More pseudo-vintage photos

More photos with the new toy.  (Click to enlarge.)

 

Thrift store thrills!

I’m a little late to the game, but I have just discovered the concept of TTV photography – shooting through the viewfinder of an old twin lens camera.  This is so low-tech that even I can do it, and the results are awesome.

High-tech contraption

I’m not the kind of gal that delights in building my own softboxes and seeks out old film cameras to experiment, but even I can handle this level of DIY.  I did have to buy duct tape and an old camera.  Both were found instantly at a thrift store and a Rite Aid.  The tape was more expensive than the camera.  Cut up an old cardboard box to mask the light, and walk around with this elephantine contraption on the end of my macro lens and we’re in business.  Instant totally awesome filter!  I am going to have fun this weekend!

(Click photos to enlarge…)

 

Is winter waning?

More of the hat.

New shoes!

Color-coordinated, am I.

Face off! (Beak off?)

Objects in mirror are larger than they appear.

 

Steinway

Took a wee trip to Chicago this weekend for my birthday.  John and Stephen and I set off for a wee 10-mile jaunt through the snowy forest preserve, where we were joined by 20 deer (who may have outnumbered the people) and my extra chin.

Dashing through the snow.

We also dined (and drank, of course) at the inimitable Fernando’s, and I took some photos of Michael’s vintage Steinway.  Played it, too!  (Click to enlarge.)

 

Clafoutis bakeoff!

Foodgeeks of the world take note: kitchen physics is fun!  So Laurel’s wee cooking blog features the versatile clafoutis – traditionally made as a dessert with cherries, it’s sort of like a Dutch Baby or German pancake with stuff in it.  Laurel makes savory ones (check out her Leek and Bacon version – delish!) and I have been following her lead.  The first two I made were radically different – one was undulating and Dutch Baby-esque, while the other was flat and flan-like – and I wondered at the cause.  Today I performed a wee experiment with different pans, and presto!

The clafoutis on the left was made in a slope-sided glass pie plate.  The one on the right in a straight-sided dark cake pan.  Formal versus rustic?  Convention versus drama?

 

Twitterpated

Oh, I’ve gone and done it.  I’ve set myself up with a Twitter account!  Yes, it’s true, for all of those inane little bits of myself that I just long to share with all of you but which don’t merit a whole blog post – there’s Twitter.  Unfamiliar, oh ye of greater than twenty years on this earth?  Twitter is a free service which suggests you answer the question “What are you doing?” in 140 characters or less.  You can text from your phone or use a web browser and update the entire world on what you’re doing at that moment.  I think this is interesting coming from:

• People with exciting jobs that take them to nifty places and who post entries like “standing at the foot of the tower of pisa watching them drop the ceremonial water balloon.”
• People who do stuff you can’t quite believe is happening.  I quote from (I kid you not) Lance Armstrong’s post of this morning, “Got the kids off to school. About to eat breakfast then 5-6 hours on the bike.”
• People you wish were really your friends.  Like Stephen Fry, who posted this picture of his chair from the set of Bones yesterday.  “Ooh the glamour. http://twitpic.com/1f7go
• And perhaps, people who have mothers who worry.

I am none of these people.  But you can still follow me on Twitter!  It’s sort of a “What did Hamlet eat for breakfast” kind of thing.  It will last until I have amassed scores of avid followers that I simply must update to please, and I throw myself into the lake because the pressure has become too great, OR until I’ve given up hoping that anyone will care.  Either way, YOU can be there to see it happen!

And, hey, if you’re one of those people for whom writing a letter (I know, archaic) or email has just gotten to be too much of a burden, then you can open your own Twitter account and send random updates throughout your life.  And I will follow you (that’s Twitterspeak) and know that you have read a poem, or scored pepper bacon on sale, or taken a cool photograph…and I will be happy in the knowledge.

 

Hat hiatus

So unbelievably warm here, and all the snow is finally melting.  No hat on the last several runs – though it will undoubtedly return soon.  A sampling from Winter 09 So Far.

One needs a balaclava at 13 degrees.

Teeny tiny icicle on my porch railing. Teeny.

It's a metaphor.

This is fun. Really.

Where are all the pretty horses?

Because what one needs after a sub-freezing run is to ice things.

Ho! Ho! Ho!

Buried in the snow.

 

Nipping at your nose

Have I mentioned my minor obsession with the frost on my windows?  This is what comes of staying inside so much because of the cold.  Go fractals!

(Click to enlarge.)

My new wallpaper border

 

Presidential Poetry

Now, I am no aficionado of poetry.  I am, if you will, rather poorly versed – I don’t know anything about our living poets or their work, and can recite maybe two poems from memory.  Maybe.  But I am a lover of words and someone who believes in their power.  And so I find it pretty darned fascinating (and fitting) that Obama is only the third incoming President to have a poet read at his inauguration.  Kennedy had Frost, Clinton had Maya Angelou and then Miller Williams.  Obama has invited Elizabeth Alexander (who talks about these ideas more eloquently here).

Also fun, are these two podcasts from the Poetry Foundation.  The first was recorded in December and features Ms. Alexander talking about Obama and poetry before she was selected to read at the inauguration.  The latter is the Poetry Foundation’s little “golly things are cool” episode of the same series after she was named (and it also has a cool story of Frost’s reading at the Kennedy inauguration).

Here are the poems that were read at prior swearings-in.

The Gift Outright
Robert Frost

The land was ours before we were the land’s.
She was our land more than a hundred years
Before we were her people. She was ours
In Massachusetts, in Virginia.
But we were England’s, still colonials,
Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,
Possessed by what we now no more possessed.
Something we were withholding made us weak.
Until we found out that it was ourselves
We were withholding from our land of living,
And forthwith found salvation in surrender.
Such as we were we gave ourselves outright
(The deed of gift was many deeds of war)
To the land vaguely realizing westward,
But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,
Such as she was, such as she would become.

---

On the Pulse of Morning
Maya Angelou

A Rock, A River, A Tree
Hosts to species long since departed,
Marked the mastodon.

The dinosaur, who left dry tokens
Of their sojourn here
On our planet floor,
Any broad alarm of their hastening doom
Is lost in the gloom of dust and ages.

But today, the Rock cries out to us, clearly, forcefully,
Come, you may stand upon my
Back and face your distant destiny,
But seek no haven in my shadow.

I will give you no more hiding place down here.

You, created only a little lower than
The angels, have crouched too long in
The bruising darkness,
Have lain too long
Face down in ignorance.

Your mouths spilling words
Armed for slaughter.

The Rock cries out today, you may stand on me,
But do not hide your face.

Across the wall of the world,
A River sings a beautiful song,
Come rest here by my side.

Each of you a bordered country,
Delicate and strangely made proud,
Yet thrusting perpetually under siege.

Your armed struggles for profit
Have left collars of waste upon
My shore, currents of debris upon my breast.

Yet, today I call you to my riverside,
If you will study war no more. Come,

Clad in peace and I will sing the songs
The Creator gave to me when I and the
Tree and the stone were one.

Before cynicism was a bloody sear across your
Brow and when you yet knew you still
Knew nothing.

The River sings and sings on.

There is a true yearning to respond to
The singing River and the wise Rock.

So say the Asian, the Hispanic, the Jew
The African and Native American, the Sioux,
The Catholic, the Muslim, the French, the Greek
The Irish, the Rabbi, the Priest, the Sheikh,
The Gay, the Straight, the Preacher,
The privileged, the homeless, the Teacher.
They hear. They all hear
The speaking of the Tree.

Today, the first and last of every Tree
Speaks to humankind. Come to me, here beside the River.

Plant yourself beside me, here beside the River.

Each of you, descendant of some passed
On traveller, has been paid for.

You, who gave me my first name, you
Pawnee, Apache and Seneca, you
Cherokee Nation, who rested with me, then
Forced on bloody feet, left me to the employment of
Other seekers–desperate for gain,
Starving for gold.

You, the Turk, the Swede, the German, the Scot …
You the Ashanti, the Yoruba, the Kru, bought
Sold, stolen, arriving on a nightmare
Praying for a dream.

Here, root yourselves beside me.

I am the Tree planted by the River,
Which will not be moved.

I, the Rock, I the River, I the Tree
I am yours–your Passages have been paid.

Lift up your faces, you have a piercing need
For this bright morning dawning for you.

History, despite its wrenching pain,
Cannot be unlived, and if faced
With courage, need not be lived again.

Lift up your eyes upon
The day breaking for you.

Give birth again
To the dream.

Women, children, men,
Take it into the palms of your hands.

Mold it into the shape of your most
Private need. Sculpt it into
The image of your most public self.
Lift up your hearts
Each new hour holds new chances
For new beginnings.

Do not be wedded forever
To fear, yoked eternally
To brutishness.

The horizon leans forward,
Offering you space to place new steps of change.
Here, on the pulse of this fine day
You may have the courage
To look up and out upon me, the
Rock, the River, the Tree, your country.

No less to Midas than the mendicant.

No less to you now than the mastodon then.

Here on the pulse of this new day
You may have the grace to look up and out
And into your sister’s eyes, into
Your brother’s face, your country
And say simply
Very simply
With hope
Good morning.

---

Of History and Hope
Miller Williams

We have memorized America,
how it was born and who we have been and where.
In ceremonies and silence we say the words,
telling the stories, singing the old songs.
We like the places they take us. Mostly we do.
The great and all the anonymous dead are there.
We know the sound of all the sounds we brought.
The rich taste of it is on our tongues.
But where are we going to be, and why, and who?
The disenfranchised dead want to know.
We mean to be the people we meant to be,
to keep on going where we meant to go.
But how do we fashion the future? Who can say how
except in the minds of those who will call it Now?
The children. The children. And how does our garden grow?
With waving hands — oh, rarely in a row –
and flowering faces. And brambles, that we can no longer allow.
Who were many people coming together
cannot become one people falling apart.
Who dreamed for every child an even chance
cannot let luck alone turn doorknobs or not.
Whose law was never so much of the hand as the head
cannot let chaos make its way to the heart.
Who have seen learning struggle from teacher to child
cannot let ignorance spread itself like rot.
We know what we have done and what we have said,
and how we have grown, degree by slow degree,
believing ourselves toward all we have tried to become –
just and compassionate, equal, able, and free.
All this in the hands of children, eyes already set
on a land we never can visit — it isn’t there yet –
but looking through their eyes, we can see
what our long gift to them may come to be.
If we can truly remember, they will not forget.

Hungry for more?  Check out the Poetry Foundation for podcasts, poems in print, and poets read aloud.  Oh, yes, and this delicious article about Blago quoting Tennyson.

 

Fun with single digits

Single digit temperatures in your neighborhood?  Not to worry!  More chances to photograph your frosty windows!

Looks like sea life...

Of course, you have to have this as background music.