Pictures of February

It's not quite the end of the month, but it's close enough to do another roundup of photos I took this month but didn't post in any entries. There are some small stories here, but nothing really seemed like it needed a whole entry.

In sort of chronological order:

1) Spring is more or less here:



Flowers are blooming.

2) Someone thought they were clever:



They're trying to copy Magritte's The Treachery of Images, but they got the French wrong. Feeling like they needed to over-explain via the double parentheses was just egregiously awful on top of that.

3) I saw a mural downtown that I'd never noticed before:



the day that I was out doing pinhole photos. There are probably dozens of murals all over the city that I've never seen, and it's fun to run across them.

4) Some friends and I painted The Rock on campus:



That's me in the middle.

The Rock is a large, flat-sided boulder on campus that is painted by students, businesses, and whomever else on an almost daily basis, depending on what's going on:







and is such an important fixture on campus that the University moved it, a rather difficult and probably expensive process, when the lot it occupied was designated to house the new health center:





After several hours it was fixed in place on the corner across the intersection from the one it used to occupy.

Getting back to this month, though, the university rolled out a brand new "Big Orange. Big Ideas." branding campaign this month:



and some friends and I decided that we had a big orange idea of our own:





Our statement stayed on The Rock for over 24 hours before being painted over, and was picked up by two local newspapers and editorialized in a cartoon in the school paper. I don't know if it will have any long term impact on the campus, but for a day people were looking at it and talking about it, and visibility is always a good thing.

5) I saw a dead bird the other day:



It must have hit one of the windows of our building.

6) I made soup this weekend:



Herbed cheese soup in the slow cooker. It was really easy, and cheese soup is a big bowl of love. If you want to make it, you'll need:

2 10 and 3/4 oz cans of condensed Cream of Chicken or Cream of Celery Soup (I used the Cream of Chicken with Herbs)
1 cup whole milk
1 teaspoon worcestershire sauce
1/4 teaspoon paprika
1 pound cheddar cheese, shredded

Mix everything together in the slow cooker, then cook on low for 4-6 hours. An hour before eating, stir, and stir again before eating it.

And that's it for February.