black is the new black.

Well I'd say it's about time for my photo website's hiatus to come to an end. In a recent burst of ambition and lack of anything else to do, I've been working on revamping the old website that's been sitting around, un-updated for the past 9 months or so. Here are some screenshots of the new site, which should be up and running in the next couple weeks (hopefully):












Kinda hard to see, but it's pretty minimal, with a simple menu up top and a rotating gallery teaser slideshow on the home page. Also decided to make the full spectrum shift from the stark white of the old site to a black and gray scheme.












Here's a sample of one of the gallery pages, with expandable thumbnails.












And here's the ever-awkward-and-narcissistic "About" page. I'm gonna break down and upgrade to a yearly package, which will give me my own domain name (www.danielaisenbrey.com), and remove all the Wix.com branding from the site. I really like Wix for the creative control you have over everything. If you want an easy-to-design flash website for anything you should check them out. Keep your eyes peeled for the launch of the new site!

Po-ta-toes? Mash 'em, boil 'em, stick 'em in a stew!

Well I finally broke. My curiosity got the best of me and I couldn't wait any longer to see what all was going on in my potato buckets.

I know you're supposed to wait for the vines to die, but I rationalized my decision by the fact that they weren't in an ideal growing environment to begin with, and the vines were turning yellow and loosing leaves, so death couldn't be that far away, right?

I had experimented with a variety of bucket configurations, mulching one with leaves, one with newspaper, and one un-mulched. Also half of the buckets had vapor barriers which didn't really get a chance to serve their purpose since the sprinkler system was put in, watering everything twice a day.

So this is what I ended up with out of four buckets and four Yukon Gold seed potatoes:

And here's the total bounty of the garden thus far, excluding a dozen or so leaves of mustard greens:














Hooray food!

You still have plenty of time to put in some fall crops like carrots, beets, turnips, spinach, brussel sprouts, cabbage, cauliflower, zucchini, pumpkin, or many others. I'm probably gonna do carrots, turnips, beets, and spinach in my containers once the tomatoes and beans finish up.

The sun also rises. In case you were wondering.

3:30AM is a disgusting time. Regardless of whether you're still up or getting up. In my case it was the latter. My alarm went off, inflicting severe psychological trauma, but I managed to crawl out of bed, jam in my contacts, lace up my boots, double-check my camera gear, and set off towards the Smokies.

Every once and awhile, when I can muster up the discipline, I try to make it out to the Park to catch the sunrise. Provided I don't have work that day and can recuperate with a lengthy nap. So the plan for this morning was to drive the hour and a half through blissfully empty Sevierville/Pigeon Forge/Gatlinburg and up to Clingman's Dome, from where you can hike a moderate 2 miles to Andrew's Bald, a grassy peak at the end of a ridge-line.

The ascent to Newfound Gap on 441 was a harrowing, fog-shrouded adventure, but I did make it to a nearly deserted parking lot at Clingman's Dome, where the wind was driving endless fog banks over the mountain and making 60F feel a lot colder. If there's a recurring theme to my pre-dawn excursions, it's that I always underestimate how cold it'll be, but luckily I had a blanket in the back of the car and fashioned it into an impromptu poncho before hitting the trail.

I clicked on my headlamp, and the first thing it illuminated was a sign on the trailhead marker warning of "aggressive bear activity" in the area. Just what you want to read before setting off into the darkness where every shadow becomes a snarling maw and every startled bird sounds an awful lot like a charging death-machine. To add inconvenience to paranoia, the first mile of the trail is pretty much a creek bed, littered with slick ankle-breakers and mud.

I arrived at the bald around 6:15, with dawn threatening to break, so I hurried and scouted out its eastern side for a good vantage point, but the best I could find was a gap in the skeletal limbs of a blighted tree. Oh well, I should probably do better research on visibility next time. I shot for an hour or so, then headed back up the trail a little disappointed.

Maybe 5 minutes later I stopped to try to identify a strange clucking that was emanating from the woods to my right, when a partridge waddled onto the path about 5 feet in front of me. It didn't seem phased by me at all, and continued its promenade across the trail and back into the woods. If the fowl hadn't made me pause, I wouldn't have noticed the spectacular beams of sunlight shooting between the trees and gotten some of my favorite images of the trip. This too seems to follow the pattern of my sunrise outings in that I usually find the best subjects on the way back to the car after I've "given up".

By the time I made it back up to the parking lot, tourists were beginning to file in, probably to make the half mile trek to the Clingman's Dome observation tower only to find panoramic views of the inside of a cloud. I stopped at Smoky Mountain Knife Works in Sevierville on the way home and bought a tantalizingly cheap Mora Craftline because it just looked so darn utilitarian.

Now I'm gonna go catch up on this sleep deficit. Anybody down for sun-up tomorrow??

a hill of beans

Beeeeeeeeeans! From the garden.

Good news for my lungs. And photos.

Guess who doesn't have tuberculosis? This guy.

Had to get tested for working at Beardsley Community Farm and handling "produce intended for human consumption". Ironic since they used to call TB "consumption" back in the day. At any rate, the TB skin test is one of the grosser things I've experienced lately. They take a tiny syringe and inject it just beneath the surface of the skin on your forearm, and inflate a penny-sized bubble under your skin. Gross.

In other news, I went by Thompson Photo here in Knoxville when I got back from the roadtrip and picked up my processed 120 film. I was really excited to see how it turned out since I'd never used this camera before and never used color medium format film.

They're all square-format, 6x6cm negatives, and I had them scan them onto a CD for me, so I won't be sure of the quality of the negatives until I get something printed. I was pretty pleased with them overall, even though there were light-leaks on a few frames and the color seems a bit off.

I may try to get the next roll cross-processed, meaning have it processed in the chemicals intended for a different type of film. From what I've seen, cross-processed color negative film (what I have currently) comes out with lots of red/orange shading to it and can be a pretty cool effect.

I'll probably try some dual-exposure stuff too, now that I'm more comfortable with the camera and film, so look out for that in the future. I have one roll of film from the roadtrip that I'll probably just have processed normally.

Plants know what they're doing.

It would appear that the trick to a self-sustaining home container garden is to let your landlord install a sprinkler system, position your containers strategically, then leave town for a couple weeks.

I had been getting kinda nervous about the state of my meager stand of veggies as I drove around the midwest, from one "excessive heat warning" to another, and I hoped that no one had re-positioned the lawn sprinklers that had been so graciously sharing their bounty with my garden.

The first thing I noticed when I pulled back into Eleanor St. after two weeks away was a gigantic frenzy of vines floating at the top of my bean trellises. Luckily they were actually the Tennessee Cornfield beans, and not some volunteer weed from the flower bed. And what was that, hiding under the canopy of vines? Could it be a tomato? Indeed, each of my mystery tomato plants now bears a single fruit whom I have named Abraham & Sarah, in hopes that they will be the first of many blessed tomatoes.

The potatoes are doing fine. I guess. Won't really know until I dig them up. Mustard greens are harvestable and boy do they pack a punch. The broccoli is still sterile, not much hope for them.

Also found this guy crawling around on the beans and thought he might appreciate a photo-shoot.

The other thing I was a little hesitant to abandon for two weeks was my kombucha scoby. I didn't have the supplies on hand to prepare a full batch for it to work on while I was away, so I just left it in a couple inches of leftover tea with a bunch of sugar and crossed my fingers. I guess it appreciated my effort, since the culture was twice as thick (about 3 inches) when I got back.

I went ahead and split it since it actually tore while I was trying to get it out of the jar. I've been trying to think of new experiments to try with it, instead of just using the standard black tea + sugar combination, so I brewed up a couple quarts of super-concentrated bissap (a Senegalese drink made from hibiscus flowers and LOTS of sugar, similar to agua de flor de jamaica in Central America) and plopped the thinned-down scoby on top. Fingers crossed.

The end of the road(trip)

And then I went to Texas, and then I went to Knoxville.

The End.

The Heartland = The Heatland

7-10-11 Cheney, KS

Decided not to go to church in Menno this morning. Woke up early and got itchy feet to get on the road after a quick dip in the lake. Morning at Menno Lake brought with it the unwelcome surprise of biting flies which left me with a dozen welts and hastened my retreat.

I know I was only there for a day, but I was content with the visit and feel like I got what I came for, so I set my sights for Kansas and waved goodbye to a sleepy farm town that isn't really all that different from 100 years ago. Friendly, hard-working people; a real Main St.; beautiful, rolling plains ripe for the plow.

I had no real illusions about Nebraska taking my breath away, and was thoroughly unimpressed with the entire length of it that I witnessed, save a charming Mexican restaurant, El Pueblito, in Columbus. Nebraska really does exemplify the flatness you probably associate with the Great Plains, whereas the portions of South Dakota and Kansas I've seen so far feature undulating waves of yellow and green speckled with evergreens.

So yeah, Kansas was an improvement, but with the scenery came blazing heat. 107F where I'm gonna be camping tonight, but with a steady, hot breeze that beats the stagnant mugginess of Lake Menno.

I found a great little local coffee shop in Hutchinson, where I plan to visit the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center tomorrow, and they graciously let me absorb some of their AC, wifi, and iced tea (note I said iced tea, and not sweet tea...barbarians) for a few hours while the sun went off to persecute other longitudes.

The campsite I had checked out online was about half an hour away, on another lake, and turned out to be pretty well developed and comfortable. I explored the beach, startling all manner of wildlife (toads, beaver, herons, deer), and now I'm sitting in my flimsy mesh tent hoping the owner of those large canine paw-prints doesn't return.

soon. i promise.

I'm sorry. I didn't forget about updates, I just haven't found the time to edit photos and whatnot since I made it to Texas. So you'll probably get a whole bunch of updates in a row when I make it back to Knoxville.

The plains. They're pretty great.

7-9-11 - Menno, SD

It's hot. Still 95F at 9pm. Not to mention that breeze that nearly blew me off the road the whole way here has up and vanished. Probably because this lake is in a bowl of sorts. Definitely sneaks up on you. I was following the directions and thinking, "It's completely flat out here, where are they hiding a lake?" But then you drop into a little gully and there it is: a nice little lake tucked into a hilly depression. From down at the shore, south-east South Dakota boasts gently rolling hills covered with a blanket of yellow and green tall grass, with stands of evergreens speckled throughout. Not bad. But from highway-level, it's flat as paper, adorned with the same corn/soy motif as Iowa and no doubt the rest of the midwest I have yet to traverse.

I rolled into Menno about 3:30pm this afternoon (Sat.), brimming with anticipation. Realistically I knew I wasn't about to discover long-lost celebrity relatives or stumble across a family fortune, but it's still exciting knowing that my flesh & blood was and is so rooted into the character and history of this midwest "nowhere" town.

Not surprisingly, the Menno Heritage Museum was closed. There was a list of phone numbers (including a Cindy Aisenbrey) on the door, but I had no reception, and didn't feel like rousing someone from an afternoon nap so I could look at turn-of-the-century cookware. I grabbed my camera and ambled down 5th Ave (more of a 'Main St' than the actual Main St) snapping nondescript touristy images.

The Schnitz (a 5-star dining establishment, no doubt) was closed. The Open Door Cafe didn't live up to its name. I wandered into a confusingly-labeled shop, filled with vhs tapes and fridges full of home-grown produce. The couple behind the counter struck up a conversation and ended up being a repository of information as to the history of Menno, and the Aisenbrey family. We chatted for half an hour, and they gave me phone numbers for resident Aisenbreys, and directions to an old cemetery out of town they thought might feature some Aisenbrey tombstones. Apparently the fence had been moved in when the church changed locations, evicting the long-since rotted wooden crosses that marked the graves of my great-great grandfather, Christian Aisenbrey, and his father, who now lie under row after row of soybeans. Maybe they would've liked it that way.

I located a couple other family-members I'll have to look up later, but the bugs were relentless, and the South Dakota sun was starting to forego the cloud-cover it had graced me with thus far.

[and now I have to go brave the swarms of no-see-em's and shoot the sun setting over the lake. BRB. . . . Worst. Bugs. Ever. Non-stop onslaught until I made it back to the tent. Gorgeous sunset though. Probably gonna miss some of the good post-sunset light, but I wasn't about to let those bugs lay eggs in my ears.]

So back to the story. I headed back into town in hopes that the Open Door or the Bier Garden would be open, but alas, one out-of-towner must not warrant opening the whole store on a Saturday afternoon. So, having seen what there was to see in town, I headed off to the lake to scout out a campsite. I guess I shouldn't have been surprised that there were so many people at the lake (which is really just a dammed river/glorified pond) given the heat, but luckily there was still one camper spot open, so I hurriedly set up my tent and retreated, once again, to its bug-proof-ness, only to sweat my ass off while trying to read.

One hour and a gallon of sweat later, I gave up and set out to find dinner in the next town over, since every door in Menno is apparently locked on Saturdays. Olivet, SD may have played big brother to Menno back in 1900, but as of July 9, 2011, its population is soaring at 63, with a grand total of zero restaurants. Back to Menno, and the sole gas station convenience store. Unfortunate.

Now I'm back in the tent, still sweating with no sign of a breeze. Guess I'm gonna try out one of the local churches tomorrow morning, then head out for Hutchinson/Wichita, KS tomorrow afternoon. Supposed to be hotter down there. Hooray.

P.S. - Lady in yellow tanktop, from air conditioned motor home just invited me to join them for fireworks in honor of her 40th birthday. Many happy returns.