The Melonpocalypse

So I managed to grow on a few melons from seed, enough to fill a couple of bags of compost or soil or whatever it is.  Anyway, having grown the seeds on past the carrying capacity of their small pots, it came time to plant them in these bags and put them outside.  I waited for the right time; warm enough that it was not going to freeze again, and with good enough weather that they would get a decent start.

Yesterday was forecast to have slight wind, fair amounts of cloud and some rain, so I thought I may as well put them out at that time and let the plants get a taste for the outdors before any serious weather came into play.

Yesterday there was a mini-typhoon.  The weather news got it completely wrong (at least the weather news I subscribe to) and it was bloody wet and bloody windy.  The wet obviously isn't much of a problem, but the windy certainly was.  The small seedlings were blown about like comedy umbrellas, folding all over the place.  The upshot is that I don't know whether they've survived or not.  Even if they do survive they'll likely have PTSD and never regain their vigour.

On the plus side I hear that smaller fruit and veg tends to be tastier, so assuming something lives and bears fruit, they'll be the tastiest melons in the world.

I did keep the other germinated melons around just in case of emergency, so if it comes to wholesale change then I'll do what must be done.  Wholesale melonslaughter.  The downside to this plan is that I deliberately chose the strongest ones to put outside, so the only ones that are left are the pathetic weaklings that barely made it out of the ground.  Melongenics is a tough, tough business.

I Can't Cook

So it's a well established fact that I can't cook, so I've been on the lookout for 'recipes.'

Where a recipe and a 'recipe,' differ is in the preparation.  A recipe requires tools (none of which I have), foodstuffs (none of which I can reasonably buy) and technique (something I will never possess).

A 'recipe,' requires the illusion of one, two or three of the above things.

Knowing this, I present to you my first 'recipe.'

So if anyone asks, they're hamburgers.  Or beefburgers or something.  I don't know.

The reason this is a 'recipe,' is simple - you don't need any specific ingredients (I just found whatever was in my fridge) or any particular skill.  You just buy mincemeat of whatever variety, chop up some vegetables (anything will do) and then mix them up.

Put them into roughly circular shapes, put them in your frying pan and cook for however long it takes to do.  Apparently you're supposed to let them settle for an hour, or put them in the fridge for a while, but I can't tell the difference either way.  Just eat the damned things.

It's taken decades to get to this point, so don't expect the next food update for a while.

On a side note, the melons are outside now (the ones that survived the cut, pun intended) so I'll get some pictures of those before they die off.

I've got a floor full of melon plants now, and I don't know what to do with them.  Urban garden graffiti?

Melon Dramatic

So the melons are coming along nicely.  They absolutely shot up at first, but have kind of levelled out now.  The second wave of growth is coming through.

A total of eleven have germinated, leaving six stuck in eternal slumber.  The roots are starting to poke through on a few of them, so I'll have to decide which ones to keep and which ones to guerilla plant in a park somewhere around here.

Playstation controller for scale.

The spider plants have completely stopped growing.  One of two things is responsible for this - I've been keeping the melons wet as is the way of melons apparently, and that is either too wet for the spiders, or the precipitous drop in temperature this week has stunted their growth.  Seriously, it was twenty degrees last week and now it's nine.  And raining.  What is up with that?

The next step is presumably planting them into something bigger.  These pots are designed to be planted whole, the roots grow through and they disintegrate.  I think another week or so should do it, what with the weather becoming warmer for good.  Probably.

Because I'm a Massive Idiot

So the negatives you get with medium format are essentially the same as those with 35mm.  You get a line of pictures, someone in the bowels of the photolab decides where to cut, you get another line and so on.  As such, you'd think it'd be particularly easy for someone to not lose negatives, on account of them all being attached to one another.

I keep my stuff in a folder that's designed to hold large film, you can hold it up to the light and see which picture is which.  Thanks to the fairly large format you can even get a good idea of which picture is which.

Unfortunately I've somehow managed to lose a picture.  A single picture.  I have no idea how it happened on account of all the pictures being adjacent to at least one other photograph in the sequence in which they were taken.

I only found out I've lost a photo because I'm going to go to the printers and get some bigger ones made over the weekend, just to see what they turn out like.  In case you're wondering, the one I lost is on this page.  It's the first one, with the very red leaves.  Not a huge loss, but it's a picture I still like for the colour.

A long time ago I lost some digital photographs that I loved, at which point I realised that digital archiving is a real thing and if you want to keep your stuff safe you need to engage with some kind of backup system.  I still don't have off-site storage figured out (the price is prohibitive) which means that if this house burns down, or more likely, is shaken to the ground and then burns down, I'll lose everything.  On the other hand I've isolated my pics to the extent where it's away from the internet, and safe from prying eyes.  Relatively.  Everything in this game is relative - there's no such thing as 'safe.'

Anyway, the upshot to all this thinking is that instead of waiting a couple of days to filter out my analogue photographs, sleeve them, tag them and bag them (as it were), I've got to do it immediately after they've been picked up.  I've also got to actually check the photographs when I get them from the printer just to make sure they don't miss out one on the end of a sequence.  It's unlikely that it'll happen, but I can't for the life of me think where this particular photograph has gone.  There's also the interesting question of archiving the film camera stuff.  The easiest way at this point would be to get a scanner and go nuts.  It's something to add to my lottery list after tripod, lenses, timelapse release and, of course, a wicked sick printer.

Digital filesystems are easy, analogue is much harder!

Cherry Blossoms

So it was quite a good week for taking pictures of flowers, cherry blossoms abound!

Unfortunately the cherry blossoms don't last particularly long, so I've only got a couple of pictures.  I took absolutely tons of them, but I didn't get any that were particularly interesting.  These two are decent enough to have a quick look at, in case you've forgotten what they look like since last year.

I went to shinjuku park which has hundreds of trees with dozens of varieties, so the colours were different from tree to tree.  Interestingly enough they were all shades of pink.  I wonder if it's simply impossible to breed them into different colours, or whether the idea of cherry blossom colour is so important to Japanese people that they refuse to try to make something a little more interesting.

There are, however, a million shades from white to bright pink.  This is one of the pinkest varieties I could find.  The centre mass is darker because of the shade, but you can see how delicate the petals actually are when the light shines through them, as in the edge petals.

The video is a better representation of the general blossomness in Japan as of last week, check it out!

Too Much Information

The wonders of modern technology.  With enough magnets you can see through anything, and with enough money you can employ those magnets to help you fix stuff.  If you have javascript enabled in your browser you can flick through the album and see the leg from left to right.  Or right to left.

Either way, it's absolutely fascinating.  At least I think it is.  You can see so much of the makeup of a knee, from the major arteries through to the weaving of the the muscles.  If I'd known I'd get to see so much detail I would have carried on working out those muscles (ignoring doctors advice).  A strange narcissism.

Anyway, I include these pictures for today in case you've never come across this incredible technology before.