This Mother Runs on Caffeine

I've been needing and wanting to post lately, but I've been thwarted by really nice things, like gettin' myself a little job and having to fill out grant proposals. Yay! I'm working on a longer essay-type piece, but I want to make sure I get it right, so it's taking me longer than most posts. I also was "hired" by my friend Catie to make a bespoke dog fleece for her awesome Frenchie, Twyla, and I've been taking pics to make a little tutorial, but while sewing today, I realized I did the math wrong on the pattern and now have a dog fleece...for a dog much bigger than Twyla. Catie gave me the awesome idea of donating it to a shelter, so I will! I still have more than enough fleece to make a properly fitting coat for Miss Twyla, but there's a shivering dog somewhere who's gonna score some sweet duds!

In the meantime, I thought I'd post quickly (sort of quickly) on my new daily ritual: homemade iced coffee. I spend an embarrassing amount of money at coffee shops, but until recently I hadn't found a way to make acceptable iced vanilla coffee at home. I read about cold brewing in (I'm waiting for my friends to smile knowingly or laugh) Martha Stewart Living, and since I'd follow Martha into the ocean with rocks in my pockets, I thought I'd try it. It's not a Peet's iced latte, but it's very good even if you're a snob, and it costs a fraction of what Peet's does. Follow me into the rich, dark, delicious ocean:

I bought a French press for cold coffee. We tossed our old one in the move, and this one was on sale for $24. My friend Katie says you can do all this without one, but I like the ease of this. I got the syrup at Whole Foods (with a Groupon!) for $10, which is ridiculous, but it's organic, and $10 is still only two lattes. That's how I justify it. The coffee is Peet's New Guinea Highlands, and it ran me $8 for a half a pound, which makes a surprising amount of coffee, I have to say. I've been doing this for a week and getting two big iced coffees out of it each day, and I still have plenty left.

Start by filling the carafe with two cups of water. I marked two cups with a Sharpie, because if there are two things I hate, they're measuring and thinking.

I use an ice cream scoop for the grinds. Iced coffee needs really strong coffee, about doubly as strong as hot coffee. Here's a silly and inaccurate way to figure out how many scoops to use: Decide how many scoops of ice cream you'd want if you were having that, and then double it. I call those "poet measurements." If you want doctor measurements, like my husband usually does, then I would say two or three scoops per cup. It's a lot. But it's better than wasting your beans and your time by making weak coffee that leaves you with weird-tasting beige milk.

Stir until it looks like...something you'd never drink.

Put it in the fridge overnight, at least 12 hours. It'll hang for a while there. It doesn't get bitter like hot coffee. I've made iced coffee from coffee that's been in the fridge for almost 24 hours. It's still good.

This French press has a separate lid for brewing in the fridge. I plunge down with the other lid. Maybe it keeps your coffee from tasting like metal. Who knows.

Then get a glass, and fill it this much with vanilla syrup:

Then coffee:

Then whatever milk you like. I use 2%:

Then ICE! And then you drink it! And there's enough to make one or two more in the course of your grant-proposal-form-filling, dog-fleece-sewing, blogpost-writing day!

NOTE: If you don't like twitching, maybe don't make a third one. Save it for tomorrow, and let me know if it's still good 36 hours later. I'm all for squeezing every drop out of my orange press. :)

Jealous of Alaska

Everyone keeps telling me how jealous they are of our trip north, and I understand why--it was so fun and so beautiful. So here are more pictures! I won't caption each one; I think most of them don't need explication, except for the eagle shot, which was shot at dusk on a cloudy day with such low light that my camera jacked the ISO to 5000 and turned out a compositionally lovely photo made from dots of color the size of golf balls. I Photoshopped it (by posterizing), but it's obviously included just to show you the eagle. :) I'll share stories soon; I just have to figure out how I want to write them...

Mushrooms of Alaska's Great RV Parks

We got back from Alaska on Monday night. It was great in almost every way (the RV camper's battery--batteries, actually--dying in the middle of the night was decidedly not great). Everyone keeps asking if we saw a moose, or a bear. No, I didn't, but the mushrooms blew my fuh-rickin' MIND, y'all! They were all over one campground on Cooper Lake, and I fell deeply in love, quickly. I mean, look at them. How can you not love them??

Some were fat and twirly like skirts.

Some were so delicate and pale, like little forest ghosts.

 Some were hot and flashy. And probably deadly.

Some looked they were in the middle of a fireworks display.

Some were shy...

Some were lonely.

Some looked like they'd be bullies, shovin' all the poor dirt around.

Some were huge and weird and huggy with each other.

Look how crazy this is! Have you ever seen anything like it?? Screw moose!

But this one, this one, was my absolute favorite. I got three shots of him before Ellie kicked him right in the face. He fell over, but I put him back, like the pecan tree. :)

I know these aren't the photos you probably wanted to see first, but too bad. This is what you get! Obligatory nature, family and camper shots to follow soon, after you have had time to fully absorb the incredible awesomeness of the mushrooms of Alaska. 

Notes from my Photography Classes...

My foray into photography continues, people! Besides following the blog Katie Evans Photography, I also have her e-book. I'm also two classes into my four-class Groupon photo class extravaganza! The first, one of two with Anfinson Photography, was a review of basic photography followed by a walking tour of Old Folsom (no, that's not where the prison is). I took a few decent shots, like this one:

But for most of them, I forgot to adjust the manual settings, so the good photos were taken in the shade, and the blown-out photos were taken in the sun. The only way to save them was to Photoshop them into sub-par pop art:

 And this, which I think could be kind of interesting in the right context, like a postcard:

The next class was an advanced portrait class, which I found hard for a lot of reasons. One, I continued to shoot on manual while most of class, I learned later, shot on aperture priority, which is easier. Two, it's really awkward telling people how to pose, and I don't really like posed shots because they look posed. It's a bit too catch-22 for awkward little me. But my partner, Cassey, is gorgeous and looked so nice in every shot! And she was really good at posing herself, which would be awesome if I weren't trying to learn how to tell people to pose. I found myself just saying, "Yeah, so, pretty much just sit down. You look perfect. Maybe I'm just brilliant at this." 

Cassey was great, but my photos needed some tweaking. Like this one, where a column grows out of her head...

Or this one, where holding the sun reflector thingy makes her look like she has the world's worst spray tan. Yikes.

Here, I cut off her hands...

And then her feet...

We both really wanted to try to do sun flare shots. The instructor told us both to pose this way. Her photo of me looks so nice--she turned it black-and-white. I didn't think to put it in here...oh, well. Anyway, mine of her looks like she has sunshine coming out of a stoma in her neck:

I do also want to Photoshop out that tree coming out of her chest. The next day, I watched Katie's son Andy for a little. I asked him if he wanted to be a model, and he smiled like this:

The pics are a little yellower than I wanted, but I think I had my camera on the wrong white balance setting ("shade"). I've since turned it to "auto" just for ease. It's what the instructor told me to do. I like this next one because this to me is just who Andy is, happy and interested in everything, though the photo itself is a wee bit out of focus (babies move a lot!). The instructor told us to put ourselves between the light source (in my case, the bedroom windows) and the baby, and do everything you can to make the baby look at you, and hopefully smile!

That's all for now. I'll be in Alaska for a week with my mom, dad, brother, and Ellie, giving Mark a chance to come home every night and stare at the wall in peaceful, silent bliss. Peace out, and see you in a week!