Here’s what they looked like in the middle of February.  A crowd of intrepid little pods poking out of the soggy carpet of leaves.  I can almost see them shivering.

Galanthus nivalis. Wikipedia to the rescue again.

Today, it was like they were having a party on the beach.

The sun came out over them, and they were just lettin’ it all hang out.

Dancing to music only flower ears can hear.

They just look like they’re having fun.

Me too.  Here’s a shot of me trying to take a picture of myself.  Must have had too many margaritas at the flower party.  Actually, I thought I’d be clever and take a photo to see if I could locate the bug in my eye.  A sure sign spring cycling is just around the corner!  I couldn’t tell if the camera was going to take a photo or not, and gave up holding it in front of my face.  Turned out it was planning to take one, just taking its time about it.

I took pictures near this spot a week ago.  My eyes were so happy to have all this colour reflected into them.  Turns out when they’re not sodden, these trees are actually green, even without their leaves!

I don’t know if that’s healthy or not.

OK, well, I’m not quite ready to talk about it in detail, but I had an epiphany during a particularly frustrating session of taking blurry photos of G, and bought a new camera.  I feel like a bit of a traitor to my Panasonic LX3, I feel like I spent too much money in absolute terms, I feel like I bought the wrong brand (but the right model at the best price point at this point in time).  I’m also getting faster shutter speeds in low light and that means fewer blurry photos of my offspring, who, at a bit over a year old, for some reason often declines to pause what she’s doing and smile for a picture.  She sure knows the word “camera” though.  OK, “camama” most of the time.  That’s from me saying “where’s my camama?” ten times a day.  I do that to throw her off so she won’t get too far ahead of her peers, vocabularily.

I’m aware that the reason I can almost justify buying a new camera is essentially that I don’t want to miss those “[Brand name] moments” (that’s not the brand I bought) with my daughter, but I’m having a whole lot of fun with the thing when I’m free to point it at other interesting objects as well.

Take the other day as an example.  I got stuck outside during a bit of a snow…flurry.  I can’t bring myself to call it a snowstorm despite the traffic chaos it caused.  Besides, it was turning to slush as soon as it hit the ground.  It was cool enough to be uncomfortable for just standing around.  Luckily, I had my new camera with me!

I took pictures of the things in my immediate vicinity until I couldn’t stand the cold wet hands (uh, mine — there wasn’t any sort of horror movie aspect to this episode).

I got the camera out again when I got to work and pointed it at other things, like the cup of hot chocolate I so desperately needed when I finally got there.  I needed something to practice my manual focusing skillz on.

This?  Oh, this is just one of those moments.

]]> http://www.beepily.com/2010/02/new-camera-cold-day/feed/ 1 http://www.beepily.com/2010/02/vegetarian-chili-or-something/ http://www.beepily.com/2010/02/vegetarian-chili-or-something/#comments Mon, 22 Feb 2010 22:57:10 +0000 chris http://www.beepily.com/?p=755 I do not aspire to be a food blogger.  However, at some point I had some idea about putting stuff up on this website that somebody might find useful. One night recently I made what we call “chili,” and thought I’d try my hand.

First of all, having read Wikipedia’s entry on Chili con carne, I think I should probably include a disclaimer at the start: this chili has no meat.  It has beans.  It has tomatoes.  It has no fresh chilis.  We like it.  So there.  Without further ado, here is the experience of making my “chili.”

I only had the thought of taking photos for this after I’d started, so here is a picture of some things in a pot.  They are olive oil, cocoa powder, cumin, cayenne pepper, onions, and slivers of fresh ginger.  Oh, and I almost forgot: paprika.  I’ve never seen the point of paprika but we have lots so I usually put some in.  Also, I wouldn’t let a lack of fresh ginger stop me from making chili.  I’d just use powdered ginger which is always at the ready in one of the two wooden spice racks we bought from Argos, prepopulated with herbs and spices, because they were cheaper than empty spice racks anywhere else.  This was years ago and we still haven’t run out of cumin. There were two bottles per rack.

Here are some mushrooms, washed.  I won’t get into whether other people should wash them or not. But how can rinsing them possibly cause them more trauma than hacking them to bits and dumping them into a pot with spices and hot(tish) oil?  And then dumping a pile of squished tomato on top.  But I am getting ahead of myself.  Let’s take a break to admire my knife.  It’s fantastic.  Look: it says “professional” right on it. OK, on to what happens next.

Hey, what happened to these?  I thought that knife said “professional” on it!

Here are the mushrooms in the pot with the other stuff.

The same thing, only stirred around a bit.

Action shot! +400 food blogger points!  (I don’t know what these points might be or whether 400 would be a lot, so please disregard the preceding statement). About here is where I realize I took this shot in portrait orientation, which is idiotic for a blog post with lots of pictures in it. -400 food blogger points.

Action shot two!  I like this one better than the previous one.  That last one is somehow not very appetizing.  Oh, and what this is a picture of is a bottle of passata being dumped in there.  According to the label, it’s made of crushed tomatoes and salt.

The next part is crucial and a bit complicated, so please pay attention.  First I open a can of organic red kidney beans in water, no salt added.  Then I open a can of not-organic red kidney beans. I put the organic and inorganic kidney beans together and rinse them thoroughly with water (what else?). Put the whole subtle mixture of organic and non-organic beans into the pot.  Aside: anyone who took organic chemistry in high school must find the sound of “organic” food less wholesome than the people who coined the term thought it sounded.

Get ready for some more action!  Kidney beans are about to cascade impressively from the steamer into the pot.

Come on, kidney beans.  Let’s see some motion.

Oh come on.

OK, they’ve all managed to teleport themselves into there. Next comes a can of organic chopped tomatoes.  I used this because I had it.  Canned tomato halves or canned whole tomatoes have also been known to work for this.  I have not tried substituting fresh tomatoes but I suspect the result would be rather different.  I didn’t take an action shot here.  After stirring a bit, I discern that the balance of organic to non-organic kidney beans is off, so I open another can of organic.

Bet you thought this was the same pair of pictures as before.

I just realized I didn’t mention there’s a small fire under the pot.  Feel free to use your usual method of making stuff in pots hot; resistive, radiative, and inductive heating have all been known to result in nice-tasting chili.  Trying to cook anything on one of those stoves with solid elements has been known to put me off my food, but that’s a different issue.  Nice puddle I made on the stovetop.  Matches the splatters of olive oil and cocoa on the wall.  I find I have a real talent for food blogging.

Now, here’s the key to the deliciousness of the chili: maple syrup.  Dribble a couple of tablespoons in there.  This will take the edge off and add a certain je ne sais quoi.  Don’t leave out this step or you’ll ruin the whole thing!

Just kidding.  Actually, I never used maple syrup before that night.  I also took no action photos to prove I even used it this time.  I’m really not sure I could tell I used maple syrup and not brown sugar, which is what I usually use.  In fact, I’m not entirely sure what would happen if you used white sugar.  But that’s a line I don’t want to cross.

I wonder, idly, how many recipes there are that use maple syrup, cocoa, and ginger all at once.  It’s not even dessert. Hmm, I suspect the combination might be conspicuous in a dessert.

Finally, it’s customary to add a bit more cumin, regardless of how much is in there already.

Let it bubble on low-ish heat for a while and then put into bowls, shred some cheddar or red leicester on top, and nuke it until the cheese melts.

Ta-da!  It turned out pretty good, even if you don’t like the picture.

That all adds up to:

• a splash of olive oil
• most of a medium-sized onion
• a small handful of diced ginger root
• a couple tbsp cocoa
• cumin — a bunch of shakes, and then some more
• cayenne pepper (or any powdered hot stuff)
• paprika

All fried up together, then

• some mushrooms
• a bottle of passata
• three cans of kidney beans
• one can of tomatoes
• some maple syrup or sugar
• more cumin
• cheese to shred on top

Unless I added it up wrong.  But it’s pretty flexible.  I used to use a bunch of different kinds of beans but I don’t need that kind of complication in my grocery shopping anymore.  Bubble it all together for a while, then put in bowls and top with shredded cheese.  Microwave for delicious meltiness.  Incidentally, I don’t put any salt in the chili because I know there will be enough salt in the cheese.

I’m having a hard time getting back on the horse here.  Everything I wanted to post before Christmas now seems very ambitious.  Well, if I’m going to be lazy, there may as well be something going up here while I’m doing it, so without further ado, I present one photo.  There was a sunny day a couple of weeks ago, and I had an unanticipated chance to go for a walk.  The colours were more vivid than they seem to have been all winter, the clouds were funky, and the scene was neat.  I won’t say timeless, because a lot of details will have changed in the sliver of urban skyline over the last couple of hundred years, but on this side of the Atlantic a lot of the spaces have a feel of having been used for the same thing for quite a long time.  You can plug your ears against the traffic noise, face away from the road, and connect with those who went before.  And by before, I don’t mean the guy who took his dog there for a dump half an hour ago; I mean people who were there in a whole other age.  A less idyllic but in some ways lovelier-to-look-at time when we didn’t have vaccines or the internet.

Savory Sweet Life has a list of a few blogs doing similar donations, though she herself appears to have enough comments to max out the scheme she was running.

For myself, there’s a good chance no one would see this post to leave a comment, so I just made a one-off donation of an amount I was comfortable with (actually a bit more, thanks to all you proactive blogging souls for the inspiration) to Médecins Sans Frontières (also known as Doctors Without Borders) who are out there right now trying to bring some relief.  In this day and age it is easier than ever to support those working to relieve suffering wherever it’s found around the globe.

I have a lot to catch up on here in the land of beep.  I have thoughts to organize, photos to sort and process, and maybe even things to say.  Here’s all I can manage tonight, as I am now officially a pumpkin.  It’s the Christmas lights on my parents’ deck, shot through the condensation on the window of what used to be the “screen door” in the wee hours of New Year’s Eve (not New Year’s Day).

Another PW photo assignment; I’ve been anticipating one for weeks as she’s been book-touring.  I had just finished preparing a bunch of black-and-white photos from the past year-and-a-bit to print for family, which is good because I wanted to participate but didn’t have time to spend on tweaking photos.

I was disheartened to find the following:

“Get Google Chrome (BETA)
It’s free and installs in seconds
New! For Linux
(Debian/Ubuntu/Fedora/openSUSE)”

Uh oh.  Really?  Because I don’t run any of those flavours of Linux. Never one to overanalyze before trying to install something on my computer, I downloaded the 32-bit Fedora/openSUSE .rpm for my Mandriva 2009.1 system.  I figured openSUSE and Fedora aren’t the same thing, so maybe the .rpm would be general enough for another .rpm-based system.  The Mandriva software installer ran, detected some dependencies, and was silent. I didn’t find Chrome in the menu afterwards, but typing google-chrome in a terminal started it up.

It imported my bookmarks from Firefox. I’ve tested it on Google Mail, Mandriva forums, and YouTube, and found no problems yet.  That’s right, Flash video worked out of the box.  Early days, of course.  I hope there will be official and explicit support for all distros in the very near future.  For now, I’m just pleased that when I signed up to be updated when Google released Chrome for Linux, it didn’t turn out to be simply a gesture.

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