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It's prep time. T minus 3 days.

Meal 1. Gluten free rice bubbles and vanilla yoghurt and 2 mugs of white coffee.

On the upside, yesterday was the Perth monthly fountain pen enthusiast meeting, so we sat around and talked, drew, wrote and looked at each others' pretty pens and ink and drank coffee or whatever everyone else was drinking.

Finished reading Network Effect to Rob and Mum last night, and we all started a rewatch of the serial. We'd eaten a delicious Indian takeaway, as a farewell to interesting food for me for 3 days. Mmm Vindaloo.

Current Mood: thoughtful

kaberett

Reading. Finished The Rose Field (Pullman)!!! I am Making Arrangements for it to Leave My House. ( Read more... )

ANYWAY. I finished it. It Is Done.

Then read the first few pages of Dead Hand Rule (Gladstone; latest in the Craft Wars) before deciding that actually I need to reread at least the end of Wicked Problems in order to remember what's going on...

Writing. Progress continues both glacial and extant.

Listening. My relisten-while-actually-awake of the first chunk of The Hidden Almanac continues, slowly.

Playing. We have finished an Exploders run on Hard in Inkulinati. I am contemplating, given how smoothly that went, whether I want to have a try at Very Hard...

Cooking. It's not quite "this week's breakfast dal, and a loaf of bread", but it does sort of feel like it was. Partly because for reasons we did not get our usual box of veg on Monday last week, which meant that we were scrabbling around using up Shelf Things and the occasional Supermarket Discount Item...

NO WAIT, I also DID make buckwheat pancakes, and inspired by lnr combined Tinned Pear and Stem Ginger with Vanilla Essence and also Ground Cardamom to go in same. V good. Will repeat.

Eating. My mother acquired for us, as A Special Treat, a variety of Baked Goods from The Fancy Bakery In Eddington: my favourite is still the fig-and-?ricotta, but the blueberry-and-?ricotta is also very good, as is the fougasse. A was extremely pleased with the pain aux raisins. AND my mother made some excellent baba ganoush, eaten with said fougasse.

This week also feat. rainbow bagels (which we got to watch some of the manufacturing process for!) as well as misc other foodstuffs from Shalom Hot Beigels.

A has some coffee and butterscotch cake (leftovers from a test bake!) from Flour Arrangements; alas by the time I got my act together to actually collect Excess Test Cake the apple pie and lemon had both all gone...

Exploring. I got to spend a little time in the City of London Cemetery, which is currently ablaze with (among other things) purple crocuses; we also (on our second attempt) managed to go on A Snowdrop Walk Around Anglesey (with thanks to aldabra for reminding me that it is That Time Of Year still!). Snowdrops excellent. May or may not get around to sharing some photos. (Our first attempt at A Snowdrop Walk Around Anglesey Abbey wound up mutating into a poke around the back of Churchill and Astronomy to peer at bulbs and other plants misc, which was also very enjoyable even if I did once again fail to take A to see the Barbara Hepworth.)

Growing. ... I bought a bag of snowdrops In The Green at Anglesey, to go into the ground around the cherry tree at the allotment? The lemongrass seedlings haven't all died?

jadelennox

I take a lot of pictures of three classes of things:

Cats: This pictures are good on any camera, including my agéd single-lens SE.
Birds: These pics are shit on the aforementioned handheld phone.
Moss and lichens and bugs: These pics are fine on the phone, but could be much better.

My real constraint is my hands and arms. I can't hold my arms above my head, I can't hold a phone still very long, the non-ergonomic controls and shape of a phone are shit, I realistically can't carry a tripod on a hike, and I can't bear weight on my shoulders or the back of my neck for any length of time. (I recognize that this collection of constraints means my pictures will never be great, and that's okay.)

So, questions:

Are there any cameras that have particularly good ergonomics, are particularly light, or have a good reputation for accessibility?
I believe I could get a remote shutter trigger & a remote focus, so I could prop the camera somewhere and get a good pic from a less painful angle; do you know how to choose a hand-friendly one? (Not finger-fiddly, easy to attach & detach, easy to click buttons.)
On a modern camera, is it possible to get lenses good enough for bird pics that are not, you know, heavy? Last time I had an SLR I was taking pictures on film, so that tells you how out of date my knowledge is.
What's the lightest tripod that works well for people with shit fine motor control and no finger strength? I can sort by weight on hiking sites, but hikers put up with a lot of fiddly controls that I can't handle.

(I'm only looking for advice from your experience or from the experience of people you trust. Please don't GoogleKagiGoPT it for me!)

princessofgeeks

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Current Mood: amused

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princessofgeeks

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dine

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mrkinch

I had a good morning in the Dotson Family Marsh today, not the morning I'd hoped for as there wasn't any more water in the marsh than in December even though it rained just a few days ago. Almost the first thing I saw was an Osprey with a fish, carrying it aerodynamically in this instance. That was the start of a nice raptor list, not only the White-tailed Kites that I think breed there but a Northern Harrier and a beautiful male American Kestrel that that sat on the bridge railing until a runner went by. After the Osprey I watched the colorful combination of Western Bluebirds and Yellow-rumped Warblers in bushes and on the ground. So many Yellow-rumped Warblers! There were ducks in the large pond by the bridge, fives species of dabbling duck and, unsurprisingly, a couple of Bufflehead. They are so tiny that they don't need much depth for diving. Best bird was nine (9) Wilson's Snipe camouflaged in the weeds beside a shallow pond. I might not have noticed them had not one flushed, prompting me to look at where they'd flushed from, whereupon I saw one, and then another, and another, and another.... Seeing Snipe is often that way, they're hidden in the weeds but once you see one, you keep finding more. ( The list: )

The Red-shouldered Hawk really kept me waiting. Not until I was almost back to the eucalyptus did they start to yell. Such restraint!

princessofgeeks

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purplecat

Photo into a museum case with a Vortex Manipulator and Teleportation Bracelet prop from Doctor Who.

rydra_wong

can, to some small degree, be simulated by a blindfolded person trying to push buttons while someone else shouts confused and panicked instructions at them:

Watch on YouTube

(Except that these guys mastered jumping WAY faster than I did.)

It's hilarious and delightful to me to watch people having an experience of Dark Souls which is not wholly unlike mine. In a weird way I feel kind of #represented.

In later vids, they have (like me) discovered the joys of the halberd as adaptive technology for people who are bad at spacing and aiming.

dine

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kaberett

Breakfast dal. This experiment continues to work extremely well.
I have definitely reached the point with the Incomplete White Puzzle where it's speeding up significantly on account of enough pieces are in place to significantly reduce the number of possible combinations that need checking. Today's decision was to start filling in from the bottom edge, where I still had a chunk that was just edge and no middles, because I think that up in the top left (interior) corner I've identified The Missing Piece, and will get annoyed if I wind up with non-contiguous gaps...
Today alternating Locate One Puzzle Piece with Do One Useful Job has been nice and smooth and easy. I have got Several things done. Is pleased.
Really really enjoying my ridiculous washi tape collection. Today I self-indulgently Added More Week Dividers, including replacing some pre-existing ones that I was Not Enjoying, Actually.
( Exercise & embodiment. )