The Very Young at Art

Sidewalk chalk was a big hit.  Scribbling everywhere with big, easy to hold chunks, and endless cups of water for pouring on top...  what more could a fifteen-month-old want?

Pet Gorilla

This toy has been in our house since Diego was a baby.  We call it the pet gorilla.

It's just a picture of a baby gorilla that I downloaded, printed, cut out and stuck in an old candy box.  Occasionally, we "feed" it some fresh bamboo, which adds to the effect.

Julio is fascinated.

He stares at it for a while, then asks for the box to be opened.  He takes out and examines the bamboo and the picture.  He says, "Gorilla!"

The other boys still occasionally play with it, but I remember that when they were his age, they were just as intrigued by it as Julio is now.

Spooky Spider

I asked Diego if he would like to make a spider web for our front door as a Halloween decoration.  He said, "No thanks, but I'd like you to make one."  Not what I had in mind, but I said, "Okay, I'll make a web if you make a spider," and he enthusiastically agreed.

I stuck six kebab skewers into a wine cork, and while I sat on the floor twisting yarn around them, Diego ran off to make a spider.  He chose his own materials, so I had no idea what he was going to make, but as usual, I love his creation!

I am so crazy about our little collaborations.  They are always surprising, and always turn out so much better than anything I would have made on my own.

You Can't Handle, The Truth

I'm surely not the first person to have this idea, but this morning when I went grocery shopping without my reusable bags and had to use paper, I realized:

Putting handles on paper bags causes a huge waste!

When I was a kid, we never double-bagged our groceries.  The bags didn't have handles, and we carried them up in our arms.  When we bought lots of cans or other heavy loads, they were usually put into old cardboard boxes for us, but mostly groceries were brought home in single brown paper bags.

Now that there are flimsy handles on all of the bags, nobody around here carries the bags by holding the bottoms any more.  Most people end up using either two paper bags or a paper and a plastic together for each sack of groceries in order to make sure they don't drop them if the handle breaks!

I'm sure there must be studies and statistics about this, right?  Seriously, it's probably time to ban the bags, but at the very least, let's forgo the convenience and go back to paper bags without handles!

Guero

He lives right in the middle of the city, next door to a vacant lot by the freeway.  Clearly, he owns the place.

We had to stop and say hello.

Gorgeous, isn't he?

Extension Tubes

Do you know about Extension Tubes?  They are tubes that fit between your lens and camera body, and they are a fairly inexpensive way to give your lenses a macro effect.

As you can see, they really are just tubes.  There is no glass in them, but they have electronic contacts so that the camera and lens can still communicate with each other for exposure and auto focus.  Mine are made by Kenko, and I got them at B&H Photo many years ago.

Here are some examples of what they can do.  (You can click on any of the photos to get an enlarged view.)  This tiny mushroom was on my front lawn:

This is a full frame of the closest I could possibly get to it with a 50mm macro lens:

Here it is the full frame after I added a 36mm extension tube:

And again:

Here's another tiny mushroom (you can see the blade of grass for scale):

And the entrance to an earthworm burrow:

As you see, they can give your photos an ethereal quality, with a very, very shallow focus.  When you use them, you need to be extremely close to your subject and hold your camera very still, so they're not ideal for taking pictures of anything that moves.  But, if you happen to be well on your way to becoming the world's greatest tiny mushroom photographer... you might enjoy playing around with these!

Hen of the Woods

Do you ever buy something from the market that you've never tried before?  I don't mean a new brand of something that you usually buy, but something so totally new to you that you need to go home and look up what it is and how to cook it.  If you are a foreigner in the country where you live, this is probably a common occurrence for you, but most of us who live near where we were raised seem to stick to the same familiar grocery list month after month.

I love trying new foods, and fortunately for me, I live in a big city where I can be a foreigner whenever I choose.  Within a few miles of my house, there are some fantastic Korean, Indian, Japanese, Greek, Mexican, Thai, Eastern European, French, Jewish, and Ethiopian grocery stores.  My favorite markets for experimentation are usually Asian, because I love so many of the flavors, because I can't read most of the packaging and because I didn't grow up eating or cooking this kind of food.  It can be wonderfully disorienting to shop in a market where you don't know most of the products.  Sometimes I will pick up a package and wonder, "Is this thing fish, or dessert, or both?!"  If the ingredients are listed in English I can usually tell if what I'm looking at is junk food or not, but the flavors are often a complete surprise.

The produce department of my nearby Koreatown Galleria Market yields all kinds of exotic-to-me fruits and vegetables.  My current favorite section is the mushroom area, where I can buy fresh Enoki, Oyster, King Oyster, Bunapi (brown and white), Portobella, Maitake, and Shiitake mushrooms.  We're working our way through them.

The Maitake, or "Hen-of-the-Woods" mushrooms, pictured above, are a new-to-us favorite.  They looked so strange to me that I had to try them... I've just been sautéing them with butter and garlic, and they are so delicious.

I know that this kind of grocery shopping is not for everyone!  What about you?  Do you enjoy tasting new-to-you foods?