Lakeshore at Sunset

A few days ago, I mentioned that I've been walking the Lakeshore Greenway on weekends, and I also mentioned that the greenway winds through and around the remaining buildings from the former mental health facility. Today I had a really busy day at work and didn't even get to do my walks through the building, so when I got home I was barely over 5,000 steps for the day, and I'm supposed to have 10,000. I decided to change clothes and go walk the greenway because it's about 5,000 steps if you do one lap.

The city recently started tearing down some of the old buildings (they're going to preserve a few), and you know how I love me some urban ruins, so while I was walking tonight I decided to take a few minutes to walk around the administration building and take a few photos:

















I'm not sure there's anything spectacular there, but I think they catch a mood, and it's been a while since I just walked around and took some photographs.

I need to get back into that habit.

Pulled Pork and Industrial Parks

The other day I was wandering the aisles at Kroger, which happens sometimes when I realize on my way home that I just need one thing but then start thinking of other things while I'm there even though I don't have a list and shouldn't shop without one, and I noticed a new (or just new to me) product with coupons next to it:



Hmmm, I thought, staring. I like pulled pork. I have a slow cooker. Maybe I should try this.

It seemed really easy, but everything in the slow cooker is usually really easy: pour in, walk away. I've even made pulled pork in the slow cooker, using a recipe that calls for rootbeer and onions. I didn't blog it, but did take photos:





Those turned out well, but this seemed even easier, as it didn't require any mixing. Intrigued, I picked up some pork and decided to give it a try.

Following instructions on the pork and the pouch, I removed the netting:



placed the pork in the slow cooker, and poured the pouch of sauce over it:



and then got started on ignoring it for eight hours.

To speed the process of ignoring along, I left the house. I promised my friend Kate earlier in the week that I would go somewhere and take photos of something, as part of a goal setting workshop we were doing. I've noticed that I've drifted away from going on little day trips or exploring the city, and want to get back into that, so I set a goal and attempted to follow it. The first place I went to had too many people, so I didn't get out of the car, and then I decided to just drive around until I saw something interesting.

Mission accomplished:



















I'm apparently only seeing in black and white, but at least I got out of the house and saw something.

I also went to the store, and when I got home, the pork was almost ready. It was somewhat difficult to continue ignoring, since the whole apartment smelled like barbecue, but I somehow made it, mostly by telling myself that trichinosis kills. Finally, it was time to pull the pork out of the crockpot and shred it, although it partially shredded itself by disintegrating while I tried removing it:



After I fork-shredded it, I returned it to the slow cooker on "warm", so that it could really soak up the sauce:



and then I ate it:



Will I use this product again?

No, probably not. The pork is fine, but it's salty. The rootbeer pork doesn't come out salty, so I'm sticking with that recipe.

And I've already moved on to wanting to make this pasta recipe I saw in "Food and Wine".

Return of the Super Muse

Way back in January I had this random photographic inspiration, where I carried my Superboy figure around the city and photographed it as if it was a real person rather than a plastic toy. This weekend I really wanted to get out of the house on Sunday, so I thought I would try it again, but I gave up in an hour after severe frustration.

What went wrong?

1) I chose my initial setting poorly. Mapping out the pattern of where I wanted to go in my head, the UT Gardens seemed like the logical choice for a first stop, since it was the furthest place on my list from my house. The photo that inspired the whole idea back in January was taken at the gardens:



so I thought retracing my steps a little might inspire me to success again. Unfortunately I forgot the basics of why that photo works and why this photo doesn't:



Scale and perspective.

The photographs that worked best from the original experiment were the ones where I worked to make it look like Superboy was part of the scene, in proportion to other objects in the frame. A blurry grove in the distance offers the illusion that Superboy might just be a person that you're standing behind, both of you staring off toward the horizon. A beer bottle the same height as Superboy confirms that Superboy is the same height as a beer bottle, and destroys the suspension of disbelief that the first set of pictures is built on. I initially forgot this when I began taking pictures on Sunday, and got more and more irritated as I moved through the gardens taking photos of Superboy among the plants that looked dissatisfyingly like photos of an action figure standing in some plants.

I might have worked my way out of it given enough time and concentration, as these pictures I took at the far end of the garden suggest that I was starting to fall into the groove of an interesting idea:





but I didn't get to concentrate and think through what I was doing, because of the other thing that I did wrong:

2) I left my house too late. I didn't go out until after noon, and that meant the gardens were full of people.

Annoying people.

Every time I set Superboy down somewhere and started to carefully pose him, someone walked up.

"What are you doing? What's that? Is that a toy? What are you working on?"

It meant that I rushed out of every location before taking more than a shot or two, and getting this right takes way more than two shots at a time. I was asked if I was almost done, if I worked at the gardens, and then the worst comment of all came when I was in the back by the rusty truck, taking the reflection photos above that are the only good ones I took in an hour:

"Are you almost done? I wanted to get some pictures of my kids by the truck before the light changes, and you're in the frame."

The gardens are for everybody, jackhole. I bet that woman's kids are horrible little entitled snots, just like their mother.

Next time I leave the house at seven in the morning, and give up as soon as I start to see other people.

Weekend Adventures

This weekend was the best of times, and it was the worst of times.

Actually, it was mostly pretty good, except for some scones that I ruined this morning because I was being sloppy and not paying 100% attention to what I was doing. And by "ruined", I mean "not perfect", not "inedible". I was on the phone while I was mixing my dough, and I misread the recipe and put too much milk in. That made my dough too wet, and when the scones baked they spread out instead of staying in a mounded up muffin shape:



They taste fine, but they're more like a scone cookie than a scone.

I decided to make scones because I had leftover whole milk from one of the things that went well this weekend: I made cheese, in my kitchen. Following a recipe in Food Network Magazine, I made ricotta cheese in three easy steps.

1) I brought milk, cream, and salt to a simmer in a nonreactive pot.



2) When it was simmering, I added lemon juice and vinegar, and stirred until it appeared fully curdled.



I thought I did that part wrong, because when I started stirring all I could smell was vinegar. All of a sudden, though, the curds got bigger and it smelled creamy, like cottage cheese. Excited by sudden success, I...

3) Poured it into a strainer lined with paper towels and let it drain.



I poured it in too fast, so the paper towels got pulled down into the strainer a little more than they should have. A long, slow pour would have kept them in place, but it wasn't really any trouble. The recipe said to let it drain for five to thirty minutes, depending on how firm you wanted it, so I went for thirty:



Homemade whole milk ricotta, with no additives or preservatives. My mom asked how much it cost, but the ingredients only came to a dollar or so more than buying a similar sized tub of ricotta at the store would have been, and this way I get to say that I am a cheesemaker. I used most of it to make a calzone today, and it was damn good.

Today I also used my new camera, a Lomography fisheye camera that I saw on a clearance table yesterday while Kristin was looking at sunglasses. I'd looked at the camera before, when we were in that store last spring, but sixty dollars seemed like a lot for a trick camera. Clearance prices, on the other hand, suddenly seemed tolerable, so I bought it and then today I walked around town with it.

There were some hits:













and some misses:





The misses aren't terrible photos, but they just don't really make the most of the format and the fisheye effect. I bet if I was closer to Ayres (the second picture) or the saloon they would look more dramatic, but as it is this just makes the space in front of them look huge and the building look far away and unimpressive.

On the other hand, the same effect made the closed lawn at World's Fair Park look enormous:



so it can be a good effect in the right circumstances.

Obviously, I need more practice, but I think it's off to a good start.

The Super Muse

The other day I was looking for a recipe that I knew I had posted to my blog, and I ended up rereading an entry from 2010: My Weekend with Superboy. If you don't want to go read it and come back, I'll summarize: In order to passive-aggressively show a friend that being an introvert on the weekends doesn't mean that I'm horribly alone, I carried my Superboy figure around with me for an entire weekend and (with Kristin's help) documented our many fun activities together.

While rereading the entry, I was struck by how much I liked this photo from the entry:



Thinking about that for a minute, I tried to figure out what made that picture different from others in the entry, like these:





and realized that the difference is that in those photos, I am clearly taking a picture of an action figure. Maybe we're holding it against something or leaning it on something, but Superboy, in those photos, is treated as a static plastic prop. In the top photo, though, I treated Superboy more like a person, and I was intrigued by that thought. What if I tried that again?

I considered, and took a few test photos on my porch, one of which I deemed satisfactory:



I decided that this idea still had possibilities, so today I took Superboy to my building on campus, and tried a few more test shots:











(I really like that black and white one)



Flipping through them (and the rejects) on the camera, I decided that I wanted to try for one with the Sunsphere in the background. World's Fair Park might be too close to the Sunsphere to get Superboy in it without laying on the ground, so I decided to try the roof of the Market Square Parking garage, which was free today since it's a holiday, and I think I was pretty successful:







I'm going to have to try this again, maybe with Ferro Lad.