Day 206

There is a fair at the church near the library but it's only open in the evenings so I don't think I'll be able to see it at all with Youth Conference the rest of this week. Ugh, I shouldn't think about that, it makes me nervous an sick to my stomach. If I was more together today's pic would be the banner I should be making right now for people to know here to gather as a stake. Maybe that'll be tomorrow's pic, or sometime next week when I just use Youth Conference pictures rather than take new ones. :)

Day 205

See, my garden is looking rather pathetic considering it cost $100 or more with all the dirt and wood and plants. Maybe closer to $125 or more. It's all rather disappointing. My brussels sprouts are disappearing, the bigger zucchini plants seem to be dying for some reason, maybe sprout related, the beans and peppers haven't taken off at all, the tomatoes have grown but there aren't any red ones... This picture makes it look much more vibrant than I feel it is when I look at it.

Day 204

Something is eating all the leaves from my brussels sprouts. They hadn't even started to look like they'd make sprouts yet. :( I think it's a bug, I saw green made eggs on one plant but I don't see any worms or anything that could be eating them all, a plant a night it looks like.

Day 203

Apparently the violent weather of recent days, or maybe an inner rotting combined with its peach-covered weight, broke off the top half of our peach tree. Very sad. I was back there just the other day when I took a picture of the peaches earlier this week so it was in tact them at least.

It looked a bit hideously gross up close after I dragged it away from the tree the bugs or fungi or whatever had made a gross slug-like gel some places like around where it broke and on some of the peaches. I poked it with a twig because I thought it was a slug on a peach at first and thought oh great, we've got slugs now?! But it poked right through and I don't think slugs would give so little resistance. I should've taken a picture of that. Oh well, maybe later. :)

Day 202

I finally got the new case for my phone (back on Wednesday) so I can risk touching my phone. It doesn't have all my preferred apps on it yet though, or the wifi password for in the house, or any of my emails which I may or may not recall the passwords for anymore. I managed to figure out my voicemail password at least so now it's a totally workable phone and I can text all I want once more.

This case is gray and hot pink, my favorite colors back when I played softball (7-ish). I was jealous of the teams that got to be pink and gray, I think I was red and white and blue and yellow different years. I may have been pink and gray sometime, too, I don't recall how many years I played. I doubt they've got little league softball for girls anywhere in the city anymore...

Anyway, once I get things set up on the new phone I'll be able to send better quality pictures because I think it has more megapixels. Plus it won't have so many scratches on the case over the camera lens. It also has a flash so the sky's the limit. :)

Day 201

Barbara is spending the next three days camping and kayaking along the Youghiogheny river with some people from church. I was very excited about it until I got in a canoe last month and immediately flipped it. :) It'd probably be fine with another person in the boat, etc etc but I'll leave it for another time after they've worked out the bugs.

Hopefully they didn't have any problems today, we got another harsh storm through today. I was at the dollar theater and it went from sunny before the movie to cloudy after to crazy storming by the time I got out of the bathroom. I don't think it lasted that long, maybe a half hour, but who knows what they could do to a river?

Day 200

Quite a storm came through today. Looking out my backdoor toward the city you couldn't even see the skyscrapers that are usually there. Out front it was sunny with no particular signs of rain to come.

Day 199

Another look at the alley. There's a random wooden fence back there that has been graffitied. Last year it had morning glories on it and I was looking forward to taking some pictures of the pretty and the urban but so far there are no flowers there. There is quite a bit of ivy on one half of it so here's a close up of some of it.

Day 198

The peach tree is looking very sad. It's weighed down by all the totally useless peaches its grown. I MUST treat it this fall so that next year the peaches will be edible. In theory at least. These might be edible. They are getting bigger and changing colors at least. But they have spots and maybe bugs and definitely the fungi thing that is better than it was last year but I still wouldn't trust a fruit that's leaving sap crystals. Such is life. I wish all the trees out back were fruit ones rather than waste of space evergreens.

Day 197

So for my birthday cake this year I decided to do a thing I saw on pintrest, make a cake out of fruit. For more details on that experience check out the post on my main blog.

Today's picture is the finished product with candles lit and no thought given to what was visible in the background. :) I tried to blur it out with depth of field. The sides of the cake were dark because of the candle light so I used clarity to brighten it up but maybe I should have played around with it a bit more because maybe other things would've showed the side decoration even better and not the urine bag.

Day 196

Today's picture is from Sarris' ice cream parlor and chocolate factory, their new chocolate castle. We have visited this place for many years but this was the first time since it reopened after a fire caused some damage that required a bit of remodeling of the store. I used the food and HDR filters on the pic.

Day 195 Friday the 13th!

Today's picture isn't about what I did today (moving stuff for Andy's girlfriend) or anything related to it being Friday the 13th. It is a bracelet that Susan sent me for my birthday that arrived today with some blueberry syrup and cupcakes. I'll look for bad luck pictures next time. :)

Day 194 Happy Birthday to Me!

So today's picture shows some of the things acquired today: three fabrics, glow sticks and stars, scrapbook card stock, clothes pins, stickers, and two shirts.

For a more detailed account of my birthday check out my other blog (http://rebeckila.blogspot.com/2012/07/happy-birthday-to-me.html).

Day 193

I made some cupcakes tonight from scratch because we only had one egg and box mixes all require three. I think they turned out fine. They apparently needed more vanilla flavor because Dad couldn't tell what flavor they were. They did taste sugar flavored to me, so I can't complain, though vanilla is never a flavor to me since I can't smell.

My mom asked me to make them because our home teacher is coming tomorrow. Personally I feel like perhaps my birthday should take a little precedence over inviting people over, but whatever.

I'm not particularly satisfied with either of the pictures I took, I didn't frame them very well, I cut things off awkwardly. Our counters are so covered in things that it's hard to take an uncluttered picture but I'd have been better off cropping to just what I wanted rather than getting in so close. I finished frosting the rest so it was too late to take another picture when I finally checked them.

Day 192

On the way to institute we stopped to feed the ducks and geese and to check out the Southside farmers market. The goslings have really grown a lot since I last saw them. They looked like little dinosaurs today. They're probably in their awkward teenage stage, all long legs and bad feathers. :) I only saw five of them which is maybe sadness since I think there were ten before. But I wasn't down where they were before, these could've been different geese all together.

At the farmers market I got some zucchini. I hope to cut them into strips to make enchilada casserole. I'm imagining myself to have some intestinal aversion to flour a la celiacs disease or such. I'm pretty sure I'm just plain old gassy. I should eat more vegetables anyway. There just wasn't a lot to choose from at the market at a price I wanted to pay.

Day 191

Tonight I made chocolate chip banana nut bread from a randomly picked recipe on my phone. I decided I didn't like the order of steps it wanted things done in (maybe doing things a certain way makes them taste better but mostly I think it just wastes dishes if I mix wet and dry separately. I've never had muffins not work out because I added dry to wet instead of vice versa) so I was making up a new order as I went and substituting things because I feel like it's a waste of butter when oil will work just fine (apple sauce would've been even better but I thought of it too late). Since I didn't use better I knew I better add some salt. Many a breadmaker bread has been "ruined" (it'll get eaten anyway) by me not adding enough salt.

In the end I neglected to add a 1/2 cup of sugar to the batter. I didn't realize it until ten minutes into baking which was too late to try adding things. I sprinkled some sugar on the already firming top (and that recipe tried to tell me I needed 65 minutes?! At 30 it was done and maybe even drying out) and hoped for the best.

I think it turned out fine, perfectly edible at least. If I'd used apple sauce it probably would've been too sweet with sugar. I mean it's supposed to be a bread, not a cake, right? Really chocolate chips and walnuts in every bite don't leave much space for tasting the dough not being sweet enough.

PS Sometimes I think the Camera+ app just makes my pictures blurrier rather than improving them. Maybe I should go with instagram or something. Really I should take pics with a real camera, my phone camera just isn't that powerful.

Day 190

I napped away prime picture taking time after church so today's picture is from the camping trip when Barbara was attacked by a bear at the campground office.

Day 189

Down the street there is a magical house which turned its front yard into a garden. Along with being a lot better use of space than a lawn, it always has different things flowering.

I don't know what this flower is and I don't recall it being there in the past though the bush is rather big to be new this year. Other things I recall seeing before I haven't seen this year so maybe they change things around sometimes or maybe I just pass it different times of year so different things are in bloom.

These particular flowers seem to attract a lot of butterflies and bees. I first noticed them while walking and getting buzzed by these pretty black butterflies with blue in their wings. Tonight there were some big fuzzy bees hanging out.

Day 188

It seems like a collapsed garage should have some artistic value. There are lots of broken bits, angles, light leaking in and such. This was a blind shot looking into the space between the front wall and door. You'll recall (or not so I'll attach a pic) that the garage just fell to the side leaving the right wall and back wall mostly upright and the left wall, including the left door, went over into the lawn.

I think the thing sticking out may've been a connector for a wire. The other stuff is who knows what. :) I'd like to take pics through other cracks but it's a bit too scary to climb on the garage at all since it's not totally down.

Day 187

Look, a real zucchini! I could pick it and eat it but I think I'll let it get bigger. There are a couple tomatoes and tiny peppers that haven't grown at all. In fact the peppers have lost many leaves. I don't think I'll get much of a haul from this garden, but I do have this zucchini at least.

Day 186 Happy Fourth of July!

Today the garage died. Well last night in the heavier storms is the more likely time of death, the rain today wasn't as intense. Dad just noticed it this afternoon and not until he was right in front of it. I don't think I looked out the back window at all like I usually do to check on it.

I walked Nicholas earlier and talked briefly to the neighbor and if I'd looked down the driveway then I would've seem it but I didn't look, I just headed for the front door... So it'll be a bit of an unsolved mystery.

Dad is going to see about the insurance. It might be nice to rebuild the garage and use it properly for storing things again instead of using the top of the yard for equipment. :)

I think we could probably dismantle the wreckage ourselves over time like we did the porch. Except it's way heavier and there's a ton more wood to deal with, not to mention the things crushed inside (or outside like the hose that I left back there when I last watered the garden). It seems a shame to waste it by cutting and bundling it go out with the garbage. Maybe we'll use some to make a new garage. Looking at it, it was really well constructed. The interior walls were finished with different wood than the outside wood.

Day 185

In preparation for the Fourth of July, here are some flowers and flags out front.

Day 184

Sometimes you just have to cut all your hair off. Today was one of those days for me. I was just noticing a ton of split ends. It's pretty sad though in retrospect because I didn't take any pictures of my awesome new hair discovery, the sock bun. I just tried it this weekend, it was super fun and there was a lot of potential for different looks with it but now I've cut at least six inches off my hair so I'm pretty sure there's no hope of recreating it even though I can still make a high ponytail.

So today's picture is a look at my new 'do. We'll see how it looks after a washing. I'm sure it'll be a little cooler for the summer and it'll probably grow back decently fast. My hair never gets past a certain length so in the past I've thought that it grows really slow but I think it just grows as long as it does and no more. Darn genetics, it just stops a little past my shoulders, maybe mid-shoulder blade on the back. Once, after high school, I didn't get a haircut for like five years and it never got longer, though some might try to blame it on lack of maintenance breaking the hair off but I never do anything with heat or products that really beat up hair, there's no way none of it would get longer if it was going to ever.

Day 183 Happy Canada Day

Finally I return to the alley. It's harder to pick things to take pictures of which is kind of funny because when I had a plan to map the alley I often wanted to take pictures of particular things and said no, just do the overview. So I go to take a picture of a shed or whatever and I don't have a previous picture to compare. Such is life.

I found some rose of sharons blooming in a yard behind the school. I have mixed feelings on these plants. We used to have tons in our yard at our old house. They always attracted lots of bees which wasn't something I liked as a kid (I'd swell terribly from stings, never breath-threatening but super itchy. I think I outgrew it, the last sting I got sometime as a teenager I didn't really react at all). Plus they'd drop tons of flowers to rot and they send out new trees all over the place and no matter how much you cut them back they'd always return. Once I spent hours trying to rip out some of the bushes at my uncle/aunt/cousins' house as they tried to sell it before they moved to Arkansas. It involved digging all the roots up and hacking at them with an axe. It was rather ridiculous and unproductive.

My mom wants to plant some here at this house and I am rather against it, but they're actually quite pretty I see so maybe if they were confined to a pot or something. We've got a hibiscus and a rubber tree plant, why not a nice rose of sharon? We'll see, it shouldn't be too hard to dig out a shoot or something.