8/30/10

Yay for kitty pictures! :) This is one of my cats, Henri (short for Henrietta - she's a girl). She's our smallest and most timid kitty, and she's really hard to snap pictures of. I had to trick her by dangling the camera by its string and then taking the picture so she'd see it swinging and be intrigued as if it were a toy. It was tricky but the end result is a pretty silly picture of her - she kinda looks drunk.

To see the full hilarity of this picture, you should click it to make it bigger. My mom (who is standing in the background) threw a crumpled up paper ball (Henri's favorite toy) down our hallway and I somehow caught her in the middle of playing with it. She's so cute!

I'll miss my kitties when I move out.

This is a view of an area of Portage Lakes that my dad lives on. That's his sailboat in the picture. I've spent many a relaxing hour out here on that boat and in the water! Today I actually laid on a raft for about 3 hours and did nothing but soak up the sun. It was sooo nice. I love that place.

8/28/2010

Today I went for an 8- or 9-mile bike ride along the Ohio & Erie Canal Towpath near my house. The towpath runs north and south from Cleveland, Ohio all the way down to Zoar (and maybe farther?). I usually ride the stretch nicknamed Mesopotamia north to Summit Lake Park (about 4 miles one way). Summit Lake Park hosts the only "floating towpath," as pictured above. It's pretty cool to ride on and you get a great view of the lake! In the background of the picture, pretty far away, you can see the edges of downtown Akron.

On the way back home after turning around, I spotted what my mom and I figured out was an osprey circling in the sky above me. This is the best picture I got of him - click to make it bigger. He looks pretty cool. Although I see ospreys fairly frequently when I spend time on the nearby Portage Lakes, it is still a good sign to see one circling overhead.

08/27/2010

For the past two summers, I have been a volunteer with a group called Project Evergreen. Basically, the program is designed to raise awareness about the importance of keeping your urban spaces (like Akron) green. I sit for a few hours every week or so with the Akron coordinator, Jacquie, at a farmer's market downtown. We always have a great time and we have become very close. This morning's shift I took with her was both of our last ones for the summer. It was also an amazingly gorgeous day so I took some pictures of the view of the buildings downtown and the extremely blue sky. I love days like today.

08/26/2010

Today I spent the afternoon with one of my old friends who I don't see very often, Jack. After wandering around the Akron area for awhile and getting some good old Swenson's food, we went to the weekly Thursday afternoon farmer's market at Stan Hywet Hall and Gardens. Stan Hywet is a local historic site that hosts a lot of cool events, like the market (pictured above). Neither of us had been to this particular market but we were pretty impressed. He got some good produce and I just browsed, but ended up getting some cider before we left. (The first cider of the season - fall is coming!)

It was very, very good. I can't wait for fall...

08/25/2010

Now let me just start off by saying that I have already been made aware of the fact that this looks pretty disgusting in pictures, but this is by far the BEST guacamole dip I've ever had/made. I pretty much ate up the entire bowl of it myself. Yummm.

I'd like to share the recipe with you for any fellow guac-lovers out there. I sort of did my own take on a recipe I already had (simply adjusting amounts of ingredients based on what I like: more garlic and spices, less onion and tomato, etc), given to me at a local farmer's market by a company from Hudson, OH called Charlie's Gourmet Garlic. They truly grow the BEST garlic (I've bought from them a few times) and their recipe, the basis for the below instructions, is awesome as well.

Delicious Guacamole Recipe (based on Charlie's Guacamole Recipe)

2 avocados

4-5 squirts of lemon juice

1/4 cup diced red onion

1 diced roma tomato

1 diced tomatillo tomato

1 large minced clove of garlic

1 diced jalapeno pepper (use disposable gloves or wash hands right away)

a handful or so of chopped cilantro (yum)

1 tsp cumin

1 tsp sea or kosher salt

Scoop out the flesh of the avocados, mash until smooth and add remaining ingredients. Stir and enjoy!

I walked out into my front yard this morning with my mom and we stumbled upon this - a little wild strawberry! How cute. There was another bigger one close to this one (about the size of half a penny) but I ate that one, excited that these were growing on our own turf...but I was extremely disappointed. It was bitter and very odd tasting, not at all like a strawberry should taste. Now, before I get a lecture about how wild strawberries are massively different than the kind you buy in a store (especially the fact that wild ones are mutated from all the gross chemicals sprayed on our produce, but that's a whole different story) - the taste really shouldn't be THAT different. I have this memory of when I was younger: spending a day at my grandparents' house out in the almost-country (as "country" as you can get in the Akron area) and wandering around their massive yard when I found a pretty large patch of wild strawberries on the edge of the woods bordering their house, perfectly ripe. I crouched in that little patch for 15 or 20 minutes, eating the little berries as fast as I could pick them. Those were some of the best berries I've ever had, even though they were tiny. So you can imagine my disappointment when my little berry-discovery in the front yard did not mirror my childhood experience. :(

I've got another picture for you from today, simply because I could not resist sharing it:

I went to the thrift store today to look for a cool old jewelry box for cheap (no luck) and was about to leave when I noticed this sign in the window. See if you can spot what made me laugh/roll my eyes/cringe (clicking on the photo makes it bigger). It's pretty sad...not to mention the fact that there were 5 or six other advertising signs with the same mistake on them.

And I know I'm a total hypocrite for saying this about "silly bands" (since I'm currently wearing 3 that were all given to me: a yellow dinosaur, a yellow dragonfly and a pink buckeye leaf and nut to represent OSU) but I really don't understand the craze. I wouldn't want to pay 2, 3, sometimes 5 dollars for a pack of little rubber bands that will break after a week and most of the time cut off circulation to your wrist. Oh, the things that go largely unnoticed by the public, like the stupidity of the silly band phenomenon and crazy mistakes in things like the above...

Well, you learn something new every day, I suppose. Today I went outside to check on my little garden I've kept this summer (my first ever to keep all on my own - I grew lettuce, sugar snap peas (on accident - a seed was mixed in with the lettuce mix), carrots, and am now growing many tomato varieties, red peppers and banana peppers). I've been waiting for a month or so now for my full-sized sweet banana peppers to do something to indicate they were ready for me to pick. I don't know what I was expecting...a little timer to go off and tell me they're ripe? But really, I thought they'd just stay that yellow color, but today I got my answer: one of them is starting to turn bright red! A bit alarmed, I went back inside to research growing banana peppers at home (which I probably should have done a long time ago) and what do you know? Apparently, they really are supposed to get red and are supposed to be really sweet when fully ripe, but usually they are harvested when they are the yellowy-green color of the pepper pictured behind my red one. That explains why when buying them in jars at the grocery store they are still that flourescent yellow color.

Interesting. I feel a little silly for not knowing that, but oh well. I think now I'll just wait until it turns fully red before I harvest it. Might as well, right? Now I just need to figure out a way to keep my nearly 6' tall tomato plants from falling over and uprooting themselves any more than they already are...

It's a little bit of a mess, as you can see.

She didn't want me to do this, but come on...this is what loving best friends do. :) This is one of my closest friends, Dioswal. We've been friends for over four years now and today I went to visit her at her brand new dorm at the University of Akron. The Hall she lives in is completely new and is so unbelieveably nice - makes me a little jealous for what my soon-to-be living conditions will be like down at OSU. Ah well, I'm still beyond pumped to be a Buckeye!

Anyway, I spent most of today with Dee and we had a great time as always - shopping spree at the mall. This picture showcases her crazy/happy/hyper personality that made us friends (although for some reason, she's convinced that she looks like an "oompa-loompa" in this but I disagree). After dropping her back off at the dorm and heading home, I really started to think about moving down to Columbus in 28 days (not that anyone's counting). It's crazy that the time is almost here already, yet a part of me wishes it would come even faster. OSU is on the quarter system still, so we start and end about a month later than the colleges on semesters (like the University of Akron and most other schools these days). I logged onto Facebook and had a billion updates in my newsfeed about how all of my friends' first classes are tomorrow and it makes me a little sad to know that I still have such a long time.

I won't wish away my extended summer, though. There won't be too many more of these left.

Time to catch up on the last few days' pictures, since I've been camping in the Pennsylvania wilderness since Thursday. Hence, the following three photos happen to all be from the wonderful state of PA (rather than Ohio).

08/19/10

This first picture was taken around mid-afternoon on Thursday, once our campsite was all set up. I was camping in a small, quiet, beautiful campground called Beaver Meadows in the Allegheny National Forest with my boyfriend, Zack. That's him in the chair waving at me. Because the first night we were there was technically a week night, the campground was almost completely deserted. It was just a really nice place, even when the "weekend camping rush" showed up our second night there, Friday. No one was in a spot any closer to us than probably about a quarter of a mile down the road, and even if they had chosen the spot directly next to ours, the sites are so spread out that we probably still wouldn't have seen or heard them. I'd recommend this gorgeous campground to anyone - it was well worth the three hour drive.

08/20/10

This is a picture of the gorgeous lake that Beaver Meadows Campground is named after. The picture doesn't do it justice, but surrounding the lake are meadows filled with goldenrod just starting and Queen Anne's Lace. The meadows are then surrounded by the Allegheny Forest. Beautiful.

I loved the reflections of the sky in the water - I love water or sky (or in this case, water AND sky) pictures in general, which I'm sure will soon be made clear. :)

08/21/10

I didn't do a very good job of taking a picture of this place because quite frankly, it's only day 3 and yes, this project already slipped my mind (oops). I was only taking a picture to remember the name of the market. I know it doesn't look like much, but this was the coolest little place of off SR 66 in PA that we saw on our way into the campground (but were in too much of an excited rush to stop in until we were reluctantly on our way back home this morning). First of all, look at the name. Zack and I spent a number of minutes trying to figure out how to pronounce it. Za-cherr-ells? Zak-ayrls? Who really knows. It was the last name of the elderly couple that owned the shop, which I know because they had a picture of the two of them posted on the wall behind the counter, which I thought was really sweet. Second of all, we were driving through the boonies and yet this place was pretty freaking crowded, so we knew it must be good. You could even see the actual farmland right behind the building (again, picture-taking skills would have been better here had I remembered I'd be posting this) where the produce sold here was grown - how cool is it to actually SEE where your food is coming from? Although we didn't buy any produce here, we got a freshly baked cinnamon bun to eat in the car as breakfast for only $1...and it was AMAZING. What was even more amazing, though, was the reaction of the elderly man running the register when he rang up the treat - "Eh...how much are them suckers?" as he turns it over in his hands. How great is this guy?! I love PA. We smiled and told him it was one dollar as marked and were sent on our merry way. Those are the kinds of people we dealt with throughout the whole trip - honest, trusting folk who really are just trying to make a living. You don't find that too much around Akron: although I love the city, it does tend to have the hurried/suspicious/big city feel in pretty much any consumer-friendly establishment.

I've made up my mind after this trip - I want to live in the middle of nowhere on a farm when I'm older. With goats. I really love goats.

Day 1: Hey guys, I'm really cheesy.

Well, that's me. Me and my lovely camera (a.k.a. my new constant companion for the next 365 days), that is. Yeah, yeah, I know it's a really dorky picture but I promise you, I've got a good excuse. First of all, it's 12:15 a.m. and I'm not in such a creative mood. Second, I'm going on a camping trip tomorrow morning and my actual camera's batteries are currently charging so the only device I had left to take a photo with was my webcam. I figured a photo of me and my Nikon Coolpix L22 was an okay start to this blog, albeit extremely cheesy.

So what's the purpose of this blog, you might ask? Well, years ago, my photographic-inclined aunt began a blog of her own that was inspired by Project 365. Basically, you take one photo each day for an entire year and post it here. Additionally, you can write or post links that go along with the picture, which I'll do whenever i'm feeling extra-inspired. :)

I know it's going to be tough, especially with everything I'll have going on in the coming year. But they say college is supposed to be the best time of your life, and this photo blog is supposed to create an everlasting reminder of the next 365 days, so here we go. One day at a time.