Good deeds for animals in need, Nantucket edition

A friend just posted pictures of sandpipers on Flickr and it made me think of walking on the beach on Nantucket with my grandmother. She had the technique for walking on soft sand down and when I was a teenager and she was in her 70’s I had to work to keep up

She would get up early every day to go walk on the beach. I am a morning person so I would often go with her. I loved the dew on the sand after a cool night.

My favorite story is one day walking by the ocean near Quidnet pond. A ray had beached itself – it was nearly four feet across, just lying by the edge of the ocean. Grandma walked past and without breaking stride she grabbed it and flipped it back into the water. It was so nonchalant, I couldn’t speak. She saw something that needed doing so she did it without interrupting her walk.

She passed away in 2011 at age 97, having been the first female GS-15 at the Department of the Treasury and meeting her first two great grandchildren.

Anniversary of an exacta

My father-in-law started going to the Preakness every year when his eldest daughter was in grad school at Hopkins (I’m pretty sure this is right. I don’t think anyone who reads this will be able to correct me if I’m wrong, but it ALSO doesn’t really matter for the story.) and continued for many years, eventually turning it into an annual family event.

One of these visits, May 15th, 2015, we were all excited to watch American Pharoah. He had won the Kentucky Derby already. He was a strong favorite to win the Preakness as well.

If you’ve never been to a horse race, this may be news – the featured race is usually not the only race of the day. It’s just the one everyone spent a lot of money on. The earlier races are often smaller fields, and there’s often a very heavy favorite. Let me tell you, it is super boring to bet on a horse running at 2:3 odds. Especially if you, like me, don’t bet large amounts. Winning a $2 bet and earning like $1.25 is better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick, but it’s not exactly exciting. So I liked to bet exactas. This means you pick the horse to win AND you pick the horse to come in second (you can do up to five but the odds of that are so low it heads back into boring territory again).

In 2015, I bet the exacta on the Preakness. I picked American Pharoah to win and long shot Tale of Verve to finish second. I’ll save you looking it up – this is the order they finished. I won about $340 on a $5 bet. It’s my biggest win at the track ever, by a good bit. This is partly because I do not bet large amounts – betting is fun in moderation, but it gets problematic fast.

It took me four days to finish this post and it ended up not being that interesting but I’m going to publish it anyway and you can’t stop me.

Egg with a hat

I love cooking with this thing.

A griddle on top of a gas range. There are two pieces of bread on top. Each has a small circle taken out of it. The circles are on the griddle next to the bread. In the hole where the circles were are eggs cooking

It’s a carbon steel griddle from Made In, if you’re interested in getting one.

I particularly like using it for this recipe. My dad called it egg with a hat. I don’t think he made it up but I’ve never heard of it anywhere else. I haven’t looked it up, though. It’s pretty simple. Use a glass and make a hole in a piece of bread. Put some butter on the bread and some butter on the griddle. When the butter is hot, put the bread on butter-side up. Let it cook for a minute, then flip it over and dump a salted egg into the hole. After it cooks for a bit, flip the whole thing over. Ideally you want the white part solid and the yolk a little runny. To serve, put it on a plate and put the “hat” piece of bread on top of the egg.

You can obviously jazz this up in all sorts of ways but I’ve honestly never bothered. Easy, delicious, reminds me of my dad.

No ultra-rich person will ever build a successful city

I was listening to the Behind the Bastards podcast on MBS, as recommended by Peter, and subsequently recommended by me, and one little aside was about how ultra-wealthy libertarians are always trying to build cities. MBS is trying to build a crazy wall-city that I’m sure will totally happen.

It got me thinking that, when you put aside the fact that cities are HARD to just build from nothing, all of these ideas are doomed to fail because anyone with the wealth to just build a city is fundamentally incompatible with a well-functioning society. When you have a society where one successful adult makes a nice salary, and the God-King of that society spends that annual salary on a random Saturday evening get-together with friends, that society is sick. No number of shiny new skyscrapers and efficient vertical farms or whatever the latest trend is can make that society okay.

Doing small things as a parent

I am reminded of something I saw on Twitter (now known as X) some years ago. It was a parent talking about how their child likes to hide under the covers with a flashlight to read, thinking they are getting away with something. but never noticing that somehow the flashlight batteries are always charged.

Today Gremlin 1 is riding her bike to soccer practice and I charged the lights for her, which she would never have thought to do and will not notice that it was done for her. But she’ll be safer on the way home.

Let me explain Bell’s Oberon

So I did not grow up in Michigan. I have never lived in Michigan. But the woman I married did both, and so I know more about Michigan than most people who’ve never lived there. I’ve been there a lot – it’s a cool state. If you’ve never seen an ocean-sized lake, you should rectify that by visiting Michigan. Traverse City is one of my favorite spots – if you like water, biking, and beer, it might be one of yours, too.

Maybe you’ve had Bell’s Oberon. Maybe you thought, “well, this is a pretty mid wheat beer”. You aren’t wrong, but you are missing the true meaning of Oberon.

Oberon is seasonal. It comes out in March or so every year. And the thing you’re missing when you dismiss it on objective taste grounds is that for many Michiganders, that first sip of Oberon means that winter is over. The long, dark, cold Michigan winter is officially over as soon as you take that first sip of Oberon. And when you understand this, you understand its outsized importance to the locals

Growing up and the best food ever

Growing up in Annapolis, we took a fair number of school field trips to DC museums, and particularly the Natural History Museum. The two things I really remember were the Hope Diamond and the cafeteria. The cafeteria at Natural History was one of my favorite places to eat.

I’ve wondered a bit about that as an adult – it can NOT have been all that great, objectively.

But it was the first time in my life (3rd grade) when I was given money for food but had no parental supervision. So it wasn’t that the food was objectively good – it was that I could choose anything I wanted.

I haven’t eaten at Natural History as an adult for various reasons, but the most important is that I don’t want to ruin the memory.

Scanning my own film

Since I got the F5, I’ve unsurprisingly been shooting more film. I just shot a roll of Cinestill, which is motion picture film that they’ve done something to so you can shoot it in a film camera and develop it C41, which is the standard developing process for color film since forever.

Cinestill has some troubling corporate tendencies. I am not dismissing these, but when I bought the roll of film I was not really aware of them. I’m probably not going to shoot any more of their film, but I am ALSO not that interested in discussing the company.

I recently picked up a used Valoi Easy35 from someone on the Dupont Photo Walk and I’ve been using that to scan film. It’s great for scanning my dad’s and my grandfather’s old stuff, but I’m struggling a bit to get results I’m happy with for my just-shot film.

So here’s a shot from that roll processed with negpy, a really nice piece of software focused on taking DSLR-scanned negatives and making nice positives out of them.

And here’s the same RAW file converted using DarkTable. DarkTable has about a billion more features than negpy but it also requires you to know how to use those features, which I largely do not.

I really want something in between these two. I want the pop from the negpy image with the detail from the darktable image. I get that sometimes you have to choose one or the other and that’s ok, but I feel like these are both the extremes and what I want is in between and it seems reasonable that I should be able to get that.

What I really need to do is learn how to use DarkTable, but the documentation is meh and that’s a lot of work, and I’m lazy. So lazy.