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.
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).
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.
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.)
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.
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.
Next step: Recipe, jar, Everclear (75%. The concentration should be higher, but sadly, that's not sold in California).
Step 3: Zesting. We want all the yellow and none of the bitter white stuff.
Almost done: Half a liter of booze and all the zest into the jar.
Done (for now):
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 :)
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.)
As is tradition, I have an advent calendar again this year! Obviously it's the chocolate kind. I like the scene on this one ("363 days without workplace accident", haha).
By the way, not sure how that's handled elsewhere in the world, but every German kid has an advent calendar (chocolate or not) and it's the best thing ever while anticipating Christmas.
