Challah

Before







After




Spring Soup from Cook's Illustrated.

A walk with an iPhone

Today I went out in the glorious spring weather with nothing but an iPhone. Also, I am posting this entry from the phone - just because. Today's style is old time B&W.

Blogged from my iPhone.

Dog-food is to Dogs as Formula is to Babies

At about 4:45pm our two dog boarders began to harass me. I call them Mutt and Jeff. According to Wikipedia, Mutt is "a tall, dimwitted ... character." Jeff is "an inmate of an insane asylum." Works for me. Their rightful owners call them Sheba and Bernie. 
Anyway, they began to harass me. In total unison. Two months ago these two dogs never agreed on anything. I thought they wanted to go outside and poo or pee or whatever, so I harnessed them up and took them out. One peed, the other did not. Yes, these are details, but kingdoms are lost on details - as in "my kingdom for a horse"
Back inside, they were still restless. I gave them their rations of dog-food, which they downed in seconds. About 180 of them.
They were sated, and stopped harassing me, but were clearly not satisfied.
It occurred to me that dog-food is to dogs as formula is to babies. It will keep them alive, but not living.
I know nothing about this subject, so I took the course of the ignorant. Google.
The first article looked promising. It said:

The best food for your dog is . . .

Fresh food. Fresh chicken, turkey, beef, bison, venison, and fish. Fresh raw vegetables and occasional fruit. Fresh brown rice and oatmeal. Fresh yogurt, eggs, and cottage cheese.

This is not "people food." Calling real food "people food" makes it sound as though people are the only living creatures who are entitled to eat fresh foods, and that simply isn't true.

Virtually all living creatures thrive on real, fresh food.

Just sayin'

Walking with Camera, iPhone and Dogs

I usually walk alone, with a camera and iPhone (or iPod or other MP3 player). 

We are taking care of a small white Havanese and a large apricot Standard Poodle,

I almost always listen to a podcast and take pictures of whatever attracts my interest. I happily get exercise and learn something while observing the real world - or at least what passes for the real world in the suburbs. Body, mind and soul are all maintained.

Adding dogs to the group complicates the activity. Two dogs and a human result in three different opinions of which direction to go and where to stop and roll in the grass or do whatever else needs to be done. The dogs rarely want to stop to take a picture; I rarely want to stop and poop. The dogs move my hand whenever I want to take a picture; I stop them from rolling in whatever dogs want to roil in. Doggy-bag activity is not one of the higher callings of human endeavor.  (I think this could help.)

My blogs entries are mostly pictures with few words - to the point that I often omit captions. Todays podcast ( a discussion of "Creative Nonfiction"} made me re-think. More words may communicate better - and force me to develop a new skill. I have always been an awkward and slow writer. My thoughts rush in parallel - writing demand a linear sequence. It is hard to make parallel lines of thought flow in the logical line that writing demands. Thinking linearly is hard. 

Maybe a class in writing could help. Maybe parallel columns could help. 

Or not.

This Week's walk

Not much walking this week - Shavuot and Showers intruded. A few from the Botanic Garden:

A walk in the woods

This statue of Linnaeus always looks ugly to me


A beaver collecting nest material

Japanese Garden

Shavuot, Twitter, Facebook, Blogs and Wikis

Shavuot is the most unobserved of Jewish Holidays except by the fully observant Orthodox communities.

For an overview of the holiday, read this

Shavuot in its modern form commemorates the giving of the law to the Jewish people at Sinai. It occurs to me that the form of the "giving' fits very well with the social media of today.

The Ten Commandments (or really, utterances) were given out over Twitter. Concise, clear, no BS.

For forty days, Moses heard the law from G-d, and and put it on Facebook, hoping that the Jewish people would friend him.

Moses started a blog which was ultimately redacted as the Torah - the five books of Moses.

The Tannaim started their own blogs (bloggim?). They blogged a lot  but some smart guy decided that something like a Wiki was needed, so the Tannaim built their version of Wikipedia called the Mishnah.

Unfortunately, their discussion pages were lost, so we are stuck with the Mishnah.

But the bloggers of the day were not content. For several centuries they blogged about the Mishnah and people commented on the blogs until a huge body of unorganized halachah and  midrash floated around the blogosphere.

Around 500 CE the folk in Babylon and Jerusalem decided that yet another Wikipedia was needed and they each did their own - the Babylonian Talmud and the Jerusalem Talmud.

So we now have two Wikipedias (Talmuds, Talmudim) - Babylonian and Jerusalem.

Since then we have had multiple cycles of blogging, commenting, and redaction. The process carries on.

We analyze, comment, complain, contradict. We try to make sense of life, but we give up and live anyway.

The social media of today are new in technology - not in fundamentals. We, the Jewish people, have always lived that way.

I am back from London

We had a great week in London. Lisa and the family have a wonderful temporary home in Hampstead -- we really enjoyed being with the family and living a London suburban life for a week. Very different from our past visits to London which were either frenetic touring to see all the "sights" or business trips of days and nights in offices and meetings.
The need to "see things" has passed - we can now simply be there and enjoy the life of a great city.
My favorite images of the week (non family snaps) are these:

Black Hat at Lunch in Golder's Green

Couple on Finchley Road

Shoes found on Sidewalk

Underground

Monday London Walk

After a stroll through Regent's Park we bussed and walked around London with Lisa as she shopped for food for the week.

We had lunch at a Kosher Indian Restaurant in Golders Green.

Friday Walk

Cloudy, overcast, distant thunder, lots of packing, etc, so it was a short walk around town to two banks and the library with my iPhone.

Thursday. No walk. Art.

I attended my water painting class, with the following result



No walk -- it was cold.

Wednesday Walk

We drove to the city for the afternoon. Even downtown looks Springy.
This is my favorite shot of the day:


 Others:

Tuesday Walk

Another warm day. I headed West to US-41, followed the bike path down to Deerfield Road, across the pedestrian bridge back to Central Ave, and then home. Odd mix of pretty spring views and ugly power lines.

An older house in our neighbourhood. Odd lack of windows - an added bathroom?


Sunset Woods


This door has not been opened in a while


Power, Telephone, Highway, and Cell Phone Tower - 100 years of progress


Over the Highway












The end!

Monday walk

Saturday - no walk - just a snooze:-)
Sunday - Walk for Israel - too many people - no pictures :-(

Monday - beautiful spring day, so Hilda and I took off along the Greenbay Trail.

I love these trees - but I have no idea what they are called. There are many of them around us.


These pretty yellow flowers will soon become dandelions with fluff all over the place.


The Greenbay Trail is always pretty...


...the train lines - not so much