Things I did today

The first time I tried baking Hokkaido Milk Bread, I incorporated Active Dry Yeast - like the picture in the recipe - into the dry ingredients of the dough. I mixed in the wet ingredients, and went on my way. As you would guess, it didn't rise. The yeast never activated, and I ended up with a very dense, but still very delicious... cake. Or Shortbread. This time, I'm going to activate the yeast and add it in as the first wet ingredient and see if that fixes things. Well - it did - but created a new problem. The dough did rise properly! However, it was very wet and sticky. After all, I technically added a quarter cup of water with the yeast that the recipe didn't call for, and with baking you have to be rather exact. So I turned it out onto my floured surface and added some flour, and did a bit of kneading. It was still sticky and wet. More flour. A bit more kneading. Then, I tossed it back into the greased bowl and searched for "what to do when dough is wet and st

I decided to have a goal of adding multiple photos together, as if I'm playing in my own band. I had a base blank photo, the photo of me playing piano, then another of me playing slide trumpet, then regular trumpet, then violin and finally baritone ukulele. I'd have added flute, guitar and maracas, but I was running out of room and didn't want to have to make it any more complicated than I already was. I even planned where to stand with what instrument and that I ought to change outfits so it didn't look like just an army of Lauras. The post-production in Photoshop was neat and difficult and nitpicky and a lot of fun! Now I know things like 'make sure your original photo isn't under or over exposed', and 'set the exposure lock'. As the sun moved across the sky in the afternoon while I took these photos, the lighting changed. Or maybe it was the clouds obscuring the sun for some of the shots. However, I was able to persevere, and learn how to

My grandmother played piano, as do I. When I was helping clean up the music in grandma's piano bench about 15 - 20 years ago, she gave me what she wasn't going to play, and I kept it all in a leather-bound folio. I recently looked at the ages of the pieces again, and recalled I have a few pieces of music from the late 1800s. This is a picture of the oldest piece of music I own - from 1881. Impressive that it's in such good shape, considering! I took a while with this photo. I knew I wanted it to be more artistic than just a straight picture of music/piano. I do wish that the 1881 copyright year was a little more apparent, but if I got closer to it, I wouldn't be able to share the name of the piece. Just having random notes and the copyright year didn't seem like enough. I also wanted it to be on an angle as just straight up and down would be boring. I took several photos with about four different configurations and settled on this one.

There was a special two years when I had two cats. One dark evening, I was driving home. About a quarter mile away, a black and white cat that looked a LOT like my cat was walking on the side of the road. I slowed down, both to not hit the cat, and to see if it was mine, and as it wasn't, I drove home (actually to my grandmother's house next door to visit for a while, then I went home.) When I got home, I said, "I saw a cat that looked really similar like Kiki! I slowed down to see if it was, but it wasn't." Dad, who I could only see from the back when I entered the house, turned and said, "Oh, this cat here?" with a grin on his face. Dad also saw the cat and picked her up to take her home. And, for two years we had two cats - Kiki (1992 - 2008) and Goober (2002-2004). Kiki, at best, tolerated playful Goober, but Goober was always open to making new friends. Both cats were such sweethearts, and I was glad to be part of their lives. I enjoyed staging

This photo was a bit difficult. At first, I had the tshirts on my dining room table, but I couldn't get them all on the table without getting some of them wrinkled. Also, I couldn't get the tripod high enough to get a top-down view for the camera, so I gave up after several configurations and put the shirts on the floor and smoothed them the best I could. I still had a slight angle because I don't have a tripod with legs that wide, so I took the photo as least-angled as I could. When I went to edit the photo, the beige carpet just stood out like a sore thumb on the sides, so I learned how to use the Brush tool in Lightroom so I could make the background with the terrible beige-ness a much darker color that almost doesn't register as a thing to be looked at. The shirts, from top left, going down: Column 1: Barrio Cafe in Phoenix, Arizona - gift from my brother Todd in 2014 Flying Saucer in Raleigh, North Carolina; Beerknurd member group - purchased with my fri

I've been enjoying photography practice, but I think daily practice will come to a close - but I'll still do photography on some frequent basis. As my desire to get back to music composition increases, I want to focus on learning recording basics for FL Studio. It's been about 12 years since I've used any type of DAW, and FL Studio feels much different from Digital Performer, what I used back then. I am close to figuring out how to pair my keyboard with FL Studio to record something - it sadly isn't obvious, but I'm spending a lot of time just learning the basics of using the application. I'll finish out the week with photography, then switch to music next week.

These three teas have been my favorite thus far - which surprise me since I rarely choose green tea, and feel like most green tea tastes like what you'd get by boiling grass clippings! The Twinings green tea is smooth and tasty! For this photo, I wanted the subjects to fill nearly the entire frame, and be sharply in focus. I also clipped the edges of the outer teabags because I'm attempting to get over my thought of  "I must take a picture of the entire item" - something that is only some times necessary.