sarah in nyc

THIS was the view from my window this morning as opposed to the terrifying orange of two days ago. Air quality isn't perfect yet, so I have spent the day indoors. My tiny adventure out of the house yesterday left me with a terrible headache. It's Friday, so that means a cookign and baking day. It was a challah baking week. Before I shaped the challot I reminded my husband of his religious obligation to bug me and remind me to take challah. The book my husband bought me with ALL of the rules of taking challah spends a great deal of time going through how big a piece of dough must be taken from the main dough to qualify as a כזית, the size of an olive. I just lop off a piece that is the size of a really big olive and don't get into the madness of people who never saw an olive determining that a כזית could possibly be the size of a baseball or a watermelon. I know that common practice is to wrap the dough bit in foil and toss it into the oven while the actual challah bakes. I ...

My childhood friend Rachely has a new phone with a camera and has been posting beautiful nature photos mostly from her neighborhood on Facebook. Her lovely photos have sparked a conversation between Rachely and her friends  about honesty and photo editing. I have been using a digital camera for a long time now. One of my frustrations with a digital camera, actually with cameras, in general, is that they don't always capture what your eye is seeing. I might be drawn to take a photo because of a particularly beautiful quality of light. Once I take the photo the quality that drew my eye, might be missing in the photo. I feel that this is an honest use of photo editing. With the magic of photo editing, I can show what it was that my eye actually saw. I have also discovered over time that while digital cameras are wonderful, they have fairly limited digital brains. I bump up to the limited abilities of my digital camera when photographing some of my work. ...