Day 346 - Pop Art Tree

This photo I took with a super cool little Android app named Paper Camera. It lets you take photos that essentially look like they are pencil drawings. Too cool. This effect also adds a little pop-art effect to it. I like it!

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Day 345 - Hilarity

Two strangers, having a blast at the Mountain View Farmers' Market.

I like the picture: I think it captures a candid moment very well. What's not so great is the partial blurriness and the high DOF, which makes it feel kind of busy. That said, perhaps that's exactly what one can expect from a place frequented by so many people.

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Day 344 - Decorating the Christmas Tree

As promised, we decorated our Christmas tree today! This is me, admiring my reflection while the Missus is focused on putting some more ornaments on the tree. Heh!

(This is the part when my visitors are relieved that I wore pants while decorating, I know).

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Day 343 - Not Cut from the Same Cloth

I know all my readers are just dying to read about German-American oddities, so here it goes. These are some average American facial tissues next to their sophisticated, distant German relatives that they wished they were like. "What?", you're asking, "Fred is a tissue elitist"? Hardly. But when you have a cold, it comes in handy when your trusty tissues don't just pretend to act as a barrier between nose and hand. As is customary, this can be described in a single German key word: "durchschnupfsicher" (safe from sniffling through).

Obviously, right after the Occupy movement has successfully eradicated all social problems from modern society, we'll move on to the second biggest issue: Inferior facial tissues.

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Day 342 - Not Yours

Thanks to a carefully wordsmithed warning message, the Mushroom People Hefeweizen survived three days in a shared fridge at work (a new record) and was consumed today.

I must say, this was some fine, fine brew. Beeradvocate agrees. (On a side note, sometimes I think about getting an account there and write about my beer tasting experience, but I fear that neither would my palate be able to detect all the notes people routinely point out in their reports, nor would my vocabulary suffice for the colorful descriptions used therein. Sadface.)

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Day 341 - Christmas Tree

Achievement unlocked: This year's Christmas tree acquired and set up. Next: Decorating!

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Day 340 - Buttery Spread

Artificially flavored "The Colonel's Buttery Spread"? Eeeew. That's nasty. I can believe it's not butter!

I am constantly baffled by the US food industry's ability to butcher perfectly fine foods and replace them with nasty artificial products. Why eat butter if you can have "buttery spread"? Why cheese, since there's Velveta? Gross, I say. Gross.

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Day 339 - Mushroom People Hefeweizen

After a long and eventful journey, fellow Mozillian tofumatt managed to bring some fine Nova Scotian brew here for the tasting. Sadly, two bottles broke, but four made it. Can't wait to try it! Yay tofumatt!

Speaking of which:

That's right.

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Today's Picture of the Day is a series of photos, as I made an Italian delicacy: Limoncello, a liqueur made from lemon zest.

The base ingredient: Untreated lemons from the farmers' market.

Day 338 - Limoncello (1/5)

Next step: Recipe, jar, Everclear (75%. The concentration should be higher, but sadly, that's not sold in California).

Day 338 - Limoncello (2/5)

Step 3: Zesting. We want all the yellow and none of the bitter white stuff.

Day 338 - Limoncello (3/5)

Almost done: Half a liter of booze and all the zest into the jar.

Day 338 - Limoncello (4/5)

Done (for now):

Day 338 - Limoncello (5/5)

This concoction will now sit in the dark for a few weeks, before I take it out and carry on. By then, the alcohol will have drawn all the good stuff out of the zest and into the liquid.

Oh and by the way, the "naked" lemons were turned into delicious, delicious lemonade. Looks like we got the most bang for our buck.

Stay tuned for the next chapter :)

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Day 337 - Unplugged

Home improvement day at Fred's place. For something that's supposed to be wireless, there were a surprising amount of cables involved! (And because nothingevereasy[TM], there was also an awfully long customer service call, because something about my TV service was broken on their end. Sigh.)

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