Day 124–Cedar Wax Wing

I didn’t know what this bird was at first. I just had never had one at the feeder. But then I realized that it was a Cedar Wax Wing. Quickly and quietly grabbed Big Bertha and managed to snap one picture before he flew off.

Bing Cherry Fruit Leather.

Oh my word! Did you think that I had just abandoned you to the internets?? I haven’t been here since last week.

And I haven’t even really THOUGHT about blogging.

Darn summer. Darn schedule. Darn work.

OK, not any of those really. I love summer here in the Frozen Northeast Ohio, it is really the best time of the year. Well, except for the fact that they are saying we might be having some, how should I say it, HORRIBLE WEATHER by tonight. Oh joy. And I am not really complaining about my schedule, except for the fact that there is too much to do and I really would like to just find a lazy day somewhere.

And I love what I do so I cannot complain about that.

Sigh.

OK, getting back on track here.

Guess what I did this week?

I made Bing Cherry Fruit Leather. Who needs to buy those nasty roll up things when you can make your own.

This was a first attempt for me so I didn’t actually take any pictures of the results. Which is a good thing which you will see in a minute. All I did was pit the cherries with my little handy, dandy cherry pitter. Then I threw all of them into my food processor and ground the heck out of them until they were the consistency of thick apple sauce. Then I got out my dehydrator which has been resting in the pantry for summer to roll around. I spread the cherry glop onto the special “fruit leather” trays (no holes) and started her up at the correct temperature and let her rip.

6 hours later……..

Bing cherry fruit leather!!!

Or really to be accurate….Bing Cherry Fruit Leather pieces.

Now I have to admit that this was not an unqualified success. And there are several things that I am going to do differently next time. And yes there will be a next time. I didn’t add any sugar to this batch because I wanted to see how it turned out without any added sweetener. Bing Cherries are one of those hit or miss fruits. When they are perfectly ripe they have just the right amount of sweetness v tang. This batch of leather is a bit on the tangy side but still delicious.

And boy HOWDY is this stuff sticky.

And there in lay the problem.

I didn’t really think this whole process through as well as I might should have.

It is Bing Cherry season.

They were on sale.

I bought a big bag of them.

HHBL doesn’t really like them so I have to eat all of them.

I don’t want to waste them. I hate to waste anything.

Massive consumption of cherries brings on a certain intestinal consequence.

What to do? Dry them (that is the next thing I am going to try)? No.

Fruit Leather!

But I didn’t think about one thing. I didn’t really consider just how sticky this stuff was going to be and the fact that it just might be a bit difficult to detach the completed cherry leather from the special tray.

Yeah, that was a problem. That stuff was stuck to the tray tighter than a Kardashian sticks to fame. But I persevered and used a dull knife and finally had pieces of cherry leather that I immediately put on waxed paper, rolled up and stored in the fridge. Next time I think I will line the tray with a piece of cut out parchment paper.

And next time I will add a pinch of sugar and cook the cherries a bit on the stove before dehydrating.

But I am SO doing this again.

And I am picking strawberries on Friday. Can you say Strawberry Fruit Leather?

Be still my palpating heart.

7 Quick Takes (Vol 216)

Holy Spitballs Batman! How did another week just fly by? You know the rules. When you are done diggin’ the blather here you need to click on the picture above to be whisked, at the speed of the weeds growing after the rain, over to Conversion Diary to see what is going on.

Now get out there and BLATHER!

1.
These days I rarely watch TV unless it is something on Netflix or a DVD. The whole “we don’t have cable” thing remember. But yesterday evening, as I was waiting for the San Antonio/Miami game to start I spent some time watching the channel that shows old re-runs.

Oh my gosh I forgot how I loved old TV shows from the 1960s. I watched an episode of “I Dream of Jeannie” and “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and “Bewitched”.

So dated. So hilarious. So much fun.

I wonder if I can get those on Netflix?

2.

The back garden is in full on mode. In about two weeks the clematis in the upper left corner of the picture will be covered with little purple blossoms.

The Day Lily are setting their blossoms which means that I am out there spraying them to keep the flower decimators deer from eating them.

Peace reigns in the garden.

Except when I see Max lifting his leg on my basil plant.

Uggggggg!

3.

After the unexpected frost two weeks ago, LaurenLeap and I thought that our “reclaimed” potato plants had bitten the dust. All the foliage was all horribly wilted and translucent, just as if the plant had been killed by frost.

I say “reclaimed” because we actually had a bunch of potatoes sprout in the compost pile and we didn’t want them to go to waste so we dug them up and replanted them in one of our potato pots.

So imagine our delight when we discovered on Tuesday that for the most part the plants seem to have survived and are sending up new leaves.

Yipee!!!

And today we plant more potatoes in the burlap potato pots that I sewed. I will keep you posted as to their progress.

Don’t you just love garden experimentation!!

4.
We had a full day of rain yesterday.

Yes!

Not only was the ground watered and the plants made happy.

My rain starved heart was watered as well.

If I could set the weather schedule for the summer (are you listening God, this is Debbie), I would say that Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday would all be sunny with fluffy, white clouds and 75F tops. It could rain at night, after 9p with an occasional thunderstorm.

But Thursdays would be reserved for a all day rain, sometimes gentle, with perhaps a thunderstormy day every few weeks.

Perfection.

5.
Look who was wandering around underneath my office window the other day.

Turkey! So intriguingly ugly. She clucked and pecked for a good 10 minutes as I quietly took some pictures. Then she realized I was there and moved off down the driveway and into the woods.

She was alone, which is their habit during the summer months. I would suspect that she has some little ones that she stashed in the woods.

The pictures don’t do her justice as they were taken through my “light limiting” screens so there is a hazy quality to them. Her feathers are actually quite lovely. They are so smooth and have a sheen to them. She looks like she would be very soft to the touch.

Of course she might peck my eyes out if I tried but I can dream.

6.

I have a new chair to take to HHBL’s baseball games. It is ridiculous how excited I am about a chair with it’s very own awning attached. In years past if it was very sunny I had a small umbrella that I held over my head to get some shade and relief from the blazing orb.

But not more.

There is only one small detail about this chair. When it is very windy, if I arise from my seat, the wind will quickly pick the chair up and flip it on it’s side.

Do you know how I know?

Because earlier in the game I had left my seat to take a picture of my chair with my iPhone. And even as I snapped the picture the wind grabbed my chair and tipped it over and at the same time spilled half of my travel mug of coffee onto the seat.

Rats.

But I still love my Throne of Games

7.
The work in the community garden is ramping up. By this afternoon LL and I will have the tomatoes and peppers and basil in the ground. The Brussels sprouts are already in. The first planting of beets is up. The lettuce is about to get it’s first harvest and the spinach is producing quite well.

Joy.

A Photography Rambling.

One of my failings, if that is the way to put it, is that I take on something and start in the middle and then just go from there. Sort of like that very old ad where the guy says,

I can do that! I can do that! I can do that! How am I going to do that? ( I would have embeded the video but I couldn’t find it anywhere)

That is me. That was me when I started the whole scrap booking consultant four year crazy time. I didn’t start out scrap booking by just doing an album and buying a few things. OH NO, I had to buy the WHOLE kit and sign up to be a consultant and THEN learn how to scrap book.

Insert dope slap here.

In other words, I bite off more that I can chew and then I chew and chew and chew stubbornly, because DAMMIT! I am going to do this MY way! When in reality if I just spit the whole thing out and started again from the beginning I would be better off and less frustrated and not so overwhelmed and about to drown.

You know I was speaking metaphorically about spitting food out and then re-chewing it.

You do know that right? Because that would just be really oogy to even thing about let alone do. Sort of like a momma bird regurgitating a worm for her baby. Only grosser.

And yes, oogy is a word. Just like greeblies is a word. TSiL disagrees with me on this but the Urban Dictionary says that it is and so it is. HA!

OK, moving on for I seem to have digressed wildly.

The above few paragraphs of drivel about biting off more that you can chew can be easily applied to my photography. Or at least to certain aspects of my photography.

It isn’t the ability to “see”, photographically, that is so deficient with me, that is actually where I think I excel. No, what is lacking is sometimes my basic knowledge of what to do with my camera, it’s settings and how to achieve in digital form what I see with my mind’s eye.

I am self taught.

I don’t have a degree in photography. I don’t even have a degree in any kind of art. I have a Bachelor of Science in Nursing. Blood does not scare me. Guts and gore fascinate me. I took no art classes in college. I took science classes (A LOT). I took History classes. I took Literature classes. I did not take art classes. I did not take photography classes. And I am guessing that Baylor might not even have had any more than basic photography classes when I was there.

But that is beside the point.

Part of being self-taught is that I sometimes most of the time don’t know what the HECK I am doing in some situations. I say, “I can do that!” and then I go back and figure out how I am going to do that and then do it. Or what more often happens is that I fall on my face the first bazillion times before I get a photo that I even half way like. I delete a lot of photos.

Being self-taught means that I am “in school” all the time. Every day. I look at the work of others and ask myself if I like what they have done or if I don’t like it. How did they do that? Why did they do that? Can I do that? I read about photography every day. I take photos every day. I make tiny strides every day, I hope.

Being self-taught means that I haven’t had anyone tell me the concrete rules that CANNOT BE BROKEN. I am learning the rules but I am breaking the rules as well. What is the worst that could happen?

Being self-taught means that I have to give myself permission to sit and read about photography and technique and photographers and tech stuff. I have to throw out the notion that others have that if I am not moving and “doing” something that I must be wasting time when in reality I am studying and learning. I HAVE to study. Every day. I LOVE to study photography.

I love photography PERIOD.

Being self-taught means that sometimes I decide that I am just going to sit down at the computer and “play” for a few minutes and look up and it is 4 hours later. And the house is still not cleaned. And the weeds are still taunting me. And I don’t know what we are having for dinner. And the to do list is still not too done. But I have accomplished something that I hadn’t done before.

I feel like the Lord has led me to this so “late” in my life that I won’t have time to take it all in and take all the photos that I want and learn all that I need to learn and make good art. And occasionally earn some money.

As Neil Gaiman says, Whatever you do….Make. Good. Art.

And then there is Photoshop. Oh my stars and garters! Or in my case Photoshop Elements. Some people call that “Photoshop Lite”. Oh for the LOVE of Peter, Paul and Mary folks! PSE 11 is awesome fantastic and can do just about everything that you could possibly want so stop being a Photoshop snob!

pantpantpantpant.

No really, I use Photoshop Elements because I am 53 years old and I don’t have enough memory to handle anything else. I don’t have an expansion slot to upgrade my brain memory to handle all the info that I am still learning about PSE 11. There is already a boat load of useless knowledge floating around in my cranium just waiting to burst forth for Final Jeopardy! If I have to add learning Photoshop you may have to call in a HAZMAT team because my head will for sure explode.

Well, I do have an expansion slot, my mouth. But that causes me to expand in ways that have nothing to do with knowledge and everything to do with buying a bigger pair of jeans.

Believe me when I say that I am always learning new things about PSE. I have some PSE learning DVD’s that I am going through at the moment. The tendency for me would be to skip over the parts about learning the basics. I almost did that this morning. But I didn’t and I learned a bunch of things that I didn’t know.

Sweetness!

All this rambling is actually just a reminder to myself that it is OK to sit and read and study every day. To work on photos. To try new things. That I am using my time wisely, despite what it might look like to others.

Getting off my soap box now and going to read a book by Ibarionex Perello on Natural Light photography.

Oh, and just as an aside. If I could listen to only ONE podcast on photography, it would be The Candid Frame, which happens to be Ibarionex Perello’s podcast. Awesome.

 

 

Day 123–Grundewald the Garden Gnome

Everyone has met Grundewald. He lives in the garden and “mysteriously” moves around from place to place.

Ok, FINE! LaurenLeap and I take turns moving him around. It isn’t quite as fun when there aren’t that many things growing in the garden and it is easy to see him.

But when the tomatoes are tall and full of lovely red globes of goodness?

Well Grundewald hides quite easily.

Day 122–Watching the Future

For the last 30 minutes of HHBL’s baseball game yesterday there was a group of High School students intently watching their elders duel to the end.

Day 121–Oak Puffs

I don’t know why. I don’t know when it happened. But I have been fascinated with these things for as long as I can remember.

Evidently they come off the oak trees and are caused by a fungus or other stress. I see just a few every Spring. They make me smile.

And of course to get the picture I had to lay prone on my driveway, camera to my face.

Thank goodness the neighbors are used to my odd photographic behavior.