patrick roger

you know, i'd really love to win the lottery and go back for a few months.

and get that blasted duck confit.

and learn how to pronounce french with some semblance of "frenchness" instead of my feeble faux-spanish-french-italian mix.

from the pompidou

the day we visited the pompidou was grey and drizzly, yet still kind of lovely.

seductive

since she's a seductive little cougar, we're considering getting a friend's neighbor's kitten for her; we're waiting to find out if testicles will drop as she does seem to get along better with boys than girls.

kittens: so freaking adorable.

a serious cleanup of my craft room will have to be in order.

peas!

my very first pea blossom. SUCCESS!!

last year they withered in the full sun before they got 4 inches tall. very sad. they're doing much better in the shade of a large tree, in a round pot with chicken wire trellising. in FACT, when i checked more recently, there appeared to be a baby pea on it!

imagine it now: large clean, white, dinner plate, one lone, verdant and plump pea in a small pool of butter. maybe a little anthill of salt & pepper, appropriately placed off-kilter, to tease the appetite.




... that's actually making me really hungry.

(no surprise there.)


in any case, i believe i have 6 pea plants (THANK YOU AMY! for saving me after i accidentally and heavily stomped on my seedlings...) - hopefully they'll produce enough for actual food. i've read that heirloom plants don't usually produce their fruit all at the same time, unlike more commercial varieties. so i'm guessing one should have more plants growing at the same time - perhaps 6 is enough. we shall see; all in due time.

the fact that i haven't killed these plants is cause for celebration enough. zucchini are supposedly easy to grow. LIARS. powdery mildew has beset my plants - i've been pouring diluted milk over their diseased leaves to try and save them, it seems to be working on at least one of them.

all in all - garden is surviving!

I tried, I really tried

I tried, I really tried, originally uploaded by gimchi.


[update]

well, that sucked.

i tried to send this via email, but my entire message was deleted!!

the gist of it was: i WANT to like bloody marys. because i like ketchup. and tomatoes. and when i go italian restaurants, i almost exclusively order tomato-based sauces, which sometimes drives anthony a little batty.

and i like how bloody marys feel so... white trashy hangover with curlers. else, nouveau riche in a lushy kind of way.

so this morning at brunch, i tried one at datz! instead of celery, i got a thick slice of bacon. WIN!

'tasty', i thought, as i nibbled the end, fatty and slightly tomato-y.

first sip: ZZZIIINNNNGGGG! spicy!

and so i sipped it through the first part of my meal until i just couldn't do it anymore. the amount i ingested was minimal, but it just got... spicy gross. like a spicy ketchup drink that was going to give me an insane stomachache.

i just couldn't do it. but i did give it my best shot!

NEXT!

i have a problem

and that problem is, in a word, laziness.

where is my mojo? my get-up-and-go? i realize that i'm a creature of stimulation - i like new things. normally my jobs haven't lasted more than a year or so - my current job is the longest at 3. it mostly keeps me busy. but even with hobbies and crafts, i can't seem to easily stick to them!

it's very frustrating. as soon as i achieve a smidgen of competence with something, i'm over it.

NNEEEXXXTT!

so i'm forcing myself to stick to a few things, mostly because it's expensive otherwise.

sewing. knitting. gardening. and of course, photography.

my photo kick has kind of waned, only in that i'm-tired-of-always-lugging-my-giant-camera-around kind of way.

so i'm trying to get some photo apps and kick my malaise in the ass with my camera phone. trying to just have fun with it and find some kind of inspiration.

i'm going through throes - i waffle back and forth when editing photos between what's "right" or what "looks right" or what "looks good" - and then i say fuckitall and nothing gets done. else i spend 45 minutes on one goddamn photo and then hit "reset".

it's very frustrating.

finding one's "style" is crazy hard. especially with digital photography. (at least, so far, it is for me.) some people are strange purists who don't want to do any photo editing - but the fact of the matter is - ALL digital photos are edited in some way, either in post production on the computer by a person or by the camera itself.

i took some photos of our television recently - we've had troubles with every single (expensive) flat screen from samsung having serious back lighting issues. anthony didn't want me to edit the raw files at all, so i didn't. however, he noted later that they didn't look like the image on the back of the camera and the lighting issues weren't noticeable. well... that's because the image you see on the back of the camera goes through in-camera processing. if you shoot in raw - the pic isn't going to look like the one on the back of the camera once you transfer it to your computer. it's just not.

with digital, an image is just math. it's just there waiting to be manipulated, waiting to "look real". it's just... trying to find that happy medium that i'm comfortable with.

BLARG.

mostly i think the malaise is stemming from seeing this, 40 hours a week:


office without a view.

depressing, no?

it's brighter than that, of course, but that's how i feel about it all. and damnit, i still haven't gotten any plants in here! that was supposed to be remedied months ago!

FAIL, EPIC.

ok, now that *that's* all out, i feel better.

/end rant.

*bow*
*exit stage left and straight on towards rapture*

actual blog comment:

"The next time I read a blog, I hope that it doesnt disappoint me as much as this one. I imply, I know it was my option to learn, but I actually thought youd have something attention-grabbing to say. All I hear is a bunch of whining about something that you would fix when you werent too busy on the lookout for attention."



HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!

thug 4 life

picard

all i can think of when i see this photo is "star trek".

the only futuristic thing about this grocery store, however, is that all the food is frozen! oooo! ahhh! the marvels of modern man! food, frozen at its freshest point in time, to be cooked and reheated later into a slightly mushy, less stellar version of its previous self!

apparently, these stores are incredibly popular - one can even order foods online to be delivered to one's home. i wonder if they deliver internationally? were i staying/living in france for a longer period of time than 1 week (and had access to a kitchen), perhaps i'd give it a try. the store is so strangely sterile, yet futuristically appealing. as though one should be wearing a space suit to wander the aisles. or at least, protective foot booties.

paul

well, since DC is apparently getting a paul, i thought i'd go ahead and share our paul meal!

it was our last one in paris. seriously, every single time we saw one of these shops, we had always JUST eaten. i realized they were a chain, but STILL. look at that beautiful design! dark, sumptuous colors, shiny gold serif lettering, sandwiches that looked divine...

finally, at the airport after we'd walked up and down the concourses 3 times trying to find/understand where our gate was, we stopped here to eat before our flight to rome.

anthony was supposedly "not hungry", but he ended up getting food after i'd gotten mine:



and, of course:



uh, yes, please. can i have some more? if i visit DC in the future, i may have to take a trip to relive good food memories.

bitches, this was in the AIRPORT. and it wasn't incredibly overpriced either! america: take note.

ant's dessert was some sort of fruit pastry.



*sigh* now i feel the need to go to bern's for some good dessert.

we bought our food at different times and each ordered une expres (spelling iffy) (pronunciation even more so). here's the result:



guess which one's anthony's? UNFAIR.

just like home!

in orvieto, we encountered a blue garbage bin that was JUST LIKE OURS! very similar to the ones we get from the city of tampa.






























just, you know.







tinier.