I had no intention of disappearing for three weeks, but I guess that's just what I did. I've been both busy and lazy. Well, not so much lazy, just worn out from the busy. And there was a bit of a cold somewhere in that time too. Last week I decided to enter a contest at Veer.com to win a MacBook Pro. I knew the competition was going to be tough, but I forced myself to try anyway. Veer is a stock photo/illustration/design site, so most users are professional graphic designers. So the contest was to step away from the computer and recreate their logo with real materials. Multiple entries were allowed, so I did three: a mini quilt, a papercut, and a candy mosaic. 

The winner was pretty darn cool, and the ten runners-up were also really great. I'm still happy I went without sleep and ate too much orange candy in my attempts. I do love my papercut one, although that was my first attempt at papercutting, and it was not easy. I want to try it out with different kinds of paper, because everything looked terrible when I tried to use a blade. I ended up using paper scissors in the end. I think I'll remove the letters from the quilt and turn it into a little doll quilt, I love the bright, juicy oranges. 

I've been doing a little cooking as well, and had myself a little tea party one afternoon, while watching Howard's End. You don't really notice the food in that movie unless you watch it hungry. I speak from experience. So I was prepared this time. One of my favorite scones ever are the ginger scones I would get at Teaism, when I lived in Alexandria, Virginia. So I used a cream scone recipe and added finely chopped crystallized ginger and they may not have looked like much, but they were just perfect. I recommend that you try this sometime. 

My former boss is an avid fisherman, and brought back a whole lot of yellow fin tuna from a recent trip. So I decided to use some to make fish & chips, but with a little Asian twist. I cut the chunk of tuna into fat sticks, dipped them in beaten egg, and then coated them with panko crumbs. Then I fried them in a little oil (maybe a half inch deep), turning so that all the sides got nice and brown. I made two dipping sauces instead of tarter sauce. The first was my usual wasabi cream sauce and the other with a spicy mayonnaise, which was simply mayo with some srirachi chili sauce (also known as Rooster sauce), and a little squeeze of lemon. Yum! It was delicious and really easy. 

Now I'm hungry, and we are out of bacon, so I think I'm going to get myself dressed and head over to the local diner for breakfast. 
 
 

I really need to get back to sewing and other creative pursuits so I stop boring you with these photos, but here I am again, with another iPhone picture edited in another new app. I just downloaded the Photoshop Mobile app, which is pretty nifty, especially since it’s free! I applied the sketch filter here, even though as I was doing it I thought, “what’s the point of this, it seems cheesey.” Surprisingly, I like the effect. I will probably post a more indepth review at appmodo tonight.

Today’s iPhone photo. Taken while going through the Jack-in-the-Box drive-thru. Sometimes you just need a big, icy, diet coke. This also goes to show that you can find little pockets of beauty anywhere, if you look for it.

Today Winston and I went to Summers Past Farms for Pumpkin Patch Day. The pumpkin field is small, but there were still lots of pumpkins to choose from. I picked this pretty Cinderella pumpkin right off the vine.

 
I have been using my iPhone camera more than my Nikon lately, and I've got a couple favorite camera apps that really make a difference. For taking pictures I like Darkroom Premium. It waits until you're holding your phone steady to snap the shutter, so pictures come out nice and crisp. The photo above has no other effects, it's straight out of the camera. All the editing programs are fun too. Tiltshift Generator is a current favorite. Look, mini pumpkins!

And the Best Camera app is pretty great too. It has all sorts of fun filters you can apply and stack and re-order for different effects. It would be nice if they added the ability to adjust the intensity of the features, but maybe they'll add that eventually. After the pumpkin patch we went to a beekeeper meetup in Balboa Park, and I took a picture of this tree:

I used the Jewel, Candy, Vignette, and Frame filters. Not bad for a 3 megapixel camera and a $2.99 app, right? There are lots of good, free apps too. I wrote about a few just the other day, if you're interested. 

Now that I see my pictures big on my computer screen, I feel like I had a pretty productive and successful photography day, if I do say so myself.

Hey, hi! Remember me? I know, I know, it's been awhile. So. I mentioned this in passing on twitter, but in case you missed it, someone climbed over our fence last weekend and stole eleven of my chickens. Why would someone do something so terrible? I've been completely heartbroken over the whole thing, and not sleeping too much, worried that they'll be back for the remaining six. Those six, by the way, seem pretty traumatized by the whole thing themselves. They stopped laying completely for a few days. In fact I've only found four eggs the last couple days. Of my six newer chicks, they took four. One of the two has lost all her friends and wanders around the yard alone most of the time. I hope the thieves just fell on hard times and really wanted some laying hens so they could have eggs to eat, but I know the chances are slim that any of them are still alive. I feel sick just typing that. In the meantime, I've put a padlock on the chicken coop, and they get locked up tight every night now. The dogs were unusually agitated for several nights in a row, and I think the robbers may have come one night to case the joint, and then dogs may have chased them away before they could get all the chickens. We reported it to the sheriff, but I don't expect much will come from that.

Anyway, I haven't felt too creative lately, as you might imagine. I did have to make a couple quilt blocks for a co-worker who is having a baby. Several other co-workers organized a friendship quilt-a-long, which is so great! I got a square of blue gingham, which I cut up to piece together this little house block.

It's not too exciting, but cute enough I think.

I've also been writing app reviews for an iPhone blog called Appmodo. So far, mostly just games, but I hope to get to try out all sorts of different apps eventually. I want to work on building a portfolio of my writing, so this will be a good addition. Plus, free apps for me! Of course, I've been using all my writing mojo up, and haven't had any leftover for my own little blog. I'm starting to get more into the swing of it, though, so I should be back here regularly now.