25

Happy Birthday Sis! You're 25 today. A quarter century. You don't get a funny little poem because Stephen is not here to write one for you, and I'm not very good and poems. But you get something wayyyyyy better... these embarrassing pictures I took of you in 2003 when I was honing my studio skills at Central, and a "senior picture" type picture at the Empire Bluffs. Enjoy! Lucky for you I was cleaning out closets and found all my archived slide film from college. You are so lucky to have a photographer as a sister who made you endure all sorts of really fun things like this. (I promise your engagement photos will be way better, no trucker hats!) You're my favorite little sister ever and I hope 25 is an awesome year! Loooooove you!

The Scene

This is the usual scene in the dumpster across the street from where we live.

70s photographs

It seems photographs from the 70s have more character than our modern digital photographs. The images always seem a bit more interesting, a bit more intriguing.

Perhaps it's because more care was taken shooting photographs when photographs were film -- rather than throw-away digitized images. Perhaps it's because only the good prints survived this long.

But most likely it is just nostalgia, even if it is not our own.

Either way, I hope the photographs that survive my 20s and 30s are enjoyed as thoroughly by my kid(s) as I enjoy the photographs of my parents.

(By the way, the one of my mom and dad is when they were dating: my dad a member of the U.S. Navy and my mom a recent graduate of Taft HS. The bottom one is of my dad on their honeymoon, which was in Lake Tahoe.)

Maple Creek Farm

So Stephen and I are really excited...we joined a community supported agriculture (CSA) program at a local, organic farm today, Maple Creek Farm. I was out there taking pictures for an assignment for the paper and found out about their CSA. For $2o a week from mid-June to the end of October we'll get a big box full of fresh produce delivered to a pick up site only a few blocks from our apartment.

I've always wanted to try something like this. It's really fun to know that this stuff literally was grown only 45 minutes from my house. I never buy stuff that's organic from the grocery store cause it's always way too expensive, but this is about what we spend on produce at the grocery store anyway.

I'm super excited to get our first shipment. We'll be getting everything that's fresh on the farm, and it's all picked the day before it's delivered. When I was out there today the owner was showing me these awesome looking brandywine tomatoes that they are growing in a hoop house to make sure they actually get a tomato crop this year. Anyway, I'm talking everything from strawberries, to squashes, broccoli, garlic, radishes, different lettuces, raspberries, tomatoes, peppers, the list goes on and on. I'm excited because we'll get to try lots of new vegetables and I'll get to create lots of new dinners in the kitchen, plus we won't have to buy hardly any produce for the entire summer and most of fall.

I'll be keeping everyone posted on how it goes and I'll be sure to post lots of pics of what we get and make.