Thanksgiving is off to a great start

Our home-cooked Thanksgiving meal this year was breakfast.

(food styling by Mr. Bears)

The pancakes were made with:

• Wheat and oats that we milled this morning with our KitchenAid grain mill
• Vanilla made the BobBIE-Baby Way

On top of the pancakes we put:

• Peanut butter ground in our BlendTec Blender
• Pomegranate syrup made from juice from our bush

I'm thankful that:

• We had a nice, wholesome, home-cooked meal and didn't get overfed
• There aren't a lot of dishes to take care of
• We have all our gadgets that make fairly healthful meals like this fun to make
• I have friends and family who humor me by reading these silly messages
• I have Jerry to take care of all the hard parts of Thanksgiving meals (and the rest of my life)

Happy Thanksgiving!

Autumn is Icumen in

Here we go again.

This year's pomegranate harvest was much better than last year's. Last year I didn't grow quite enough pomegranates to make one batch of jelly. This year I got a lot of pomegranates. I made three batches of jelly and one of syrup. Pancakes like pomegranates, too.

That took a gallon of juice. That took getting a lot of little arils out of the tough rinds.

I made a movie of the process.

Thrills ahead!

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

A mug (put into service as a pencil box) and matching box.

Gadgetmania

Jerry and I have joined the 21^st Century.  We got new cellphones!

We got Droids. Now we are never without phones. Or email. Or the web.

I was going to try to post this from my car at lunch today but I'm not good at typing on the tiny keyboards yet.

It's got GPS and can navigate using Google Maps. I had it guide me home from work yesterday. When you reach your destination it switches from the map to Google's street view. I found out that they've got a close-up of our house now.


View Larger Map

Their notion of our address is kind of off.

The picture was taken after our flood and shortly after the bike race (if you move to the left you'll see mud on the road from the truck that got stuck in the muck).

But all this is beside the point.

We have a very comprehensive phone plan now. We have unlimited data use. And unlimited text and picture messages. The use of the phone isn't unlimited but we've got a lot more time than we had before and we never went over our plan's time. We need to talk more.

So text away! Email is pretty much instant, too.

It's powered by Google's Android operating system. To get full use of it we needed to get Google's gmail email accounts. I'll be sending our my new email address soon. The old addresses still work but if you use the gmail address I'll be notified of new mail almost instantly. The others might have a 15 minute lag.

Keep in touch. We're never out of reach now.

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

Here I am in a T-shirt.

Just hangin' around

When I got our latest turtle, I bought a bat also by Henry Dupere.  We were busy last weekend so it didn't get installed until today. It's just hangin' around above the front door.

While we were deciding where to put the bat, Jerry noticed this moth just hangin' around on the door jamb. I guess she thinks this is a good place to start a family. There's not a lot to eat here.

Moths sure are pretty.

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

A herd of horse hair pottery turtles found (I think) in Madrid, NM.

Autumn in New Mexico

My first morning in New Mexico gave me a bit of scenery that I really hadn't counted on. Snow!

Here's my little Southern California car's first encounter with precipitation.

I got to use its heated seats for the first time.

I needed to get a scenic panorama of the cliffs around Los Alamos. I ended up at the Clinton P. Anderson Scenic Overlook on the main road into town. Here we see (I think) Los Alamos Canyon and the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. I wish Blogger would leave my pictures at their full resolution. If anybody wants to see higher resolution versions of the panoramas, just ask.

Here's a picture of picture of the mesas just to the right of the center of the panorama. The Sangre de Cristos are behind the clouds. This picture isn't one of the shots that went into the panorama. I zoomed in on the mesas more than in the panorama.

Snow is pretty but I don't think I want to live where it you expect it to happen. I suppose it is nice to experience once every 20 or 30 years.

Since I'm in a panorama frenzy, here is a picture of Burnt Mountain behind the house I grew up in. There were a lot more trees when I lived in Los Alamos.

Oh, look! There's the start of a new forest in the foreground!

And to continue the frenzy, here's one more panorama from the Painted Desert. I named this picture "Kachina Point" and that's the name I gave to a picture in my Petrified Forest post. The two pictures aren't showing the same place. One has got to be Chinde Point. I'll figure it all out some day.

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

From my stop in Madrid last week.

The Petrified Forest

Mom and my new car demanded that I take a road trip. I obeyed them last week.  The car got a bit more than 52 miles per gallon on the way to Los Alamos but only 51 mpg on the way home.

On the way to New Mexico, I stopped for the night at the Motel 6 in Holbrook, Arizona. I got up the next morning and headed over to the south entrance of the Petrified Forest National Park. The winter hours went into effect that day so I had to wait until 8:00 to get in.

I took pictures.

Here is an obligatory picture of petrified logs along the Long Logs Trail. I passed a man who had his very serious camera on a tripod set to take a picture of the end of a log. He was woking on his shot for a long time as I approached and was still working on it as I headed back to the car. I took artsy close-ups, too, but I won't bother you with those. Mine didn't take an hour each.

One of my favorite gadgets is Photoshop Elements' Photomerge^TM Panorama feature. You take many pictures that overlap a bit and it pastes them together into one, long picture.  I should have read the tutorial about how to use it most effectively.  I should have shot in portrait orientation rather than landscape. I sometimes used a tripod but didn't for this picture. It's a kind of amphitheater with petrified logs strewn around. Click on it to enlarge it. (Blogger limits the size of the pictures. The original is much larger.)

I drove up to the Crystal Forest. This is the view of a hill you see as you approach the Crystal Forest's parking lot. It struck me as pretty. (What in the Petrified Forest and Painted Desert isn't pretty?)

Here are petroglyphs on the Newspaper Rock. I wish doo-doo heads wouldn't add their scratchings to it.

I took some more panoramas in the Painted Desert part of the park. I used the tripod to keep the camera facing the same altitude for each shot so it worked better than the Long Logs shot. Here is the view from the Lacey Point overlook.

And here is the view from the Kachina Point overlook. I used an additional wide angle lens and aimed the camera into the valley rather than at the horizon. The wall at the bottom of the picture either is straight or curves around the parking lot. It doesn't really bow away from us.

The trip through the park is a great way to spend four hours and only ten dollars. Everybody should do it when they have the opportunity.