Portraits: Truphena

I helped my friend Truphena take some portraits for her website the other day.   Truphena is an up and coming freelance multimedia journalist and podcast producer, and also one of the funniest people that I know. You should check out her writing and pilot podcast, My Personal Canada, that has recently been picked up by rabble.ca (!!!). It's a story telling podcast that focuses on the experiences of immigrants in Canada. 

 

Boston and the Fuji-X100

A couple weeks ago, I decided it was time to put an end to this picture taking hiatus. I had, funnily enough, more or less stopped taking photos the day I upgraded from my dinky beginner dSLR (Canon 400D) to a fancier one that was also much heavier and bulkier.  Fully committed to upgrading, I also bought a beautiful glass 28 mm lens that I was very, very afraid of breaking.  Mostly out of fear (and weak shoulder muscles) I brought my camera nowhere.  Instead, it has sat and collected dust on my desk.  To remedy this problem, I started to research: what was a lighter camera that still gave you ample control over aperture and ISO that would not break my neck and that I'd be comfortable bringing everywhere? And that is when I discovered the Fuji-x100! 

Here is the camera in all its glory, as well as a few public toilets. Huzzah!

I bought the oldest version of this model used off of Craigslist, and proceeded to take the camera with me to Boston, where my friend Jillian is living for the next few months, working as a visiting grad student at Harvard.   She rips up armadillos with her bare hands and does cool experiments with their spines (disclaimer: I am either grossly over-simplifying or misrepresenting her research).  Here are a few photos from the trip taken with my lovely camera that I am very happy with.  They include: a visit to the very beautiful Boston Public Library, a cat named Lemon that lived in Jillian's building, a few photos of my primate friends at the zoo, and the Harvard Museum of Natural History. 

 

I ended the trip with surely what is the best concert I have ever been to, Stephin Merritt & Sam Davol of the Magnetic Fields.  ACLU Benefit was the opener - basically this random, but super awesome guy, who just e-mailed Stephin and asked if he could open for him!!  He had a wonderfully sad, baritone voice and it was a most excellent opening act.  He also sold magic cards and a total of five different, single CDs as merch. Awesome, right?

sundried tomato avocado pesto (or, being vegan is a cinch!)

Over the past few months I have debated whether I should challenge myself to do a "vegan month" - I figured it wouldn't be too tricky since I'm already mostly vegetarian on weekdays (ah, the combined frugality and laziness of a grad student).  But then I would think long and hard, and visions of cheese, lattes, ice cream, and most importantly morning omelettes/scrambled eggs/savoury breakfast of any sort would dance around in my head, and I would sigh and think "another month, perhaps".  Last week I decided to finally make a compromise, and simply do a "vegan home cooked dinners month" - enough flexibility to give me my cheesy omelettes but also something to motivate me to cook more interesting meals on weeknights! 

Tonight, I made a sun-dried tomato avocado pesto spaghetti, taken from Blissful Basil. It was delicious, creamy, and savoury, and didn't take very long at all. I paired it with garlic mashed cauliflower mixed with nutritional yeast flakes (which apparently mimic the taste of cheese).

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Ingredients

• Half a jar of sundried tomatoes
• 1 avocado
• Lots of basil leaves!
• 2 chopped cloves of garlic 
• 1 package of spaghetti 
• 3 tablespoons of lemon juice 

Supa Straightforward Steps

Put avocado, sundried tomatoes, basil leaves, garlic and lemon juice in a small hand blender (or food processor).

Blend! Add more lemon juice/sundried tomatoes to reach the consistency you prefer.

Add sauce to prep'd spaghetti. 

Before and after blending pesto

A very green summer.

Providence, RI.

Dear non-existent reader population: after a year-long hiatus (i.e. a mostly unsuccessful switch to tumblr), I am back! Things that have happened during my absence include starting grad school and moving to a new city, but perhaps I'll bore you with a ramble about that in another post.  One relevant detail that I will mention is that one of the grandest perks of research is the wonderful opportunity to travel for conferences!  A couple months ago, I travelled to Providence, Rhode Island to present a poster at an acoustics conference.  The conference, aside from instilling a healthy dose of impostor syndrome in me, made me realize how broad the discipline was - attendees included music researchers, biologists, linguists and engineers - I even met someone who worked on hardware development for Google glass!  I learned a lot, received good (or perhaps harsh) feedback about my project, and snapped a few photos on my daily walk from the apartment I was staying to the conference centre. Here they are in all their glory!  

living spaces

When I first bought my new camera in May, I fiddled around with it mostly by taking various test shots of people's apartments and houses (my own included), since I still had my kit wide angle lens.   A few months later, having stumbled upon the photos by accident, I noticed there was something that was a little nostalgic and interesting about photographs of living spaces. Here are a few that I particularly liked. 

This is my sister.