mikeShriver

I have a lot of respect for crafty people. I like the kind of people who own sewing machines, or buy darkroom chemicals from ebay; the kind of people who hammer old silverware into jewelry, and paint; and who make music, and make musical instruments, and fix everything first before buying new. I’ve never considered myself all that crafty. In fact, I kind of write myself off as being too lazy to really get into something long enough to really learn it.

A friend mentioned that she is taking a cheesemaking course from WSU, recently. This is strange, and awesome and made me want to try to learn my own craft. I’ve had an idea that I wanted to try homebrewing for a few years, now, and I think that comment gave me just enough of a kick to try it out. I nabbed an old kit from craigslist for fifty bucks, got the ingredients a week later, and brewed everything up last weekend:

This is what beer started out as: Malt extract, specialty grains, hops, and yeast (that white package is actually corn sugar used when bottling. Just pretend it’s yeast, and let’s move on).

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Tags: Beer, Hobbies, Homebrewing.

Some more of those “I thought that shit only happened on the internet” times:

Living in a house of eight unrelated people is always going to be an adventure. Keeping common areas clean and resolving conflict when they aren’t gets overwhelming. Everyone falls on a spectrum that seems to range from being unconcerned with a few dirty dishes, but stressed by indirect confrontation about mess, to those who can’t stand the mess, and have no direct way of communicating their discomfort.

In my current house reside eight people that had never met before the current housing situation. Previously, I have always lived in houses with friends, and while the dish situation was rarely better in those houses, communication was better, and so conflicts tended to raise to the surface faster, as opposed to boiling unnoticed until someone moves out.

Probably the best situation I lived in had 5 guys in one space, but we regularly shared meals together. In fact, we made it a point to have a dinner with just the ‘family’ once a week where we shut out the rest of the world and enjoyed each other’s company. Seeing each other regularly led to complaints about cleanliness problems coming out in normal conversation. They weren’t kept inside until agreed upon times. It also prevented dreaded ‘house meetings,’ which amount to times specifically scheduled for complaints. We looked forward to weekly dinners, no one dreaded our house get togethers.

The kitchen sink seems to bear the brunt of the cleanliness complaints everywhere I’ve lived. Anyone with workable ideas about how to manage sink cleanliness and avoid the associated negative communication needs to write a damn book. I am completely out of ideas.

Our house whiteboard has become the de facto forum for airing complaints:

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Tags: Eastern House, Roommates, Whiteboard.

The second camera I acquired recently, a fully-manual Fujica ST801, got it’s first roll back yesterday. I’m a little more impressed with the results of this roll. The Fujica is fully-manual so I have to spend a few moments with it before I can take any photos. It’s very intimate, and requires more patience than I have had to use in the past. The results were overall better than the AE-1, which reinforces a general distrust of things unnecessarily computerized.

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Tags: Eyes, Fujica, Hobbies, kodak gold 200, Photography, ST-801.

Two new cameras arrived last week. My collection of Lomo cameras has deteriorated down to a disused Holga, and so I hit up ebay for a replacement to my 35mm options. Turns out high quality cameras from the 70’s run less than the eternally trendy lomo-style point-and-shoot’s. I scored a Fujica ST-801 for $35. I expect to be processing the first rolls from that camera sometime this week.

I ran a roll through the old Canon AE-1 that my dad brought up from Salt Lake. I’ve got a batch of expired (2002) Kodak Gold 200 that I intended to run through my ill-fated Smena2 (RIP), so I shot a test roll to get a feel for my new toy:

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Tags: AE-1, Eyes, Hobbies, kodak gold 200, Photography.