Various Photos
This post will just be a bit of a hodgepodge of photos I’ve been building up for the past week or so.
First, a slightly-oversized image, but it was the only way to crop it and have the width come out at my blog’s standard 450 pixels. It’s of a table-top stove setup. On the bottom is a mini-gas range, a portable unit that uses cans of gas fuel. The range cost about $17, and each can of fuel costs about a dollar. The first can has lasted two meals so far and seems to be good for a third, so that’s a pretty cheap setup. The grill on top is very nicely designed, rounded so the grease can drop into the gutters along the edge and fall into a water-holding trap below. Cooking with it creates almost no smoke, so it’s good for the tabletop. That part costs about $8, but already, the teflon or whatever coating it is seems to be wearing off after only a few good scrubs; still, it’s bound to be good enough so that the cost per meal will work out to only around a dollar a meal, at worst, and it’ll probably last somewhat longer than that.
Sachi and I agreed that the meal we had turned out even better than the ones we’ve had at yakiniku restaurants, which can run upwards of $40 or more; the food we got cost maybe $10 all told; factor in a few bucks for the per-meal cost of the tabletop grill, and it comes out to a big savings over going out to eat–and it’s an easy meal to prepare. What you see here is our second meal, where we cooked only meat, which we stuffed into tortillas to make fajitas, along with lettuce, black olives, peppers, green onions and a bit of cream cheese. With the yakiniku meal, we also cooked cabbage and onions on the grill.
Next up, from birdwatching, is a nice Black-eyed Bunting–one with brighter yellow coloring than any of the others I’ve snapped. They’re not the clearest photos I’ve snapped, but then you have to be incredibly quick to get some of these birds–first, you have to find them, and then in the few seconds they stay in one place, you have to zoom in with the camera and find a tiny camouflaged bird (Have you ever tried? It’s hard! This bunting may seem to stand out, but the image is cropped–the bird was only a tiny speck in the viewfinder), and then make sure/hope your settings are right, while trying to keep the camera stable enough because the low light won’t allow better than a 1/30th-second exposure. Yargh.
Out of a great many more attempts I was able to get this image of a female Bull-headed Shrike:
Above the birdwatching field that day: what appeared to be an AH-1 Cobra helicopter, without apparent markings identifying which government it belonged to. The thin body structure made it pretty danged noticeable.
And finally, on a coat hanger I bought today, a tag reading the same in Japanese (phonetically) as in English: Coating Hangar. Sounds like something else entirely, doesn’t it?