Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Fancy fair rides

145/365
May 16, 2010

This ride at the 5th Avenue Street Fair was actually just set up in the back of a truck. There was no motor, only a man rocking it back and forth. It looked pretty silly.

Swans

144/365
June 12, 2010

The waterfowl of Prospect Park frequently make the local news. There are two swan "families" in the park, with a mated pair and their cygnets. One pair is more aggressive and apparently bullies the other pair and some swan fans hang out in the park and monitor the swans, and I think, try to keep the two groups apart. Swans are large and strong and I keep my distance when they have cygnets around to protect. Apparently a swan took out a small dog once and nearly drowned a pitbull. Once we were feeding the swans and geese and some little kids came over and were feeding them with us when the cob (adult male) rushed at us all puffed up. The kids ran behind Craig and I just threw the rest of the food at him. Don't mess with the swans!

This group looked kind of picturesque with the adults on each end of the cygnets and the nice background.

Tuesday, July 13, 2010

Smurftastic

143/365
May 8, 2010

This waterfall in Prospect Park is a popular spot for wedding pictures, but it usually doesn't have all of these flowers around it. A Smurfs movie is in production and some scenes were being shot in Prospect Park in the area of this waterfall. For the shoot they put lots of real and fake flowers everywhere. I wish they would have left the real ones there because they looked nice there.

Apparently a real cat(s) was used for Gargamel's (sp?) cat, and Shep wanted to hunt it. While I was walking him in this area the cat trainers had a cat running between crates and I had to drag Shep away. The main thing I remember about the Smurfs is that the word "smurf" was stuck into all kinds of words, like fantastic was smurftastic and terrific was smurfarific.

Mrs. Toad

142/365
May 24, 2010

This huge toad hung out in our garden for about a week. I was happy imagining it eating bugs. Sadly, it went away after a while.

I used to flush them out of their little tunnels with a hose and gather them up in a bucket. I think I tried to make little habitats for them with plants from the yard and gather bugs to feed them, but they never seemed content with this so I would let them go. I'm pretty sure my cruel hobby of flooding toads out of their homes means I might make a good government bigwig. Did anyone else go on toad hunts as a kid?

Park Slope rooftops

141/365
May 23, 2010

We attended the (2nd?) annual Southern Fried Brunch at a friend's place, and most of the time was spent on the roof of the building. There were things like biscuits and fried chicken. I love the views of Brooklyn from rooftops.

frustration!

Part of what has kept me from updating the blog lately is frustration. Every so often I empty my memory card from the camera into my photo library and I don't always look through it immediately, especially when there are hundreds of photos. Somewhere along the way, a lot of photos have gone missing! I'm not sure if the problem is on the card itself, the upload process, or something to do with iphoto. Right now I suspect that something is wrong with my iphoto and I'm losing pictures there but I haven't had the patience to fool with it.

So, there is a week or so in a row where all my photos are gone! I'm going to dig through pictures from other days to fill in the blanks because the big gap is giving me a big case of the sads. I'll keep the #/365 going, but the dates won't be in exact order.

Hopefully I'll post a bunch in the next couple of days and hopefully I will get the problem sorted out as well.

Again with the cupcakes

140/365
May 22, 2010

Yep, that's a shelf full of more cupcakes just waiting for me to add some delicious buttercream icing. We were going to a party and I of course offered to bring a dessert so I could practice the icing more. This time I used a tres leches cake recipe for the cupcakes and soaked them with a tres leches sauce before adding the vanilla icing.

Speed Racer

139/365
May 21, 2010

Grad school can have field trips. For the zoonoses class I took, one of our speakers was the head vet at the Wildlife Conservation Society (Bronx Zoo and the other NYC zoos) and he gave us a tour of the animal hospital at the Bronx Zoo. We could not take photos during the tour, but afterwards we walked around the zoo. I don't really love taking pictures of animals in zoos, but I took a few for the 365. I like how the blur makes it kind of look like the turtle is fast.

Monday, July 5, 2010

Mice

138/365
May 20, 2010

Mice have been a part of life since moving to the city. Some apartments were relatively rodent free (no place is truly free of them here) with them just using our place as a connector from the basement to the gross apartments above us and other times we've had them partying it up. In our rent-stabilized place they really moved in. Despite no evidence of them eating in our place, based on my extensive search and the exterminators, they seemed to be ever-present. Shep is an excellent mouser, but I wanted a way to really get rid of them and the mouse zapper, as I call it, is the best solution (barring being able to fill ALL holes).

In this picture Shep is proudly playing with the mouse (only one seen so far here, in two years) he caught. Below is a shot of the wonderful mouse-zapper.


Petunias and mini-petunias

137/365
May 16, 2010*

*New rule for my 365 postings: the picture may not be from the day up in order. If I miss a day or just like multiple pictures from one day that I like better than another nearby day, I'll post that one. This is the case for picture 137.

This is one of my favorite flower baskets this summer. It has million bells (which look like miniature petunias, and may be closely related but I'm not sure) and some red petunias. I can only plant petunias in containers because our endless snail population eats them to the ground in a few days if I plant them in the yard. It takes them a while to get into the planters so I have a chance to grab them and toss them into the beer bowl of death.

Sunday, July 4, 2010

Ramp butter

136/365
May 18, 2010

I used the last of my ramps to make my own ramp butter. The recipe called for a lot of lemon juice, and I used probably less than half of what it called for but it was still too much. The butter is good (um, it's still butter with tasty flavors), but the lemon flavor is almost as strong as the ramp flavor.

Summer dessert

135/365
May 17, 2010

Fresh local strawberries, cream cheese pound cake, and fresh whipped cream. That is all.

Mmm, good.

134/365
May 16, 2010

Pulled pork and smoked beef brisket sandwiches. These were two of the tastiest things we've had at a street fair here. A new steakhouse in the neighborhood was serving these along with some other quirky items like hot beef sundaes and pork parfaits.