Blog Tweak

Just a quick note to say that I changed the way images are displayed once you click on them. I suggest you try to click on the next picture (once the page has been fully loaded). It should allow you to preview bigger images without having to navigate back and forth and is prettier than what I was doing before.

I took this series of pictures over the weekend to see how small were the things that I could photograph. The result is pretty interesting, the diagonal of the picture represent about 4mm in the real world. It was quite a pain to set the whole thing up (belows, reflex box, chimney visor, 35mm lens+ about 20cm extensions, tripod and a lot of patience).

Independence day

Yesterday for the 4th of July, Anna and Danny invited us at their house for a chicken roast party to celebrate the Independence day. As we arrived, I noticed Danny in a corner in front of THAT:

Yes he overdid himself and there was clearly some advanced engineering and thinking that had been going on. He had been patiently rotating the chicken by 90 degrees clockwise every 3 minutes precisely for the past 2 hours and a half and regularly measuring the temperature with a meat thermometer. I was clearly impressed and I was not the only one drooling nearby.

After another half an hour of slow roasting, we enjoyed some nice and juicy chicken with some Cincinnati BBQ sauce (it was really good and I'm not a fan of BBQ sauce usually).
We took our time, enjoying a not-so-sunny-afternoon chatting, tasting some more summer ales and then proceeded to play ladder toss:

M and I lost our game against a highly competitive team :). It felt very nice, we were playing on the front-yard right by the sidewalk, one neighbor stopped to play a game with us, passer-by were asking about the game, the kids next door were watching us.
As the night started to come, the fireworks started. I learned that they are kind of forbidden in Oregon, you can't buy fireworks that go any higher than a few feet, and overall they have to be pretty weak. I was getting ready to be disappointed when the 2 neighbors essentially started a competition that would last for the next 2 hours, playing at who's going to fire the biggest fireworks. It was amazing (and clearly illegal), some were launching up to probably 50m or higher in the sky and triggering multiple flower explosions, and it was going on and on, bigger and bigger. We all decided that next year we would all team up together, travel to Washington and buy some very large amount of big, nice and illegal firework and would participate to the neighborhood festivities by blowing up stuff, like everybody else. Yeah, nobody would really have believed fireworks were illegal in Oregon, and it was not just our 2 neighbors, it was the entire city that was firing up big stuff at each intersection :). Anyways, we had tons of fun ! More pics here.