182: Hibiscus

More practice flower shots. Not much else to say.

Happy Canada Day!

Going out of town tomorrow. Will be back soon enough

181: Plant

Fun with colours and DOF. A plant in the park I went to yersterday.

180: Practice flower

So techinically, this is an outake, but my one possible entry if my other idea doesn't pan out will not be posted until I decide what I'm going to do.

Just some flowers on a tree in a park near my place. Nothing more, nothing less.

Well, there is a leaf in there.

179: Toadstool

Another one a day late and a dollar short. I actually have an excuse. We had a power outage that was supposedly due to a fallen tree. It was out for about 8 or 9 hours. They said that they needed to cut more trees down and that was the problem. I think they were at the local pub knocking back a few and then they took their sweet time to fix it.

Anyways, during the outage, I went for a walk to take some practice flower shots. I found this little mushroom all by its lonesome self. Had a hard time getting the shot as I couldn't lay in the grass since it was wet. Still, I needed a little frog or fairy or something!

Bonus picture:
You may recognize the cat from my terrible excuse of an 'art' photo a while back. Here (s)he is being a nice cat!

178: Future Pesto

I know, I blew out the sky, but I'm lazy. I'm running out of things to take pictures of, and it was raining when I left the house this morning so I didn't take my camera

Every year, we grow basil in some boxes at our place. My boyfriend uses it in sandwichs, we put it in salads, and then I periodically make pesto with it. I prefer homemade because I find the commercial stuff usually has an unecessary amount of olive oil in it.

To make pesto, all you need is basil, pine nuts, romano and/or parmesan chees, olive oil, and garlic. My secret is I use a whole head (!) of garlic, but I roast it. Cut the top of the garlic head off, drizzle a bit of olive oil, sprinkle some pepper and dried oregono on it, wrap it in foil, and bake for about 30 minutes at about 350 F. Let it cool, and then the garlic will be all nice and buttery-like so you can just squeeze the cloves out.

Anyways, that's all you need for pesto! You can also do fun things like throw in sun dried tomatoes (packed in olive oil - drained, or dried, but re-hydrated), other herbs, or if you want to get really fancy, can replace the basil with things like arugula (rocket for you Brits and Aussies) or flat leaf parsley. The possiblities are endless! Happy cooking!

177: Flower

Another flower from Torrey Pines because I'm highly annoyed with some of the calls that were made during World Cup games today and I think the refs need glasses.

Anyways, I'm annoyed so I don't feel like taking pictures

176: Beverages

So, each case has 24 bottles of beer in it. That means copious amounts of beer was consumed the past few days!! No, I did not drink all that by myself, either!

So an interesting addendum to the term peanut gallery. My boyfriend noted that peanut gallery is actually a segragationist term, where it was the area in a theatre that blacks were made to sit during the days of segregation.

It's interesting how the racial connotation of the term is actually relatively difficult to find. A quick search finds some references to blacks calling the segregated area of the theatre the peanut gallery. However, it seems as though the Howdy Doody show broke the racial connotation of the word.

Thanks to my dad for the help in finding info about that