Entries tagged hobbies

My husband and I are accomplished gardeners. Our old apartment in Austin had a large balcony that we absolutely filled with potted plants. We grew a few different kinds of mint, parsley, cilantro, all kinds of peppers, and different herbs that I would use for truly homemade herbal tea. We grew both Italian sweet basil and tulsi, or Indian holy basil. The bees that made the commute up to our third story balcony blessed us with a new hybrid between the two.

Our garden was so overactive that you could see it from the street, and currently persists in the promotional photos for the building.

Our new place in Dallas has no balcony or yard, so we were unable to take our plants with us. They are in the care of various other residents at that building. I hope they're doing well.

What better opportunity to start anew? We signed up for a local community garden here in town. We got a 4x4 plot, well enough for a few good-size plants. We started with some okra seeds, because we just happened to have some when we toured the garden for the first time together.

We completely forgot about the seeds for a good few weeks. We had a couple of downpoors in the mean time, and by the time we got back to plant more things, we had a couple healthy-looking okra sprouts!

We gave the okra guys a ladder to climb and got to work with the rest of the plot. We selected a few things that we think would survive an October sowing in North Texas, divided the plot into nine segments, and planted seeds in the configuration recommended by the packet.

We planted a week ago and watered sporadically since then. I dropped by this morning to check on how things were doing. A few sprouts here and there, I'm most impressed by the arugula.

I shouldn't be suprised. Arugula is a weed. We'll have to watch it to make sure it doesn't take over the whole community garden.

I took a few extra moments to take in the rest of the place. It's a very beautiful, peaceful place. The garden is situated under a few highway overpasses, but situated such that all the plots get plenty of sun throughout the day. Both water and power run to the plot, so it's just about perfect for a community garden. There is considerable highway noise, but it's elevated and obstructed, so it filters down to the garden as nearly indistiguishable white noise. It's a great setting in which to meditate.

The other plots offer inspiration for things to plant, as well as general gardening tips. We have some very resourceful neighbors.

Depleted wine and liquor bottles are used in place of Aqua globes, if the plot owner is unable to water for a certain interval of time.

These are cocktail stirrers from a nearby seafood bar and grill where the community has their happy hours. Here, they are used as plant markers.

The water faucets are communal, installed on each row of plots. Here we have somebody who put a Y-valve on one, and installed a water timer on one of the outlets. Very clever, I'll consider a similar setup if watering becomes too much of a hassle or we go on vacation.

There are a couple of community-maintained plots, for pollination and herbs. It's a lot easier and cheaper to go down to the community garden when I need some parsley for a recipe than go to the store. It almost seems to taste better, too.

I was not alone in the garden this morning. A squirrel was darting up and down the tree in the middle of the garden and between all the planter boxes. He performed some impressive acrobatics. He was clearly busy with something.

I got low and crept behind him, camera at the level. It's hard to get a good shot of a squirrel who's moving with purpose. Frankly, I'm not satisfied with any of the shots I got of him. Here's about as close as I got:

It seems that he was hard at work harvesting nuts from the tree and burying them in the planter boxes. I guess I'll know the reaon why if one day our plot has an oak tree hanging out of it.

Tags: gardening, hobbies, nature, outside, photography | No comments

My husband and I got bikes recently, from a local shop located in a dilapidated Frito factory. We awkwardly peddled them back home to our home, located in a 114 year old Model T factory.

Having not ridden a bike since middle school so many years ago, it took us some time to get used to them. Balancing and going fast aren't the problem, so much as starting and stopping.

But I've really taken to riding after work. For what Dallas lacks in nature hikes, it makes up for in bike trails. We can ride from our home in Deep Ellum all the way to White Rock Lake and the trail that encomposses it, with only a few blocks of road travel and just a few intersections.

Today, I thought it would be fun to bring my Sony Mavica, model MVC-FD88, along for the ride. I brought along a satchel full of 1.44 MB new-old-stock Office Depot floppy diskettes, but I only got through three of them before my long-disused battery ran out.

So, yes, 33% of the pictures that I took are of my bike. Though it's pretty fine-looking, if I do say so myself.

Hey, it's a new toy and I want to show it off. Could you really blame me? Though the reason I pulled over on this gravel wasn't to get another shot of my bike, it was this:

I'm not normally a fan of graffiti, but I would certainly rather it be done against stark slabs of cement than the natural features themselves. So, thank you for that, anonymous lady-butt drawer.

I enjoy the limitations of the crappy digital camera... uh, format? This would be a rather mediocre picture if taken with a good camera. It's over-exposed, there's a lot of detail washed out. But the artifacts and jpeg-edness of it all make it so much mroe interesting. And I can still arrange a halfway decent composition, at least if I stare intently into the early 00s LCD technology intently enough.

And this thing has some halfway-decent glass in it, for being a monolith without any form of changeable lens. I won't pretend this isn't a crap photo, but I'm always impressed how close I can get with the optical zoom.

There are some pretty old buildings around the lake. Clubhouses, some repurposed industrial buildings. I think most of them are venue spaces now.

There was some sort of rowing competition. I wanted to get more pictures of it, maybe even a zoomy panning shot, but my battery was running low. All I got was this chaser boat, and perhaps the only particularly decent shot of this set:

This fisherman seemed none too pleased that he chose rowing competition day to get all of his gear together and head down to the lake. Hopefully he had something to show for at the end of the day.

Not a bad day of bike riding or shooting! And I'm pleased to be re-acquainted with the good old post-workout feeling of tired/not-tired. The mostly uphill ride home was strenous, but invigorating. And I'll certainly be bringing crappy old digital cameras on future rides!

The full gallery is available here. It's interesting -- usually I throw away between 80 and 100% of the digital pictures I take. But something about the limiting nature of recording them on floppies makes me think about the ones I take more, like with film. These are all the exposures that I took today!

It's almost like it's the best of both worlds, if you can excuse the poor sensor technology and image resolution.

Tags: hobbies, mavica, my thighs, old technology, outdoors, photography | No comments