Saturday, June 04, 2011

Resolutions: May Update

Yikes, it's been quite the while since I rapped at ya about my resolutions. I've had a lot on my plate. Sort of.
  1. Shooting, Shooting, Shooting: Take the camera off auto-settings. I'm not going to lie, I've been seriously lazy about this. But I am getting a little better at judging, not lease deciding what I don't like with the auto settings and fiddling around to change the exposure. So I am slowly but surely learning a little more but, to be honest, not that much.
  2. Cooking, cooking, and more cooking. We've been doing pretty well on this - we did lots of slow cooking, but now the weather is better that's out of the picture. But last weekend we cooked sand shark (!) on the barbecue after marinading it in soy and ginger and honey, as well as trying out rum-laced versions of almond joy milkshakes (divine!). This is what happens when you don't update regularly - you completely forget what you've done. I firmly believe in those reports about the utter unreliability of witnesses' memory - I barely remember what I've done one week to next, let alone the last three months.
  3. Reading, reading and more reading. An achievement! I read VS Naipaul's A Bend in the River; somewhat coincidentally, the discomfort I felt at his descriptions of women have been somewhat backed up by his words about female authors, but I can't help thinking I should act along the lines advised in this post - accept the bad, learn from it and learn from the mastery of his prose. It was an extremely uncomfortable but fascinating read. And, somewhat coincidentally I am, for the first time, reading Sense and Sensibility, mostly inspired by Ta-Nehisi Coates' amazing posts revelling in Austen's writing.
  4. Looking, looking and more looking - at exhibitions. Hmm, not so great on this, although we have used the Brooklyn Botanic Garden frequently and enjoyed the Cherry Blossom season, and also Rose Night recently (with a glorious sweet rose martini).
  5. Solving, solving, solving. Having gone through a very good patch, I've been utterly rubbish at this recently. Partly because I've been reading a lot more (was completely obsessed with this very silly book, in part because there's a lot of discussion of the history of alchemy and science, or so I tell myself), including - shock! - my book club book for the month. It's hard for me to strike a balance, really.
So there you go. Surely worth the wait.

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