More Purps

I did manage to take about a dozen pictures this weekend. Here are two of them:

The Purps

I took these pictures a few weeks ago. I have been busy working and not shooting. Maybe this week I'll have enough time to do both.

Sprinkler Saturation

I love these colors. And the water droplets.

Hanging On By A Thread

I saw this leaf hanging from a spider's web when we were on "the boot shoot" down in Texas. It was moving around just enough to throw off my camera's autofocus, so it's a little blurry, but I think the blur tells the truth of the moment. This leaf had no business hanging all by itself from some invisible silk thread instead of being on the ground with its gravity-stricken brethren, and I was lucky to A) have noticed it at all, and B) have gotten any sort of picture of it.

More From Texas

I mentioned before how most of what I saw of Texas was seen from the passenger seat of a car, speeding down the Texas highways around Whitney. Here are two classic examples of pictures taken while driving. They are blurry and not well-composed, but they do illustrate two things I saw a lot of--crops and sky. There is an unbelievable amount of sky in Texas.

Blurred corn crop:











Blurred maize crop:

(Lemon) Thyme Collins

As promised, my summer drink of '08 has been perfected and properly named. I had been fooling around with muddling lemon thyme and sugar, etc. but hadn't been happy with the results (not thymey enough). Then I thought it was time to experiment with making a lemon thyme infused simple syrup. Home run on the first try! The simple syrup recipe is...well...simple: 2 cups of sugar, one and a half cups of water. Heat until sugar is dissolved and bring to a simmer/ barely boil. Then remove it from the heat and stick in an entire bunch of lemon thyme and swaths of lemon peel cut from one lemon with a vegetable peeler. Let everything steep until cool and then strain and chill. The drink itself is a pint glass of ice, lemon wedges, one ounce of lemon juice, one ounce of lemon thyme simple syrup, two ounces of gin and then the whole thing is topped off with club soda. (Decorative sprig of lemon thyme optional.)


This is tasty and refreshing, and would be equally good (I'm theorizing here) as a non-alcoholic herbal lemonade concoction.

Two Way Hay

Newfangled, high falutin' rolls of hay:











Old fashioned American family values bales of hay:

I Need More Cow...(boy Boots)!

I would like to take this opportunity to thank Dave and his mom for their patience while I coerced them into helping me scout locations around the house for Thursday morning's "boot shoot." I can't help it. I'm just crazy about these boots (and Dave and his mom).

Things That Are Adorable


Dave's baby picture:

















Dave holding the tiniest pair of cowboy boots I have ever seen. Dave's grandfather gave these to him for his first birthday:

Texas Roadside Attractions

Given the unfortunate circumstances of my first visit to Texas, we did not have a lot of time to go sightseeing, and almost every picture I took while I was there was taken through the car window. But, on Wednesday evening, Dave's mom took us out through the country and showed us some of her family's current and former homes. (Don't worry, neither of these pictures are family homesteads!) These were just some of the more unusual things we saw on our drive.

Dallas-Bound

I'm leaving tomorrow morning for Dallas. (Hopefully in something a little more technologically advanced than this...)

R.I.P. John

Dave's dad passed away this morning, at home in Texas, after a long battle with lung cancer. He was a smart, kind, generous and gentle man who--for some reason--liked to come up here on vacation and work on home improvement projects for us! Here he is celebrating the completion of his biggest project (our deck) in September of '05. I think of him every time I'm out there.


Thanks for everything John, you are forever loved and missed.

Happy Daiquiri Day

I made two different daiquiris today.
Nectarine:








Strawberry:

Happy Fourth of July

Juliet's flipflops:

















My hotdog:

Living Up To Your Name

In addition to this morning's fog, I saw many poppies popping:
(A phrase that kind of sounds like it ought to be part of a summer version of The Twelve Days of Christmas.)

The Summer Fog

These shots were taken at the beach this morning at about 6am. Foggy summer mornings like this always remind me of summers growing up in Port Townsend. Our "gang" of neighborhood girls often got together for outdoor sleepovers in each other's backyards--and would wake early to clammy fog and dew on our sleeping bags and the "conversations" of foghorns off Pt. Wilson. For once I am not being facetious when I say, "Good times, good times."