Miracle fruit party

Check it out, miracle fruit! It makes your taste buds freak out so sour things taste sweet to you. It lasts about 30 minutes. There is a way better scientific explanation for this but I am too lazy to hunt it down.




Alisha invited us over to take the miracle fruit tablets and partake in this really strange looking buffet. It was really fun to eat all this bitter citrus and have it taste like sweet citrus candy.



The tabasco sauce was a real trip! It was almost like a peppered maple syrup. Incredible!

More pictures at my flickr. Thanks to Alisha for letting us in on the experiment!

Tamal time!

For the past few years I've had an idle threat to teach some friends how to make tamales. Someone finally held me to it, so last week we gathered in my kitchen and made around 50 of them. Above, you see the chilies stuffed with cheese, waiting to be cradled in a tender bed of masa.



Here are the hojas we wrapped them in. It's funny that even though I have been making tamales with my family for the past 20 years or so, I mostly only prepare the masa on the hojas. A more experienced relative actually handles the rest of the process. When making them in my kitchen the other day and it finally came down to wrapping them up, I realized that I didn't really know what I was doing. Good thing for the internet!



Once in the pot, they were off and running.

Ultimately, they came out great! However, they are a lot of work and they take forever to make. This is why most folks only make them for holidays and special occasions. The tamal lady makes them because she has the time and she knows she can sell them to you for a nice profit. Hmm, maybe I should start taking orders.

Copyright infringement

Without naming names, though you can figure it out, a certain "sexpert" used a photo of mine on her blog without permission. A couple of emails were exchanged and a grand, gracious apology was delivered and now she's taken the picture off. This whole incident really got me down. Here's why. I'm kind of not a private person. Shy, sometimes. Insecure about my writing (that's why I generally don't share my blog), but not really private. I like having pictures of me and my family on the internet. It helps our out of town family and friends see what we're doing, where we've been and how that sweater they got Ira fits. I also like sharing recipes for things I cooked or things I've sewn. Maybe someone out there wants to make that, too and are just looking for a picture of it. Now that someone has taken a picture of MY CHILD out of context, without my permission and used it for something out of my control, I feel flustered and ultimately bummed out. So I'm sorry to say that I'm going to scale down access to my Flickr photostream. Not to worry, I think I've got all my Flickr contacts marked appropriately as "friend" or "family." Most of you will still be able to see our pictures. I didn't want to be the person who does this, no, I REALLY didn't want to be the person that does this, but for now it feels like the right thing to do. 99% of the time moms can be all over the internet with their kids, like "oh look he's trying on daddy's shoes," or some other garbage and they're fine. It just took one incident to cause me to not only get all mama bear, but to rethink how I put my kid out there, you know? If I can't control the pictures and can't live with the consequences, then I shouldn't make them public, right?

The worst part about it is that I think she lied to me. She said she found Ira's picture with the eyes blacked out on some other website. This is how I think it really went down: on Tuesday of last week, she favorited it from my photostream with intent to use it on her blog later. My Flickr stats don't lie! When I saw that it was favorited, I followed the links to her profile on Flickr to see if it was the real "sexpert" and it was. From there, I found her blog. Giving the benefit of doubt, I thought maybe she just said "hey, funny picture" and saved it. It's a funny picture, but even I know it's not that special, so I decided to keep tabs on it and see if she'd blog it. Sure enough, the next day it was there with the eyes blacked out. So I took the next couple of days to figure out how I felt about this whole thing and on Friday I emailed her to take it down. Finally on Monday I was able to reach her and get it sorted out though she insists that she found it that way and honestly doesn't know how she also found the original on Flickr. Come on, dude! I'm so not stupid. I'd rather just know that she downloaded it, altered it and then posted it. Instead, I'm tossing and turning at night wondering where else Ira is turning up on random websites!

Since I've changed every single picture of Ira on my Flickr to private, you might notice that a lot of my blog pictures no longer work. That's because I was frequently using the convenient "blog this" feature from Flickr. Apparently, you can't use "blog this" on private photos. Ugh! What a chore. Someday I'll go back and fix all those broken posts, but I just don't have the time right now. Thanks, picture stealer! I just want to put this whole thing behind me. I think the "sexpert" does, too. For what it's worth, she did seem to really regret posting the picture.