derekl1963

Corned Beef

Tried my hand at making my own corned beef - it made an excellent corned beef and cabbage on Friday and an INCREDIBLE corned beef and hash again last night. I'm almost tempted to make another just to have the leftovers to hash.

I think I've bought my last commercial corned beef.

Thanksgiving

Yep, its that time of year again - time for my LJ folks to endure a month of me obsessing over T day. Chuck came over on Saturday and we started discussing methods and menu. This should be fun as I'm attempting an entirely new way of cooking the turkey this year. Details to come.

Photography



Photographing little Missy has proven to be a major challenge - I have to shoot a very active little hamster in the low light environment of our living room. I can't use the camera's flash this close because I could injure her little eyes.



An experimental timed exposure of the trees in the background silhouetted against the rising moon. This would have been a better shot had the clouds not been moving so fast... back to the drawing board.

Managed to catch three movies this weekend, covering quite a spread of genres. Not an all time record I suspect, that was probably set somewhere under the North Atlantic watching a movie marathon in the crews lounge.


Astroboy - Seen with Eric (fugazi2112) Saturday afternoon. Not too bad, not too bad at all. Marred somewhat by the unevenness of the writing and because it seemed the producer/director couldn't quite make up their mind just what kind of movie they were actually making. Kudos to the animators for actually watching the originals and brilliantly adapting the characters and facial expressions of 2d anime to 3D CGI.

Monsters Vs. Aliens - Watched this one at home with my sweetie (brenda333). We'd seen the first twenty minutes at least half a dozen times on the TV in our cabin when we were on the cruise... But the last thing we wanted to do was stop and watch a movie with so much else to see and do. (The one evening we tried to watch a late showing, we fell asleep on the couch...) When I was in Fred Meyer shopping after dropping Eric off, they were showing it on the TV's in the electronics section, which reminded me we wanted to see it. A nice fun little movie.

Zombieland - Seen with Lydia, and afterwards Brenda joined us for a nice long dinner-and-chat at Campagna's in Poulsbo. We laughed our tails off throughout the movie.

On our way home from Astroboy the light and clouds caught my eye, so Eric and I stopped by Silverdale's Waterfront Park and I took a few pictures...



Dyes Inlet reflecting the sky, and in a much calmer mood than the photo taken from the same location last week.



A shot experimenting with water reflecting the main subject. I think this one came out pretty well, could have been even better had Mother Nature cooperated with the placement of the clouds... Oh well, photography is an improv art form and you work with what you have.



The waterfront park itself, dressed in festive fall colors.



My favorite shot of the day... And one really worth checking out at full size.

Coming back from woodworking at Ralph's on Sat, I snagged these pictures from the waterfront park in Silverdale. Getting into the habit of never leaving the house without my camera is paying off.



Clouds over the Tracyton area.



Dyes Inlet is normally pretty placid - but the winds were whipping up some nice waves. Sounded almost like I was at the beach.



As I stood there taking pictures the sky continued to get darker and the wind stronger.



I walked out on the dock for the final picture... Photographing directly into the wind. As the rain squall forming over Chico (right hand side of the picture, in the background) started heading my way, it was time to head back to the car and find a warm and dry place.

Just got a wild hair this evening and decided to try some timed exposures of car lights in the rain from the upstairs balcony.

Focaccia baked from a recipe in Artisan Bread in Five Minutes A Day. I meant to take a picture when it first came out of the oven, but it smelled so dang good, dinner was ready, and we were hungry!

My Lords and Ladies, I bid you to fill your cups and attend my words.

I remember hearing Cairbre recite his toast to An Tir. Filled with thunder as he recited the virtues of a distant land filled with beauty and honor. I remember the swelling strength of his voice as he raised his cup and cried forth:

"My Lords and Ladies, I bid you open your eyes - I give you that fabled land. I give you AN TIR!"

But never more will that voice ring across the land. From the crashing seas to the highest mountain it echoes only in memory.

I remember being inspired by the voice and that gift of a passport to a land of dreams to essay a few small attempts of my own into the art of toasts and toasting, some even well received.

I remember that twinkle in his eye and laughter lurking in his voice as he prepared to deliver a jest or to return as well as he was given.

But tonight, the eternal stars will shine undimmed and steady lest they be shamed by competing with that memory. The songbirds passing south with the summer take wing with their voices held low lest they be mistaken for his laughter.

I take this cup I have filled with bitter tears and pour it untasted upon the ground. Instead, I will lift a cup to happier times and gentle memory.

It would be unseemly to remember him with silence whose voice and words inspired so many. Instead, I bid you thus:

"My Lord and Ladies, I give you my small toast and bid you join me in remembering joy and inspiration as balance against the pain.

To Cairbre."

Done this day, October 9th Anno Societatis 44, in memory of Cairbre macc Eochada micc Fedelmid.
Theodoric the Scholar.

Permission is granted to repeat far and wide so long as proper credit is given.

PS - Rowan, I hope you forgive the liberty. Today I speak from the heart, and regret that I have erred and not stayed in contact with you and Jeff as I should have. I am often clumsy at such things.

Just in time for Summer to fade into Fall... A little bit of cheese from the late 70's and one of my all time favorite songs;

Night - Hot Summer Nights.



None of the versions I could find on YouTube had as driving a beat as I remember. It has been thirty years though...

A friend recently posted how she has just joined Facebook - so I thought I'd post something I wrote a while back:

LiveJournal, Facebook, and Twitter - a comparison.

Sorry for the delay, but editing photos and trying for quality writing has turned out to be much harder than I thought - leading to a bit of writer's block. I do want to finish this series, both to share the trip with my friends and to fix the memories in my own mind. Happily, I kept a daily journal, which makes this all so much easier.

( Long and picture heavy behind the cut )

In repentance for my 'Tutor/Tudor/Laurel' joke of the other day...

Snerked from: skaldic

OK, so you have to be both a Teen Titans (cartoon) fan *and* a Weird Al fan... (And I can't image there's a large overlap between those sets...)

But this is funny as hell.

Man... I originally read this as 'Tudor Kitty', and my mind supplied.... Well, a Laurel of my acquaintance's face for the kitty.


see more Lolcats and funny pictures

We bought a new camera just for this cruise, and as some of you saw at fighter practice or here in my LJ, I practiced frantically with it before we left. I studied the manual and practiced taking pictures so diligently that it wasn't until we left that I realized I didn't know how to review the pictures I'd taken! It wasn't until the third or fourth day of the cruise that someone with a similar model showed me how...

This is the first Really Good camera I've owned since high school (and credit goes to Brad Camp (also known as Tyrus) for helping me pick it out), and the first time I've really set out to take serious photographs in roughly the same timeframe.

It was an interesting struggle between remembering to enjoy the hell out of the experience of a lifetime, keeping a journal of sorts, and taking good (documentary) photographs. Overall, I'm pleased - I think I struck a nice balance. As we get into the touristy stuff over the next few days of the cruise, more personal photo's will put in an appearance.

Highlights of the day:

• The ship's jogging track ran outside of the window of the restaurant where we had breakfast. While eating, we watched one gentleman repeatedly come cruising by. I saw him many more times over the course of the week, tagging him in my mind as 'the Marathon Man' as seemed to spend a considerable portion of the day just running.
• Meet & Greet with the people I met on the Cruise Critics bulletin board - nice folks all, and always nice to know someone, if nothing to say hi to in passing.
• Cocktails with the Captain, invited because we were booked in a suite. This was pretty much free champagne, free canape's and a thirty second photo op with the Captain. (Which the ship gladly sold us a copy of.)
• Crepes made to order in the buffet! Yum!
• Discovering a bar on deck 6 with a substantial menu of good scotches - which menu I would steadily work my through over the course of the week.

A fun, and dangerous thing was the virtually 24/7 access to food... It was very weird to just be able to walk up to the buffet, or sit down in a restaurant, get food, and then walk out when we were done. No worrying about the check, and tips were covered in our ticket.

The bulk of the day was spent out on deck admiring the scenery of the Inside Passage, and ducking inside when it got to be too cold. I regretted not buying a pullover hat as I had pondered before leaving, because my ears kept freezing. The ship's spa however was a wonderful place to hang out and get warm at the end of the day - the pass for the week was some of the best money we spent.

After a strenuous day of watching scenery, eating, drinking, and hanging out in the spa - we fell asleep on the couch watching Monster Vs. Aliens on the ship's TV. Over the course of the week, we'd encounter the first half hour of it at least a dozen times.

(As always, click on the pix to make big.)

Misty Guardians



The trip through the Inside Passage was an ever changing panorama of islands, inlets, and distant misty mountains. Some would say the fog and mist obscured the view, I would say that they added a dimension of mystery that you'd never see on a sunny day.

Vanishing Point.



Serendipity - I didn't realize until looking at this photo after returning how the vanishing points *almost* converge. Annoyance - that I didn't see it than and make it so.

Strength in numbers.



Isolated islands clump together protectively against the cold and isolation - like a mother and her children.

Drama Club.



A few of the folks I talked to seemed to be disappointed by the cloudy day, I tried to appreciate the extra layers of drama Nature added to the show.

Three Worlds.



With apologies to M.C. Escher for the title, but somehow this image brought his etching to mind.

At the edge of the world.



The clouds, mists, and fogs of our journey through the Inside Passage created ever changing and ever enclosed vistas. Rather like wandering through a house and marveling over how each room was decorated.

Our first glimpse of the Pearl - emerging from the mist as we cross the sound.




OK, I lie a little bit - my first glimpse was when I woke up early and hit the Space Needle webcam to check out the harbor to make sure she was really there like a kid peeking under the tree on Christmas Morning.

Getting there and getting onboard and settled into our cabins went easily enough - then we grabbed lunch and spent the time until we departed exploring the ship. (I'll post a ship tour later.) Despite it's huge size, getting around was actually pretty easy as maps and placards were everywhere.

Just before departure, I snagged this shot from our cabin balcony:




As always, you can click to make big if you want to - but you really should check out the full size view of this image!

As we turned to exit Elliot Bay I caught this picture postcard shot...



The only real disappointment of the day was that I wasn't able to get many landscapes of Kitsap County as we sailed by... The light was dim and the coast mostly too far away. The only shot that came out was this one of Point No Point:



After passing out of the Puget Sound we headed down to the buffet and had dinner while watching Whidbey Island pass by. We rounded out the evening by burning a little cash in the ship's casino as we headed out into the open sea.

Burglar leaves his Facebook page on victim’s computer.

Downloaded the memory cards with the pictures I took during the cruise onto the computer last night - 962 pictures! (Wow.) It's going to take quite a while to sort through 'em. I'll be inflicting them on you for weeks... :)

On one hand, it's evil and a PITA to have to sort through that many pictures. On the other it's wonderful to be freed from the limitations of film - we've all experienced "OK, I only have x number of pictures in total - so I can only take y at this destination".

On the gripping hand, with some of the landscape pictures, I'll be happy if 1 in 10 ends up being usable.

(click to see full size)

The view from my bedroom window this morning - a prelude to fall.

It is possible to be over organized...

Exhibit Number One: The Organized Christmas presents a Fourteen Week Holiday Master Plan. Included in the plan is a checklist for preparing your checklists, and a master calender for tracking all your lists.