gunston hall, mason neck, va

day-trip on monday to tangier island. pix are better than words.

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first, the food, because that’s what i said i’d post. i started off with the chilies and yak cheese served with bhutanese rice. the red rice is the bhutanese rice; i gathered from other sources that the white rice was added as filler. all in all, it was pretty good - a bit like queso dip, actually. only somewhat runnier. i ate almost all of it, and was still hungry.

so then i meandered down to the viet-tex fusion tent (”texas noodles,” i think is the name of the place) and ordered some steamed pork buns. they were the spitting image of dim sum pork buns, but the filling was a bit more western barbecue-like. also yummy.

but what was really neat to see at the folklife festival was the buddhist monk working on a sand mandala:

so if you’re in dc, go check it out the festival. it’s pretty cool.

driving back from point lookout this afternoon, we left a downpour in dc and headed toward bright sunshine in arlington. the result of this was a gorgeous double rainbow, to which this phone pic really doesn’t do justice.

but certainly not chipmunk-proof. and have i mentioned i love this lens?

i picked up a new zoom lens a few weeks ago because my 28-200 tamron just wasn’t hacking it anymore. not that the photo quality was bad, but after ~3000 shots, i was starting to notice a certain lack of sharpness. so enter the nikon 70-300 with vibration reduction.

then i downloaded the trial version of aperture.

then i spent sunday afternoon and evening in the company of a 3- and 4-year-old.

and these are some of the results. more are sure to come, as i shot more than 200 photos. there should be a nice dozen or so.

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charlie & gabrielle Close

 
i didn’t take this one - obviously:

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the average age of the 5 guys who rent the house next door? (not the mcugly eyesore, but on the other side.)

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aftermath Close

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attempting an imagemap of the asheville river arts district. ideally, you would click on the various circles that look like they don’t belong to see what was there. unfortunately, the map doesn’t seem to, well, map properly. so run your cursor to the right of the circles, and you might find the links. (there has to be a better way of doing this, but i’m having difficulty with blog integration.)

this morning’s random bits:

• it’s apparently difficult to get rid of all the personal data on an iphone.
• xkcd introduces geohashing. geekier geocaching for the investment-inclined.
• sometimes i think people would be easier to understand if their speech had html markups.
• nick has photos from istanbul up - quite neat, even if he didn’t take his SLR. apparently his main site is down, tho. is this the end of defenestrate.org?
• bad political news: kennedy’s malignant glioma. good political news: va’s abortion law gets overturned. again.
• and a quasi-art project.

that is all for now.

a few (40 or so) have been added. but with 110 different header images in rotation, you may not see them any time soon.

be on the lookout for pandas. i went to the zoo last week.