Posts Tagged ‘Hobbies’
* Eyes: Favorite Photos from Recent Travel
Posted on May 3rd, 2010 by Mike Shriver. Filed under Photography.
I recently took 6 weeks off from work to visit some friends in South America. When I got back, I dumped 9 rolls on the counter at my local Bartell’s. I’m dedicating this post to my favorite shots from the trip.
* The Needle’s Click
Posted on January 29th, 2010 by Mike Shriver. Filed under Craft.
Thanks to the capable instruction of my friend Danielle, I have taken up a new hobby-as-distraction: Knitting. Of course, as in most things, I am something of a prodigy of this competitive sport.
Remember kids, the ‘K’ is hard. Say it with me: K-nitting
* Homebrewering: Stage Beer!
Posted on September 16th, 2009 by Mike Shriver. Filed under Craft.
I got a little impatient and cracked a bottle open on Monday. Inside I found a liquid not unlike beer! Success!
* Homebrewering: Stage Two
Posted on September 7th, 2009 by Mike Shriver. Filed under Craft.
I am now just a few weeks away from playing out this scene:
The setting is a dark, unfinished basement in an old house in Ballard. Indie music blares lethargically from the speakers of an old boom box. A dense cloud of 20-something hipsters mills around, their motions mirroring the mundane cycles of their lives; A weather system of humanity fueled by the dreary indie music and a fridge full of watery beer. It leads them outside for a cigarette, back inside for a beer, back outside to vomit in a bush, and take it from the top.
But who is this tall, handsome stranger? And what does he carry in his hand, but a case of homemade beer! Instantly faces light up, attitudes change and the party’s death flow reverses. Hipsters find new meaning in their lives as they crack open a bottle of a flavorful home brewed ale. Someone changes the music to a lively dance song, people begin to congregate on the dance floor and move their bodies in ways that are new and lifegiving. Another dreary party saved from the cusp of collapsing under it’s own angst. A hundred hipsters turn their eyes to me and ‘Prost!’ and I am regarded as hero.
I put my first batch of home brew in bottles yesterday. This is the final leg of the journey.
* Homebrewering: Stage One
Posted on August 27th, 2009 by Mike Shriver. Filed under Journal.
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).
* Eyes: On Not Trusting the Computer
Posted on August 15th, 2009 by Mike Shriver. Filed under Photography.
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.
* Eyes: First Roll From a New Camera
Posted on August 11th, 2009 by Mike Shriver. Filed under Photography.
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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