jgrussell – my world

A lot of people dislike graffiti intensely, and cities often go to great lengths to remove it and to criminalize those who create it. Me, I’ve always kind of liked graffiti. It adds a certain, well, flair to otherwise dull city streets.

Graffiti

A Davenport cousin I’ve worked with for some time finishing his manuscript on his Davenport family research sent me some lovely flowers as a thank you. He didn’t have to… but I’m glad he did. He gave me some “models” to practice shooting macros with…

Tiny white flower

Purple flower

I drive past this shop every single night on my way home from work, so it’s a natural for a photo of the day. And I’ve always thought that, if the person was a REAL psychic, he or she would know that I was taking the picture, and would obviously want to know who was taking the picture, and so any picture I took would show the curtains being twitched aside…

The psychic...?

Well, there goes another fine theory down the drain…

One of the things I like best about summer is all the color that nature displays for us to enjoy.

Summer flowers

Trying to get caught up on a million things these days now that I’ve wrapped up the editing I got conned into doing for a distant cousin who’s also a genealogy researcher. But I did find time to grab the camera when I looked out the kitchen window and saw this lovely little lady — I swear it looked like she was praying.

Female house finch

This week’s organic farm share was heavy on greens (well, maybe not so green, some of ’em), and all of it looked really good.

There was a big basket of what they called baby lettuce and turned out to be one small head of red leaf lettuce:

Red leaf lettuce

… and two small heads of green leaf lettuce.

Green leaf lettuce

There was another whole basket of mixed spectrum greens:

Spectrum greens

There was more cabbage:

Cabbage

And more scallions:

Scallions

More kale, which has to be blanched and frozen tomorrow for sure — there’s been enough kale so far to feed an army!

The herbs included basil, mint, oregano, plus sage

Sage

and sorrel, which is a completely new one to me (anybody got a recipe that uses two leaves of sorrel??):

Sorrel

And there was the first fresh cauliflower of this share season.

Cauliflower

Anyone who even half-fancies himself (or herself) to be a cook would probably laugh at me. Here I am, considerably beyond the age at which people really learn to experiment with food and cook, and for the first time in my life I am discovering that (…gasp…) vegetables taste good. Really good. At least when they are fresh from the garden of an organic farm.

Last week’s farm share included a number of things I have never fixed for myself before (snow peas for example) and a number of things I have always loathed (cabbage for example). Tonight, my dinner contained both cabbage and snow peas and it was delicious.

The snow peas I sauteed in olive oil with minced garlic and just a taste — literally just a taste — of ginger flavored soy sauce. Oh yummm…

And the cabbage? Well, this morning, I shredded the entire head — about 11 ounces in the end — added some carrots and onions a homemade sauce, and voila! Coleslaw. But not that icky limp nasty stuff you get as a side dish in restaurants that you immediately throw away. No, this was crunchy and creamy and tasty!

I guess you really can teach old dogs new tricks.

Coleslaw

It’s amazing what detail exists in the world that we overlook all the time because those details are so small. The world writ small takes on a whole ‘nother dimension when seen through a 100mm macro lens…

There is amazing detail in the leaf of a long-leaf plant.

Plant leaf

Amazing detail in something as simple as a geranium.

Geranium

Geranium petal

And when you look close-up at a plain basket, the detail is stunning.

Basket

Basket

Very hectic busy busy day so very little time to shoot. Fortunately, this little lady cowbird was kind enough to pose for me for a minute so I’d have my picture of the day…

Female cowbird