I'm back from holiday now and just about adjusted to the local time zone.
There were professional photographers on the mountain taking photos of everybody coming down one of the runs. I've just been poring through the pictures on their website and found myself:
I'm not quite ready to pay the $35 they want for a 5x7 print so I guess I'll just have to settle for these thumbnail versions...
We went for a drive around Lake Tahoe the day before yesterday in the Durango and, surprisingly, survived some of the dodgy roads.
We stopped at a little snow-covered beach called Sand Harbor for a cheeky photo opportunity and I wanted to try the new (free) Photosynth software from Microsoft - you basically take a load of overlapping photos of a scene and then upload them to a site which stitches them together into a continuous, scrollable image. Well, sort of...
You need to download and install the Photosynth client to make it work, but here's my synth of Sand Harbour (click and drag to scroll the camera angle):
If that doesn't work or you don't want to download the client, here's a Flickr folder with the images in. (Incidentally, Flickr has recently started letting you create unlimited sets on free accounts).
I'm in the middle of a snowboarding holiday at the moment and since most of the gondolas are closed today I thought I'd tell you a little bit about our hire car.
It's a Dodge Durango (see below) which boasts a spectacular 13mpg fuel consumption, and a top speed of about 70mph, if you dare take it up that far.
I'm not the one driving but I'm reliably informed it handles about as well as a small barge. In fact, there's even a warning on the driver's-side sun visor:
All-in-all, not the most reasurring thing to see when you've got a drop like this by the side of the road:
The scenery *is* pretty spectacular though if you can take your mind off the car's interesting handling quirks for long enough to enjoy it. More photos to follow...
I made another cake last night - a desert island. There *was* going to be a palm tree on it as well but it didn't quite work out so there's just the not-so-buried treasure.
I shunned the traditional pink & yellow combination in favour of corporate colours. Extra brownie points with my client there :-). This one nearly didn't happen. I forgot I had cake class last night so I had to quickly bake a cake in 2 tins so it cooked quicker, then cut them both in half to cool down quicker as well. I also took some ice to class in a sandwich bag and cooled the separate cake layers individually with it when I got there. It took about 45 minutes to mix, bake, slice and then get to college. Then we only had about an hour in class yesterday so I had to make some buttercream to glue the layers together, coat it in marzipan, colour the icing, roll it and cover the cake and then clean up after myself. Thankfully, I just about finished in time but it was all a bit of a rush.
I've been waking up in the morning lately and the first thing that's been popping into my head is "a cake, right, in the shape of a watermelon", so I made this in the hope it would make the voices go away...
The stripes on the icing are something called "lustre dust" - it's a very fine powder a bit like poster paint powder, but edible. You can either mix it with water (or vodka if you prefer) to create a liquid paint or just brush it on dry, which is what I did to get the mottled effect. I put a cheeky little surprise inside the cake - yay for red food colouring! I also bunged a handful of raisins into the cake mix to represent the watermelon seeds. Hopefully that'll make my mornings a little less obsessive, at least until the voices start whispering the next design. I'm turning into a cake-baking puppet to my subconscious :-(
I'm breaking the first rule of Scrap Club by talking about it here. I'm also breaking the second rule but, well, in for a penny, in for a pound...
My brother got tickets for an event on Saturday in a semi-legal event space behind Peckham Library. It's basically an abandoned workshop - think what a Kwik-Fit or similar would look like if you removed all the equipment and interior partitions.
When you get there the first thing you see is a great big pile of broken office equipment and kitchen goods like so:
The second thing you see is a bull pen made from railings, and a table with hard hats, safety goggles, gloves and loads of hammers, pipes and crowbars...
The rest of what happens should be obvious, but just in case anyone isn't sure:
and
There were about a hundred people there so it gets split into 10-minute sessions with about 8 people in the ring at a time. Here's my brother taking a filing cabinet to task:
and me following up on it in the very next session (I'm the one in mid-swing):
There wasn't much left of it by the time we were done with it:
All of this was accompanied by a live electro-band making weird deconstructed industrial ploinking and blooping noises on some rewired keyboards. I got some video as well which I'll post as soon as I've bothered to set up a YouTube account.
The whole thing was very odd. Once you get into full flow you kind of lose track of what's going on around you - there's just you, a hammer and whatever you're hitting. You sort of zone-out and get obsessed with smashing up whatever your target is, and you end up with a stupid grin when it's all over.
They only do a few of these events a year, so check the site for the next one. I'll be keeping an eye out for it and trying to get tickets for sure.
"You come in here, giving it all that..."
I shunned the traditional pink & yellow combination in favour of corporate colours. Extra brownie points with my client there :-).
This one nearly didn't happen. I forgot I had cake class last night so I had to quickly bake a cake in 2 tins so it cooked quicker, then cut them both in half to cool down quicker as well. I also took some ice to class in a sandwich bag and cooled the separate cake layers individually with it when I got there. It took about 45 minutes to mix, bake, slice and then get to college. Then we only had about an hour in class yesterday so I had to make some buttercream to glue the layers together, coat it in marzipan, colour the icing, roll it and cover the cake and then clean up after myself. Thankfully, I just about finished in time but it was all a bit of a rush.
The stripes on the icing are something called "lustre dust" - it's a very fine powder a bit like poster paint powder, but edible. You can either mix it with water (or vodka if you prefer) to create a liquid paint or just brush it on dry, which is what I did to get the mottled effect. 
I put a cheeky little surprise inside the cake - yay for red food colouring! I also bunged a handful of raisins into the cake mix to represent the watermelon seeds. 
