Fun in the Sun

We're having a wonderful time at the beach! Edisto is a great beach vacation spot. When I was growing up we used to go to Destin, Florida sometimes for summer beach vacations. I loved going to Destin. The sand there is white and fluffy, and the water is clear blue-green, at least that's how I remember it. I also remember high-rise buildings. No high-rise buildings in sight here in Edisto. The shoreline is just dotted with cute beach cottages, some small, some large, with the Piggly Wiggly at the end of the road. Beyond heading to "the pig" (its unfortunate nickname around here) for that necessary gallon of vanilla ice cream to go with Andrew's peach pie, there isn't much else to do around here besides lounge on the beach with a book. It's pretty much perfect. Tomorrow, though, I think we might leave our flip flops at the beach and head to a most beautiful place.

My Birthday Present

For my birthday Andrew and his mom gave me a macro lens, and it's amazing! It's a bit of a bittersweet gift since our really nice camera went missing, but it fits on my sister's camera and will fit on our old camera as well, so I'm still excited about it. It's a Sigma 105mm macro lens. You can get a really close image of your subject without actually being that close, but you can get a whole lot closer to a subject than with a standard lens, just a few inches away, and the detail is incredible. Here is a picture I took with it at the beach. I should have used a tripod, but the picture is still nice. (I had another flower picture here, but I deleted it because it was a little too blurry.) I can't wait to show you more pictures from the beach.

9 Month Birthday . . . from the beach

We're at Edisto Beach having fun in the sun, and Lois has been modeling her collection of bathing suits. She has more bathing suits than her mommy and boy does she look cute in them. Lois celebrated her 9 month birthday on the 10th, but I thought it would be fun to wait until we got to the beach to take her birthday pictures. We don't have internet access at the beach (a good thing, really), so I'm at the local bookstore writing a few posts until we have access again, and keeping them short since the caravan is going to leave me if I take too long. Here are pictures from yesterday--Lois' first day at the beach! It was so fun.

Garden Anywhere

Speaking of food, when you don't need it for survival, I think it's really fun to have a vegetable garden of your own, if you can. This book, Garden Anywhere, might motivate me to have a few mini-garden pots on our fire escape. It's a tiny space, but it gets good sun. I'm so looking forward to having a patch of grass again one day (or a patio, or a porch), and I hope we have a little garden one day too. My sister and her husband built a few raised box gardens in their backyard, and a lot of the veggies are ripe for picking. I had one of the best tomatoes I've ever had this week from her garden. My mom used to have a huge vegetable garden (it was about 100 feet by 20 feet--really big!), and every year it was so satisfying to go out to the garden and pick what we'd eat for dinner, and I wasn't even the one who did the work to grow it! Also, I think a garden is great for kids. Here are a few pictures from their garden.

Basil.
Zucchini.
Tomatoes.
Okra.
Cherry tomatoes.
Jalapenos.
All of these pictures (and all the pictures since I've been here in Atlanta) were taken with my sister's camera. We lost our new fancy pants camera, and a great lens that was with it, argh!! Andrew was going to bring it with him when we left because I thought I had too much to carry alone, but somewhere between the cab and the plane it went MIA. He was SO upset. But it's just a thing. It's replaceable. No one has turned it in to SFO lost and found, but we've contacted our renter's insurance and can have it covered after our deductible, which is a fraction of the cost of the camera, so we might do that. Thanks to my sister, though, I've been able to take some pictures while we're here with her great camera, a Canon Rebel XTi. We didn't get around to selling our old camera, also a Canon XTi, so we might just keep that for now.

Food for Thought

Today I found a treasure of a book at the Goodwill while stopping in for a few minutes with my grandma. It's The Horizon Cookbook and Illustrated History of Eating and Drinking through the Ages by William Harlan Hale. At first glance it reminded me of one of my favorite books--Art and Wonder: An Illustrated Anthology of Visionary Poetry--so I was drawn to it immediately. This book, though, is all about food. Since Lois was born I find myself thinking about food often and in a way I didn't before. When I refer to my baby feeding chart (at 4 months begin cereal; at 7 months begin yogurt; at 8 months finely milled meats), I wonder what people did hundreds and hundreds of years ago when they didn't have the handy Earth's Best feeding chart and a Whole Foods down the street. I know women nursed much longer than most women do now, but children had to start eating food at some point, and I'm sure mothers didn't always have many options. I'm so grateful to live when I do--a time when I don't have to grow or hunt for my own food to survive. This book takes you back through history when people did. From the evolution of markets, to the search for spices, to the bottling of bubbles, to the art of porcelain, to the ceremony of dining throughout the ages, this book is a gem for anyone who likes history, art, or food. It also has an extensive recipe section in the back. Most of the images here show pages with artwork, but the book is filled with more text than art. So far it's a scrumptious read, especially for the thrifty $2.50 price tag. You can click on the images to view them larger.