When I looked out the plane window and saw the mountains of Utah, I saw saw-blade ridges that are wholly unlike the rounded green mounds of the Appalachians I’m used to. I couldn’t wait to get out into them, and after a nearly a week at our hotel, I finally took a gondola ride up the mountain and went for a hike with some of my coworkers.
I can’t wait to take our kids to new places to see how different the world can be.
I generally photograph nature: hikes in the Appalachians, camping in Shenandoah, clouds in Florida, marshes in Georgia. This week, though, I am among talented creatives who organized a morning photo walk not on a hiking trail, but down Main Street in Park City, Utah.
At 7:30 in the morning, before the sun crested the peaks of the mountains east of town, twenty Automatticians with cameras dangling from their necks poured from vans onto the streets. I was one of them, and I photographed things I don’t normally photograph.
The shopping district was empty, and we criss-crossed vacant streets as we snapped shots of roof lines, window displays, and street sculpture.
A maintenance crew puttered from lamp post to lamp post, and water dripped from hanging flower baskets in their wake. Our shutters clicked like beetle wings, and the sun rose quietly over roof tops.
I plan to take my camera up the mountain while I’m here so that I can get some nature shots, but looking at these photos, I am refreshed that I tried something new. I need to shoot like this more often.
I’m in Park City, Utah for the annual Automattic Grand Meetup, and I had originally signed up to run the WordPress 5K this morning. After all the wine I drank last night, though, I decided to go for a solo mini-hike instead.
I took these photos on the trail behind our hotel as the sun rose over the mountains.
The word fray no longer makes me think of threadbare jeans or ratty-edged towels. It makes me think of the swim start in a triathlon, when your heart has hummingbird wings that beat inside your throat. When, after waiting for hours for your heat to begin, you finally line up shoulder to shoulder with your comptetitors, and you finally run into the water, and when it’s knee deep, you finally dive in and and you slither over another swimmer and you get kicked in the face and elbowed in the ribs, and you suddenly feel a knee in your back as a swimmer slithers over you and you go under and swallow lake water, and then you pop up again and get elbowed in the ear and you try to cough out the water and hope your goggles don’t get kicked off. That’s what fray is to me. Being in the fray at the start of an open water swim.
*Photo from the TriAmerica triathlon in 2002, in our pre-children life. I’m not sure whether my husband or my mom took the picture, or even if I’m in it. This is my entry for The Daily Post Photo Challenge: Fray.
Clouds are my favorite thing about Florida. They are the part I miss most after living there, and the part I love most when we visit. I thought I’d share some with you here. Enjoy.
One of my favorite summer cocktails is a rum daiquiri (recipe below). With only three ingredients, it is clean, cold, fresh, and simple. Buy a bottle of rum, a few limes, and some sugar to make simple syrup, and you can make one anywhere you have access to ice.
Or so I thought.
Our first night on vacation I went to make myself one – I had prepped simple syrup earlier in the day and was all ready to go – and I realized I didn’t have a shaker. Cocktails with citrus should be shaken in order to get a fresh bubbly flavor, but you know, vacation rentals don’t always have all the tools you’re used to having at home. I banged around in the cabinets to be sure I couldn’t rig something, then shrugged my shoulders and resigned myself to stirring.
The drink served as a rum, lime, and sugar delivery mechanism, which isn’t all bad, but it tasted flat and I didn’t make another.
The following night my husband and I both wanted daiquiris, but we wanted them to have the zing we craved – the zing you can only get from shaking, not stirring. So I banged around in the cabinets some more, double checked where the wine glasses were stored, triple checked the cupboard with the blender. No cocktail shaker. I wandered back into our bedroom to brainstorm with my husband, and then I saw our solution.
A few months ago I received some WordPress swag after guest hosting a writing challenge on The Daily Post. The box included a tee-shirt, a copy of The Year Without Pants, some stickers, and an insulated Klean Kanteen bottle with a sealable sippy lid (aka “Cafe Cap”). I love this bottle. It keeps my water icy in the summer and my coffee steaming in the winter.
And with a screw top cap that can be mostly closed off, on vacation it serves as our cocktail shaker. I forgot to close off the sippy hole the first shake and I flung sugar-lime-rum everywhere, and when you do close the sippy hole it doesn’t seal perfectly for vigorous shaking, but the minimal drink loss was worth it: the daiquiris were fresh and not flat, shaken and not stirred. Sometimes you have to improvise.
Mix all ingredients in a cocktail shaker (or Klean Kanteen bottle with lid closed) and shake vigorously for ~ 10 seconds. Strain over ice in a rocks glass. Garnish with lime wedge.
*To make simple syrup, heat equal parts water and sugar over medium heat until sugar is dissolved (we use a lot of simple syrup in our house so I usually mix 1 cup sugar and 1 cup water per batch). You do not need to stir constantly, nor do you need to bring it to a boil. Once the sugar is dissolved, remove from heat and allow to cool. If you are in a hurry to use it in drinks, cool it in an ice bath to avoid melting the ice in your drink and watering it down.
Butterfly Mind 