did somebody die?
by Emily on Feb.05, 2012, under foods
Mike’s been busy and is working long hours. I don’t cook during the week. To alleviate the problem that this presents, we spent the day cooking comfort food for the week. We’ve made the 100% switch to brown rice, which makes me feel even better about our choices for the week 
1) green smoothies for the week (Spinach, Banana, Pineapple, Orange, blueberry)
2) mujadra (lentils, brown rice, caramelized onions)
3) vegetable fried rice
4) yellow rice and chicken (thanks for the recipe Mayra!) – the one non-vegetarian dish :-p
5) red beans and potatoes
what luck
by mike on Jan.29, 2012, under artsy, china
On my flight to China over the summer, I barely slept at all. I spent most of my time looking out the window and watching the map on the seatback screen with our location. At one point during this time awake, I observed an incredible lake. I loved its extremely contorted shoreline, the super blue color and the complete lack of any evidence of human involvement. I wanted to parachute out right there and explore. Anyway, since then, I’ve been fixated on the idea of finding out where that lake actually is in hopes that I’ll have some random opportunity in my life to see it. Well, today, bored at work waiting on some stuff, I popped open google earth and voila!
spring cleaning 1
by mike on Jan.26, 2012, under artsy, china
Every now and then, I browse through my library of photos and for one reason or another I feel regret for not having put one of them on my blog. It’s as though once a certain amount of time passes, or if I have already blogged about related photos, it’s impossible for me to post it. Time to get over that.
Here’s a few shots from my time in China that I hadn’t posted:
epic bic
by mike on Jan.24, 2012, under artsy
I’m one of those people that upon realizing a lighter has one of the +/- adjustment dials on it, I immediately take it apart and crank it out of the realm of safe lighter use. At this point, the lighter doesn’t light a small amount of butane as it evaporates from the tip, rather liquid butane just kinda sprays out of the top and whatever lights, lights. During one of these bic lighter adventures, I decided to man both the lighter and my camera and see what I could get.
The photos were taken at 1/8000 sec @ f / 2.8, ISO 800. I want to point out that I did no photoshop to the images. Just some vibrance/clarity adjustments in Lightroom. I wish I was good enough in photoshop to make twisty flames like these.
Getting the flame at different parts of the ignition was extremely difficult. The whole thing happens ridiculously fast and setting my camera to 8 frames/sec never yielded more than 1 or 2 shots of the actual event. Instead, I just tried to simultaneously do both, leading just slightly with the lighter.
1: Just after the strike
2. Just a bit longer: This one is quite reminiscent of the H-Bomb test
3: end of the excitement: The flame quickly dies off
4: This one is in here because it’s simply terrifying. There is a demon emerging from my lighter and it is not pleased.
