An interesting photography book: Hungry Planet: What the World Eats

176/365, Saturday, 06/25/2011

I do like looking at the photos in this book--it is interesting to see "what the world eats". Here is the website for the book. And here's a pdf from the website with more examples from the book. 

She ain't heavy, she's my sister!

175/365 Friday, 06/25/2011

And who might these two lovelies be...? The one in the bow-tie pinafore (it was bright red corduroy), proudly displaying her brand-new bowl hair-cut (someone, a neighbor I think or maybe my mother literally placed a bowl on my head before cutting off my longish golden locks...) and a plastered-on sort of smile would be me and the cutie on the platform holding the unplanned for co-inhabitant of this picture (=teddy) would be my sister Louisa. We had a professional photographer come to our apartment in Hurlstone Park (an inner-west suburb of Sydney) to take a set of pictures. I remember it well. I was excited and when told to smile, well smile I did. My sister on the other hand....I remember the photographer doing his darndest to get her to crack a grin, including waving this teddy at her/us...apparently the only way he could even elicit the hint of a Mona-Lisa-sh grin was to have her actually hold on to the teddy, who thus became immortalized in this portrait. Maybe I'll call her Mona-L(ou) isa from now on....

Captain Bartholomew "Bartle" Teeling -- Papal Zouave and Private Chamberlain to the Pope

174/365 Thursday, 06/23/2011

I had originally planned to post a different picture as the pic of the day for this day and Friday, but silly Cathie managed to inadvertently delete both of those from her phone.  So these are the two pictures that I am posting instead.

I spent most of the day researching this relative’s family. His name, as one can see on the picture was Bartholomew John Joseph Aloysius Teeling, and he was the husband of Theodora Lane Clarke, my first cousin thrice removed. (I will definitely write a blog post about her at some point as well as her mother, Louisa Lane Clarke my great great grandaunt).  

The Teelings are a famous Irish family who go waaaay back. Captain Bartholomew, or Bartle as he was called, was a member of the Papal Zouaves, an international infantry force formed to defend the Papal States.  (Here’s a blog post about them that mentions him). He was also appointed Papal Chamberlain. His grand-uncle (of the same name) was a leader in the 1798 Irish Rebellion who was executed on September 24 1798 by the British.

I'm glad I have this old photograph of him.

173/365 Wednesday, 06/22/2011

A pretty strong thunderstorm passed through here yesterday afternoon. The picture shows why we lost power. It was off from about 3:30 till 9:00pm.
Just as I was settling in to read more of "The Glass Bead Game"/Magister Ludi with a little flashlight and some candles, the power came back on and we put on one of our DVD's. We had had dinner at the one of the two Mexican restaurants in
Albion (=the only one with a liquor license) and had sat on the porch for a while talking to neighbors. (People were out and about because the power was out). Not too bad of an evening after all.

172/365 Tuesday 06/21/2011

We're always a little behind everyone else with getting our flowers in--but we finally did it, or Bill finally did it I should say!

171/365 Monday, 06/20/2011

For the first time in a long long while I have caught up with my 365 pictures. This is what I saw when I walked into the bathroom yesterday morning upon waking. A big tortoiseshell cat lounging in the bathroom sink...Mieze used to do this too when she was younger, but she was cute and fluffy. Seeing big ol' Sophs' in there was a bit of a shock. 

170/365 Sunday, 06/19/2011

Sorry. This is the best picture I took on this day. Not very auspicious but very "alltäglich" = "every-dayish".

169/365 Saturday, 06/18/2011

This is the first of three back-to-back cat pictures that will appear on this blog, and for which I want to apologize to the non-cat-people out there who read this blog. (if there are any...)
I just couldn't resist this image of how Mieze likes to prop her head on a corner of the box. She looks like she's just a floating kitty-head--which is kind of wacky.

168/365 Friday, 06/17/2011

I took this at one of our favorite breakfast places: Roma's in Marshall, MI. It is especially nice in summer when one can sit outside under these flowers. Sometimes a friendly black cat comes to visit. And the food is pretty good too. We had come to Marshall for a yearly check-up of mine, which I ended up re-scheduling for insurance reasons.

167/365 Thursday 06/16/2011

This was taken in a shopping/restaurant mall near the MSU campus in East Lansing. We drove to East Lansing to pick someone up and bring them home and we had lunch here first, as a nice Middle Eastern restaurant. I just thought this car was unusual enough to take a picture of. 

How to handle the paper load

166/365 Wednesday, 06/15/2011

I found this golden oldie while looking for things to purge on Sunday afternoon. Even though I will be teaching German not English comp. I thought it might be useful to take a look at what suggestions it offers. I was perusing this while we watched this show.
After a first glance it actually seems to offer some good basic advice--it emphasizes journal writing (which is not always graded) and also focusing on the writing process versus the finished writing product. I might even take it with me. (I'm trying to limit the number of books I'm taking -since it's probably only for one year and I'll have to bring them all back...

165/365 (Tuesday) 06/14/2011

Alas this is another cheated picture. I didn't take any on this Tuesday - so this photo from Monday will have to suffice. We had bought this 19 inch TV with a built in DVD player at Best Buy on Sunday for me to take to Ohio. We decided to give it a test run in the bedroom and Sophie was intrigued. We watched a little bit of the beginning of this movie.

164/365 Monday 06/13/2011

A shot of the Kalamazoo river in Albion. A fellow Albionite who found it on flickr described it perfectly: "River Street overlooking the Kalamazoo River towards Reiger Park."

Shiny happy people: ABBA!

163/365 Sunday, 06/19/2011

Last Sunday I spent much of the afternoon sorting through clothes, books and knickknacks deciding what should stay and what should go. Easter Seals was going to pick stuff up on Monday. I got rid of a lot of old unsent cards but decided to keep this one. I like its glitteriness (which the photo doesn't do justice to) and its overall cheeziness. And anyway who doesn't love Abba? (Besides my husband). Another reason is that I remember buying it in a little mall full of ecelctic little shops in Wellington, New Zealand-so it reminds me of New Zealand too. 

162/365 Saturday, 06/11/2011

I apologize for the back-to-back Mieze in the box pics...just didn't get around to taking a more interesting picture...

161/365 Friday 06/10/2011

It's time for another installment of "Mieze in a box", with Sophie (also in a box) chillin' in the background. 

The Joys of Streaming Media

160/365 Thursday, 06/09/2011

Ah yes the joys of streaming media. They sometimes lead me to pick movies I probably wouldn't normally choose to watch--probably because it is so easy to stop and pick a different one, if the first one just isn't working out. That's how I stumbled across this beauty: Female Perversions, directed by Susan Streitfeld and loosely based on Louise Kaplan's book of the same name. It stars Tilda Swinton as a very strange "career woman" and quite a few other fairly well-known actresses. The movie plays around with the notion that - to quote from the Publishers Weekly blurb on the amazon website:
"women's perversions parody feminine gender ideals of innocence and submission, while men's perversions express forbidden and shameful feminine impulses." 
The film focuses only on the women's side of this--and tries to tell a story or fable about what happens to women, because of all these perversions they are all condemned to perform. In order to convey some of the main theoretical tenets of the book, one finds slogans from it in the background, as graffiti and I think the above is another example of this--the ad slogan sounds like it could be another one from the book. I found this aspect rather clumsy. The whole film is rather clumsy in fact - not uninteresting - Swinton is always interesting to watch, but I did not really become invested in these characters or their lives. To be completely honest I've tried watching it twice now and have yet to make it through to the end. Maybe I'll go back and see what happens--if it's something interesting I'll let you know....

Gardner House Museum, Albion Michigan

159/365 Wednesday, 06/08/2011

Last summer my friend Marie and I would meet once or twice a week to walk 2 or 3 miles around the outside track at Albion college. We wanted to do the same this but we found out that the track and field area is being returfed and updated. (I should have realized something was going on due to all the big trucks that have being going forth in that general direction...so we had to make do with a stroll through the park and a bit of downtown Albion. It was nice but on this particular day it was already quite hot and humid. (The weather has turned less hot and humid and just about perfect since then thank goodness!) This is a picture of the Gardner House - home of the Albion Historical society. I hate to admit but we have not made it inside yet...here's a bit more info about it.

158/365 Tuesday, 06/07/2011

This is a picture of Sophie once again "helping" with my work--in this case a book review I'm working on for a scholarly journal. She's such a good helper...

Humble Pie or how my scattered scattered brain works...

So. After finding out that I too have been not tying my shoelaces properly  I was scrolling down my facebook page where I happened upon this headline: A battered Germany recovers from E. coli outbreak 

Salad is back on the menu in Germany , but it's being served with a big helping of humble pie. 

At first I wanted to share this link along with some kind of witty remark related to how hard it must be for Germans to eat humble pie, but instead I looked up the term "humble pie".  It turns out the term has a very interesting etymology:

The expression derives from umble pie, which was a pie filled with liver, heart and other offal, especially of cow but often deer or boar. Umble evolved from numble, (after the French nomble) meaning 'deer's innards'.^[1][2] Umbles were considered inferior food; in medieval times the pie was often served to lower-class people.^[3]

Although "umbles" and the modern word "humble" are etymologically unrelated, each word has appeared both with and without the initial "h" after the Middle Ages until the 19th century. Since the sound "h" is often dropped in many dialects, and "umble" was a humble meal anyway, the phrase was rebracketed as "humble pie".^{[citation needed]} While "umble" is now gone from the language, the phrase remains, carrying the fossilized word as an idiom. 

And it turns out that: "Umble pie in its literal sense is a filled pastry similar in many respects to a Cornish pasty." which of course made me think of one of my favorite places --Michigan's Upper Peninsula--where pasties are a part of the local cuisine: see the cuisine section of the wikipedia UP entry...
Now I have to go back and read the original article...

157/365 Monday 06/06/2011

This is a picture of a white rhododendron seen as Adrienne and I went for a walk on Monday evening. The white ones seem rarer than the pink ones around our neck of the woods. 

156/365 Sunday 06/05/2011

A picture of one of our rhododendron blossoms/flowers-our rhododendron does not appear to be as healthy as some of the other beauties in the neighborhood, but it's still pretty.

155/365 Saturday, 06/04/2011

Taken from inside the car as it went through the car-wash---not sure if that is obvious or not. Our car gets quite dirty because of all of the trees--and the fact it never gets to be inside the garage (=too full). 

154/365 Friday 06/03/2011

Friday dinner: this is another dish "made by Bill." It is very good - I guess its sort of like "super nachos". The only thing wrong with it is its "too-muchness"...

153/365 Thursday, 06/02/2011

I made a pasta salad with shrimp last Thursday for dinner that had "white wine vinegar" listed as one of the ingredients of the dressing. I looked around and found this selection of vinegars in our cupboards and fridge: balsamic, red wine, rice and two bottles of apple cider vinegar. I also have a bottle of plain vinegar I keep upstairs because for cleaning purposes. But alas there was no white wine vinegar...after consulting with Bill I went with the red wine vinegar and as I recall it didn't seem out of place in the salad, which was quite good, but probably not "will make this exact one again" good.

152/365 Wednesday, 06/01/2011

I take it that a lot of young girls are smitten with this young man/vampire...I just don't see it..well I guess I kind of see it...I actually quite liked this first installment of the movie version "Twilight" trilogy--I'll probably never read the books, but the movie was quite entertaining in a escapist/romantic way. I'll watch the others.

151/365 Tuesday, 05/31/2011

In a fit of summer laziness I only took a couple of pictures today and really the best one was this one of Hansi who has taken to sitting on one of our front porch chairs when he is let outside. It's a sign of old age and increasing temperatures...It makes it easy for me since I don't have to follow him around as much. 

150/365 Monday 05/30/2011

This is one of Hansi's places to hang out outside- a patch of ivy, myrtle and pachysandra next to our driveway. Bill has been weeding there furiously the past few days (he's awaiting a new job assignment)  so now there really are only those three plants over there. Hans loves rolling around in the ivy. 

149/365 Sunday, 05/29/2011

Mieze loves looking out the window. Here she is at the other living room window that looks out onto the porch. She had gone there to watch Hansi who was going for his walk. She doesn't really want to go outside and we don't really want her too--she might bolt or react to something quickly and she is harder to catch--Hans lets us catch him, he usually doesn't get to far. 

148/365 Saturday, 05/28/2011

Not a very exciting picture of Bill shopping at Meijers except for the fact that it is the very first picture on this blog taken with my new LG Optimus V smartphone. Once it became clear I'd be moving to Ohio in August we both quickly realized I'd need a better phone. With it I'll be able to quickly check my email and send texts etc. Since I'm not planning on getting the internet hooked up at the apartment it will be my link to the connected world. I hope it doesn't mean the already pretty average quality of my photos will go down even more--I'll try and do a better job of taking some pictures with the camera. It's just so easy to take them with the phone...

147/365 Friday 05/27/2011

A picture from the ceiling of our favorite brew-pub in Marshall, Michigan--the Dark Horse. Good beer, good food, good times. We really like it there. And the hand-made numbered mugs are another reason to keep coming back! I'll look through my Flickr stream to see if I can find a picture of "my" mug--it's very pretty I like it.

Unfortunately we probably will not be back here for a while...since I'll be moving to Ohio at the beginning of August. Bill and I might go back for one last time, and I"m sure we'll be back when  I come back from Ohio-either around Christmas time or sometime next year.

146/365 Thursday 05/26/2011

I do like the bubbly--even the moderately priced brand that Trader Joe peddles in..."Schloss Biebrich"

On this epinions site it gets a four star rating--and we find out that Germans drink the most bubbly (Sekt as it is called) - plus there is an nice easy sounding cocktail recipe using it too!

I'm afraid I have not yet made it to the palace this Sekt is named after--and it's in Wiesbaden where my sister lives. Will have to check it out next time I'm there!