BLOG: (ZERO, ZERO, ZERO): Things I Did in April

I made an effort to hit a few more categories this month, but my work is pretty thin, as it has been. The puppies are still taking up most of my time. They're about 2/3 of the way grown now, weight-wise anyway, and looking back at old photos and videos of them, I can't believe I ever wanted to do anything but spend time with them. In hindsight, I wish I had given them every second (and that I'd gone ahead and bought better cameras to record those seconds!).

Anyway, here's my creative output:

VIDEOS: I divided a clump of hostas last fall, and when I saw them coming up again this spring, I thought it would be fun to make a time-lapse video of them, and it was. I did a pretty crappy job, though. For one thing, I only took one photo per day for just over two weeks, and I missed two or three days, so there are only 13 frames total. Also, I don't have a tripod, so even though I tried to always stand in the same spot, holding the camera at the same height, the picture jumps around a bit. I find it helps if you focus on a single plant:

Time Lapse - Hostas

PHOTOS:

These are just my towels drying on a rack after being washed, but I liked the colors, the textures, the light:

I had to move some things--my WIRED magazine, my phone, my camera--off the kitchen table in a hurry one day, so I set them on a broken chair in the living room. The magazine was open to an article about the construction of a semi-secret facility in Utah where the NSA will store EVERY COMMUNICATION IT CAN GET ITS SILLY MITTS ON! I thought the silvery monochrome of the camera and the phone and the block quote about spying would look creepy/cool in a web-cam photo. I even took some shots that came out clearer, but I liked the blurriness of this one best:

I saved a beautiful autumn leaf on my dresser all winter. This spring, I figured it was time to let it go (to compost). First, I set it on my roommate's ultrasuede footstool and took this photo:

And lastly, here's a picture I took of an arrangement of plants my roommate potted up (she has a great eye for color and texture, not to mention finding the weirdest plants in the store). I like how the composition flirts with the edges of the frame:

ARTWORK: I found an old block of newsprint and some vine charcoal, leftover from my architecture school days. I figured I would fill the entire block and then just share the best drawings. I only ended up filling half a dozen pages, and I hate to think that these two drawings are my best, even of that small bit of work, but they are. First, I pictured a woman and tried to draw her with my eyes closed. I think it's neat, in a caricaturey kind of way:

Then, I pictured my brown puppy, Lizzie, and drew her with my eyes closed, too:

I was surprised I got even that close to making it look like a dog. I did try drawing things I was actually looking at, and imagining things and drawing them with my eyes open, and drawing pictures from magazines, but somehow, these were the only two drawings with any verve at all. Can you believe I had art instruction for most of grade school and college? Because I sure can't.

ESSAYS: I'd like to do writing that is less personal in the future, but this is all I've got for now:

"Stuff"

"A Self-Analytical Moment: Success and Background"

EXERCISE: I can't remember what all my goals were, but I kept up with doing "some crunches" every day, and added "some push-ups." I did them pretty much every day of the month--if I missed a day, I don't remember when it was. I can still only do about 9 push-ups in the "girly-style." For May, I'd like to continue with push-ups and crunches and add "some sun salutations" to get some stretching in. (Sun salutations combine stretching, strength and cardio--my final semester in college I took an acting course that ended up being full of world-class athletes, and my health was so poor that I couldn't do a single sun salutation--and I got laughed at. It really makes me appreciate the level of health and fitness I'm at now.) I'd also like to start plugging the better recipes I've tried into fitday.com as "custom foods." It's tiresome to enter all the foods you eat on fitday, but if I can make healthy recipes and then just type in that I ate half or 1/4 of such-and-such recipe, it might make using the program much easier in the long run.

RECIPES: With 34 recipes under my belt so far, I'm right on track to finish one hundred by the end of the year!! (The bad news is, that means the year is already a third of the way over. But don't think about that.) I made lots of good stuff this month. Links to recipes and write-ups for these dishes can be found in the sidebar of my blog. (Some were written up late and can be found under the "May" heading.) I'm very proud that it may be necessary to mention that these are my own photographs of the dishes I made:

#29. Herby Potato Rosti