority of these baked goods so I don't feel like I have to eat all the cookies myself. However, I always keep a few back for my Hubby and I to enjoy.

With this division of cookies, there's often a mix-up with which container of cookies is for what. What I needed was a special box or container that would work to differentiate things. La! A cookie tin!
And what better tin for storing my Christmas booty than one shaped like a treasure chest?

Love it!

New Toy

I don't remember exactly when I bought it, but I've had my little point-and-click camera for at least five years. A great deal of research went into my choice and I've been very very happy with my little Fuji Finepix f31fd. It has 6 megapixels (which was pretty reasonable back in the day) and takes excellent low-light pictures, plus, it fits in my pocket (thus making possible the FB album: Crazy Things I See While Walking About).

However, in the past few months, it has begun displaying a little bit of a petulant temperament. Somehow a bit of dust had made it inside the body and showed up as a gray blur the upper right-hand corner of all my pictures. Most of the time this was easily Photoshopped out, but more recently the power button occasionally doesn't work. I was able to work around this development, but over time it became more frequent and more annoying.

While it might be endearing for a little while, I fully recognize that anytime an electronic toy starts displaying any sort of "character trait", it's really a symptom of a dying machine. I worked around the idiosyncrasies for a few months but, the longer it went, the more nervous I became about it spontaneously giving up the ghost. That would be a major issue for this shutter-happy girl.

So, the last couple weeks I've been doing some research and comparisons and, last Friday, my brand new camera arrived in the mail. Wohoo!

I went with another Fuji ('cuz I love the Li-on rechargeable battery) and I settled on the Finepix F500EXR. This one is slick! It has 16 megapixels and is black and sleeker than my old one, so it'll still fit in my pocket plus it has lots of schnazzy features (that I'm still getting the hang of) that make it a nice blend between a simple point-and-shoot and a real SLR.

Tonight I took it to Activity Days to test out it's high-speed shooting for when the girls were playing Water Balloon Vollyball.

I feel like the colors were a little washed out and over-exposed, so I'll have to play around some more, of course. But still, I got some good action shots!

Hot Wheels

Studies of Movement

Recently, I was reading up on the basics of photography. I do like taking pictures. One might even say I'm "Shutter-Happy". But I almost always use the automatic settings on my point and click camera. Still, it really is a great little camera. I've had it for some time and, generally, I'm quite happy with the results (and if there are pictures that I'm less than pleased with I will run them through Picasa or GIMP until I am satisfied). All that being so, I know that there are ways my pictures could be improved.. but the idea of using the manual settings is a little daunting to me.

However, I've got some vacation coming up and I thought it would be fun to improve my photography skills. Maybe, if I'm lucky, I'll be able to capture some really great shots.

So, I started reading up on the basics of photography which lead directly to reading the manual for my little camera. Turns out that, while it's nothing super fancy, it has quite a range of options and abilities that I have not been utilizing. This opened up all sorts of avenues for experiments!

Eventually, after doing a good amount of reading and taking notes on a few specific settings, I thought I'd put my knowledge into practice. To start off, I figured that playing with shutter speeds would give the most obvious results (good or bad). So the other day, for my lunch hour, I took myself over to Daley Plaza to take some pictures of movement. (the fountain was green since it was St. Patty's day.. Heh)
Here are the results:

too fast.. not enough light got in (i think)
or maybe I was playing with the light contrast right then... 

too slow, over exposed...

this one had the smeary motion that I was going for, but was over exposed.. perhaps it was too sunny?

 this one turned out well, you can see individual water droplets and the color is good too!

Heh.. so, clearly, I still have lots to learn, but it's an exciting beginning!

Upgrading

My memory is notorious for being patchy. This tendency is especially bad when I'm tired or life gets super busy. A classic example is when, back in college, my roommates got frequent enjoyment from messing with my poor, frenzied brain. Their favorite game was to ask me, at some point in the afternoon, what I'd had for breakfast that day... to which I'd often only answer: "Ummmmmm...." 

Happily, life got calmer for me after college and, consequently, my ability to remember things improved noticeably. (Most days I almost always remember what I've had for breakfast.)  However, even then, without classes and homework to keep track of anymore, I still forgot stuff or double-booked myself. I realized the Real World still needed me to remember important things. So, I got me a Personal Digital Assistant. It was a life saver.

Over the last few years, my little Palm Pilot has been good to me. However, the lifespan of an electronic toy is a fleeting thing and, in the last little while, mine has started developing a little bit of a personality. At first, I didn't mind it getting a little quirky; I'm not real demanding of my electronics - as long as it remembers my calendar, we can still be friends.

Then, the other week, I left it at my parents' house and the battery died. They were kind enough to send it to me in the mail. It arrived safely and I was glad to have it back. However, it seemed that, in addition to its already existing quirks, it had now developed abandonment issues as well.

Whereas before it didn't like sharing information with my computer, now it seemed to dislike being charged. This was a problem. I had survived the week without my PDA pretty well, and eventually it did charge up ok, but the idea of having it die completely, with no way to retrieve my calendar ever again, stopped my heart cold.
It was clearly time for an upgrade.. and this one is better all around.

Wohoo! May it live long and prosper :)

We Picked One!

And henceforth it shall be called Gus. 

  

And of course:

(Some things never change)