Tuesday's Tidings for November 19, 2013

5. As I've mentioned in many a post, I like to cook with hot oil, and I almost always burn myself. The tips of my fingers are so burnt at this point that I barely have any feeling left in them (very nice when playing a steel string guitar, I have to say). Unfortunately, though, I still have plenty of feeling left in my forearms. When I was making breakfast on Saturday (I was testing out a new breakfast potatoes recipe for you - it turned out, but the pictures didn't), a pan of oil heated up far faster than I anticipated, and when I added the potatoes, my forearms were splattered in hot oil. Looks like the burns are second degree, because they're blistering. Yay. Showers will be fun for awhile. 

6. So, lighting is hard. We've had our DSLR for about nine months now, and though we've learned a lot, it feels like we're still just beginning to scratch the surface (which is undoubtedly true). Where food photography is concerned, our primary challenge is lighting. Yes, composition, setting, angles, etc are all areas we can work on, but none of that seems to matter if the lighting is poor, and now that it gets dark at 4:30, well...dinner is tough to photograph. So, shall we prepare everything ahead of time and reheat for dinner, photograph only on the weekends, or invest in some lighting equipment?

7. Christian has had quite a week! All at once, he is army crawling (Chels calls it zombie crawling because of his personal twist on the conventional style), pulling himself up to a sitting position from being on his stomach, hanging on to the furniture, referring to Noel (the cat) as "didi," and preferring all of our food over his. Some of these are "early" and some of them are "late," but as I'm always telling Chels, every baby is different. Our experience with our three babies has certainly borne that out. Still, this week it was hard to keep up!

8. Poor Edie had a reaction to her flu shot (which wasn't really a shot, as she keeps reminding me - "Daddy, it was a vaccine..."). It was a nasal spray this time, which is nice, but 24 hours later she had a fever and felt awful. Edie never (ever!) gets sick, so it was hard to see her dealing with that. To make matters worse, we were over at my parents' house for my brother's birthday, which she wasn't really able to enjoy - she loves a party!

9. Speaking of my brother, Jeff, he turned 21 last week. Which is insane. That is all. 

10. Actually, that's not all. He's taking an engineering class at Portland State University, and he's been working on building and programming a fan. Yeah. It doesn't sound like much, but it's amazing how complicated it is. He had to design the parts, have them cut and shaped out of plastic, wire the engines, and then write the programming code that would govern the fan speed, when it started and stopped, and the oscillation. I found myself quite fascinated by the process. He finished it while we were over for his birthday on Saturday night - he was underwhelmed as the fan blade spun and the head moved back and forth. I'm sure it seemed a minor accomplishment after weeks of work, but I was ecstatic and very proud - he made it work! I have infinitely more respect for my oscillating fans at this point.