The Apprentice

The little one has been learning how to cook things from Grandma recently.

She retices recipes for all tiffin items in step by step sequence, with a cute Tamil accent! Have to capture a secret video of that soon.

The other day she tells grandpa "how did you like it? I made it for you". Was kind of confused hearing that.

Then saw it in action last night and took a video of it. She seems to be okay with the way she sits on the countertop and so is grandma but it was not the safest and did scare me. So going to purchase a high stool for the little one so she can sit on that and stir, add ingredients etc.

Brought me back so many memories of sitting next to my grandma and her aunt (Ambulu) next to a clay made oven of sorts on the ground and helping them make "therattu paal".

Now I have a craving to eat that at 9:30 PM. Sigh!

One of my favorite subjects

The Moon..

When we were enroute to Joshua tree last friday, learned that it was a special night. The "blue moon" as it is called is a rarity.

Once in a while there are two full moon days in the month of August and this second full moon in the same month is also refered to as blue moon (However the real blue moon reference was created by the moon becoming blue under a volcanic ash cloud somewhere in Europe in the middle ages.. that I remember from the good old quizzing days in school)

Digressed as usual.. coming to this special moon.. 

Stopped on the side of a freeway exit on Route 5 someplace near Panoche Road and took a bunch of shots with the 70-200mm using the 2x extender. Tried the HDR stuff but it doesn't work. Maybe there are some manual tricks that need to be done to get rid of the blue and red ring that comes up in PHotoshop when using the merge to HDR option.

See for yourself. The default shot is not bad as my family was oohing and aahing over this photograph.

However when you do the HDR merge on three shots you get this..

Granted the detail in the highlights and shadows pop out but the edge is now off. There is a ring around the edge that has blue on one side and red on the other. Have a dozen shots of the moon in sets of three and it happens on all of the triplets no matter what the default setting was with respect to shutter speed or aperture.

f8, f11, f13, f22 all end up with same ring! Does the moon move that much within two seconds to cause this? Technically this was on a stable tripod shot and even if there are miniscule shakes thanks to the trucks on the freeway, the software is supposed to align the moon based on features in the photograph anyways, right? There is not much to align in three photographs which have a moon in the middle of a black background. So what gives?

Have to pore over a few internet pages from expert moon photographers to figure this one out. Not going to get a blue moon anytime soon. But if you know of ways to fix this in HDR, do let me know.

Veggie harvest amidst a bunny problem

The planter is giving us results.

Thankfully the rabbits were not able to get to these plants. We have been getting tomato by the ones and twos almost every day for the last month and it has been great! We made Okra curry and sambar with home grown okra and it was yummy.

Only issue was that we would collect 2 or 3 okra a day and store it in the fridge and would wait till we got 30 or so before making something with it. Same thing with the egg plant.

In the meantime the bunny problem is reaching epidemic proportions. There are at least 18-20 bunnies around in the bush behind our house and they have a network of holes dug under the fences on all sides so they can freely travel from backyard to backyard.

The railway tracks behind our house has even more bunnies huddling up. I saw a dead bunny on the road on my way to work Friday!  They are now crossing the roads and getting hit.. not a good sign considering they are not as fast as the squirrels. Sooner or later this is going to cause an accident with a person and at that point hopefully the City of Cupertino will act.

High time they did something. I called and they wanted me to pay and put traps for the bunnies and give the bunnies I catch to animal control. Like I have time for that?!

They should put an ordinance on having bunnies as pets and if releasing orphans into the local parks. Bad idea. They give me grief for trying to plant a Eucalyptus tree or Camphor tree but they ignore the rabbits..

Local governance at work!