boarding

I had a great day boarding with dave at 7 laux. Waist high powder and endless off piste.
on the lift:

first tracks from the ridge

hiking the ridge

halfway down


from the base

teeth

the dentists appointment turned out to just be a consulatation. He explained that all of my amalgam fillings have cracked my teeth, causing cavities. They need to be replaced (nine of them!) which i'm so completeley psyched about that its hard to articulate. Before I do it, I need to make sure my insurance company agrees to it, because it will cost 1800 euro!!! Somehow I never realized that fillings have a limited lifetime.

boarding

Went out for my second and chloes first day of boarding of the year. There wasnt any powder at all; not even the heavy stuff that we usually get around here, which made for sore knees at the end of the day. Here's chloe looking very cold:


Theyve built an impressive park on the other side of the mountain:

They look well built, but are the most intimidating jumps I have ever seen, and I have been to a lot of board parks before. It might have something to do with the abruptness at which you will be chucked into the air. Usually with a jump like the one on the left, you see a group of kids uphill from it, trying not to look scared and steeling themselves for the inevitable painful crash. Every once and a while one of them will start boarding down to it, make some last minute turns to slow down, hit the jump with no speed, and land flat on their backs. I know this because I was frequently one of those kids. Then you have the fearless mini-kids with helmets, who pull up to the group, cast a scornful sideways look at the group, then bear down at full speed and huck themselves off for a perfect landing.

Pinhole

Last week I finally got back into pinhole photography. I started off with a 24 cm x 18 cm paper negative camera with a fairly large field of view, and by the saturday afternoon I had built three cameras of varying focal length. A guy at work had kindly drilled the .5 mm pinhole for me, and I subsequently made the .4 and .3 myself out of a swatch of aluminum can. Hypodermic needles and an emery board gave me a decent pinhole under a stereo microscope, and the images are decent. The Electron Microscope guy gave me a lot of 24 cm x 18 cm Ilfospeed paper, which I have been using as negeatives. Our darkroom has some stocks of Kodak X-ray film developer, which is not ideal but works well enough! Here are some of the images:

wheels

reason #2 (reason #1) not to park on the street:

(thankfully not our car!)

SNOW

its been snowing for a few days, so Dave and I hit the slopes at les 7 laux, a smaller local resort. I managed to take one of chloes gloves and one of my own (both right hands of course), but luckily Dave had a spare wool mitten. If you have ever snowboarded before, you know that a wool mitten is not a particularly good supstitute for a gore tex glove! It was a perfect day: just overcast enough to drive away the sun seekers, enough fogginess to hide the best untracked off-piste, and tons of fresh powder.
Looking south:

Looking at the fog (Grenoble is somewhere underneath)

Dave (little tiny blue speck under the central finger of rock) after taking a wrong turn and ending up on the top of rocky outcrop

double OOOF

went to the high tech dentist here in town who showed me how basically all of my amalgam fillings have cracked my teeth and caused cavities under them. Three cheers for U.S. dentistry! We're the best in the world at everything! yay! Its going to
take a lot of visits to fix everything, which is awesome because I love going to the dentist.

In other news, I met with the gallery manager today, who seemed very interested in my photos! Were going to throw
a big party if I get a show, but I wont know until feb 20. While I was showing my photos, some random guy came in and started complimenting my pics, which probably helped.

OOOF

I've had a little writers block recently, which is a little silly considering that this a BLOG after all. anyway, last week, I treated myself to some nice oysters, and a day later was sick for a day and a half. I'm actually very picky about my oysters, and inspect and sniff them scrupulously. I usually buy more than I think I'll eat specifically because I always end up throwing one or two of them away. Anyway, I found out that there is in fact another way to get sick off oysters besides eating spoiled oysters, and that is Norwalk Virus (as a funny aside, I could hear my moms heart stop from across the planet when Chloe told her that it was a virus). You can distinguish between plain old food poisoning and Norwalk by the time of onset. In my case, I ate them on tuesday night, and got sick about 40 hours later, about an hour after climbing in the gym. I had been feeling crappy all day, but that afternoon I asked chloe to drive me home because I felt awful. Anyway, because I love you, the reader so much, I'll spare you the details about how I was crapping water and simultaneously puking into a bucket, but suffice it to say that it wasn't pretty. I stayed at home on friday, and by saturday morning I was basically healthy again, but white as a sheet and a few pounds lighter.

norwalk virus comes from raw sewage dumped overboard by fishermen who deserve to be kicked in the groin for a week while being force fed infected oysters. Oysters are filter feeders which concentrate the virus from the excrement into handy bite sized packages for innocent oyster lovers such as myself. From now on I'm going to pay close attention to the provenance of the oysters. even so, no more oysters for a while.

market

we went to the market near Place de Gordes on a freezing morning. There was a trail of either bloody or strawberry coated footprints out of the jardin de ville.

where we bought some wonderful walnuts and ugly knobbly potatoes (that tasted great)

swans

on my way to work. Thank you mom and dad for the sony T3 which I carry everywhere now!

laxness

Okay so I've been a bit lax in my postings recently, but what can I say; there simply aren't very many interesting things going on, and I've been working hard on writing a paper.

This Sunday we went to Ombleze to climb with Mark, Amy, Dave, Sandy and Dylan (Dave and Sandy's son). It was a beautiful day, made more interesting by the fact that I did a beautiful and scary Piola route and by the fact that the car we were in had the low gas light on for most of the day. After a failed attempt at syphoning gas from the other car, we ended up coasting down towards St. Jean en Royans (the nearest gas) in a stressful and brakeless 20 minute run.

zoom

I've been getting ~300 MB 24bit scans off of 6x6 negatives, and I'm pretty happy with the detail; here are some examples of the max resolution from the Venasque photo below:


Impressive quality for such an inexpensive scanner!

The Strange Things People Do

On the way back to work today we pulled up to the neighborhood gas station. We waited for a woman in a white Fiat Panda to drive away, since she had been sitting in her car for a little while. We assumed that she would pull her seatbelt on at any moment and drive away, seeing as she was blocking the pumps. After a few more minutes, we gave up and pulled into the adjacent pump and pulled the fueling hose to the gas tank over the car, onto the opposite side. We looked over at her, and to both of our amazement, she was casually turning the pages of a newspaper on her lap while smoking! As I finished fueling, she rolled down her window, flicked the lit cigarette into the station, folded up the newspaper, took off her seatbelt, and.... opened the door and began fueling.

I found this experience to be remarkable not solely because it reminded me how singularly, amazingly, fantastically inconsiderate people can be, but also because it showed me how much we want to believe that people aren't sociopaths. When we pulled up and she wasn't moving, I wanted to believe that she was about to pull away. When she didn't, I assumed that it was because her friend or husband was inside paying. When I saw her reading her paper and smoking, I assumed the same thing. I had a little twinge of doubt when the only other person at the cashiers desk came out, got into a delivery van and drove away. Watching her draw long drags on that cigarette, it really never occured to me that she hadn't even started fueling up yet.

Venasque

A medium format shot from Venasque on our last trip to provence

St. Eynard

We walked up the snow covered road

to the Fort St. Eynard

enjoyed some tea

And some nice views of Grenoble

and the Chamchaude

I was using my hassy/gitzo 1228 legs/arca head, and on the way down I realized just how light my camera bag is without the damn tripod. Most of the weight is from the head, so now I'm looking for a lighter one. The arca is a fantastic head, but I originally bought it to hold a much heavier camera (Toyo 45AII view camera), and I think its kind of overkill for the cameras I use right now.

We also managed to get our car stuck trying to get out of the parking area.

old photos

I took a 6 month old roll of reala 35 in to be developed a few days ago, and after the usual photo-store-employee sneering and unpleasantness I picked up the prints and some other velvia I had shot recently. To our surprise, the 35mm shots were largely of our lunch/dinner at La maison de Marc Veyrat. It was a truly memorable meal: unquestionably one of the finest we have ever had. Out friends Deb and Howard were celebrating their wedding anniversary, and took us out to this dinner (and another at le Pere Bise) as a wonderful wedding gift.

We all had the tasting menu, which is listed below, with some pictures:


Pot de yaourt de foie gras, gelée végétale,
myrrhe odorante (plante sauvage cueillie au dessus de 1800 mètres)




Trois ravioles de légumes, trois souffles de vinaigrette


*
Nouilles plates sans œufs et sans féculent
aux arômes de parmesan, d'anchois et de poivrons


*
Jaune d'œuf de 9 heures, piqûre de cumin des prés,
mouillettes aux amandes


*
Féra du Lac fumée, écorce de sapin, boudin de riz craquant,
hostie virtuelle du pauvre, pinceau de benoîte urbaine


*
L'omble chevalier confit à basse température
(si cette Dame désire taquiner l'hameçon)


*
Turbot en croûte d'argile, laitance d'oxalis des sous-bois


*
Homard en pièces, vapeur, bonbons sans sucre de serpolet


*
Bonbons de caviar, chocolat blanc, écume de tussilage


*
Soda vera


*
Brochette de gros haricots blancs en conserve,
souffle d'acha (cousin du céleri)


*
Purée de rates, truffes de Seyssel, cacao très amer


*
Papillote de veau, bonbons de café sauce
de chicorée des talus, cube de polenta

ou

Volaille de Bresse rôtie enveloppée de citrons,
mélissés, citrons


*
Plateau de fromages des Savoies


*
Les trois desserts de ma fille Carine



and here's the man himself

mini whitehouse

Today was the last day of an unproductive work week for me: I was trying to get some data together for a paper we're writing next month, but was unmotivated. I did figure out what the problem was with a structure that wasn't refining well today, but that was about it! I also have framed three photos. I've completely given up on the idea of cutting the mats myself. It's just not worth saving an extra 10 euros per photo when the framing shop will sell me perfectly cut custom mats.

After work, Chloe and I walked up through to the bastille

Where there was snow on the ramparts

and a beautiful sunset over the Chamchaude

the Belledonne

Grenoble

and the Vercors.

Later that day we went to a FANTASTIC framing store called L'eclat de Verre. While I was picking out mat colors, Chloe got waylaid by the manager. I was a little surprised to find her still missing by the time I got back to the counter, but the manager told me that she was upstairs. What was upstairs? Well as it turns out, Pierre-Yves is a fanatical model builder, and wanted us to see his giant room full of models


including Versailles, the Orangerie, etc etc. However, in a special place of honor on the landing was this:

yeah thats right: the Whitehouse. With a silver prom limousine out front, a Little Bird attack helicopter and a fully camouflaged presidential Seahawk (with a big presidential seal on the sied: isn't that a bit counterproductive to the camo?) parked on the roof. There is of course an associated web site which, Pierre-Yves was quick to point out, has no membership fees!

Kenji

I'm finally continuing the scanning of my parents old negatives (My original project was to print them out, but I dont have enough time to get into the darkroom right now) on my excellent new epson 4870. Heres one of my dad:

which I thought was kind of interesting because I didnt know they had color film back then. Just kidding, dad.

Natto

OK first of all, now I'm not sure what it was that Bourdain was served that was called "mountain potato". It was probably Nagaimo, but maybe in a special kind of preparation. In any case, I dug up this quote about natto and nagaimo:


I thought I would die. Nothing, not bugs, not iguana, not live reptile parts, not tree grubs, nothing I'd ever eaten would approach the horror of these few not unusual breakfast items. I'm not sneering. I'm sure that natto AND mountain potato are, as they say, 'Acquired tastes.' And I'm sure that over time I could learn to appreciate them. If I were incarcerated and natto was the only food available. But for right now? Given a choice between eating natto and digging up my old dog Pucci (dead thirty-five years) and making rillets out of him? Sorry, Pucci.


so there you have it.