One thing I have a new appreciation for as I finish my Whole30 month of eating very, very specifically, is good espresso. My go-do drink is a cappuccino, and I’ll certainly come back to those, but I’ve found great pleasure in a well-made espresso this month. I’ve enjoyed improving my home espresso craft along the way, too.

Taking a walk on a very windy lunchtime.

I keep meaning to post a photo of breakfast at my favorite local joint, the Tourist Home. So, here you go.

Statistically, winters in Flagstaff average fifty inches of snow, and in practice we’re used to that meaning that some winters we really get dumped on, and other winters see rather little snow. The first winter we spent here brought us only a few storms, but since then we’ve had some pretty good seasons, including the whopper of a winter of 2010, when a four-day span dropped five feet of snow on us. That winter I was lucky enough to buy one of the last unsold snowblowers in town and just barely keep up with the storm.

This year we had the longest winter-time dry spell on record, ever: Over thirty days without so much as a whiff of precipitation. So the whole town was buzzing over the prospect of the storm that came through late this week and into the weekend. Reports are that it brought a couple of feet to the San Francisco Peaks, and we got wonderful rain here in town, where it stayed just too warm for it to fall as snow except for a brief period overnight.

I got out around town for an hour or so between storms, looking for good puddles, stormy light, and view of some of my favorite downtown scenes, as well as some new alleyway nooks and crannies.

The view toward the Monte Vista from the south side is one of the iconic pictures of this town, and it’s easy to see why. I can’t resist checking it out nearly every time I walk that direction. This night, the late sun poked through the clouds at just about the right time.

Downtown has a lot of streets at odd angles to one another, old gravel lots, and a mix of new and old construction — churches next door to motels next door to restaurants, and almost everywhere a view of the train tracks or buildings that once housed businesses related to the trains. The neighborhoods are home to small, old homes in different stages of repair, depending on how long they have served as rental housing for NAU students. I enjoy the mix of home construction, some of which shows a strong southwestern influence with Adobe and tile, while other homes are in the mountain town style of clapboard, shingles, corrugated metals. There’s one fascinating house downtown built out of converted shipping containers. Last night, there were some fun puddles to be found, shining up the late evening light.

I made it back to the car just as the storm really opened up again, cold hands flexing in the car after holding the camera in the wind and incipient rain — turning to slush and snow as the temperature dropped in the last block that I pulled up my hood, stuffed the camera back in the bag and made for the car.

A VSCO note

My photo walk was in part inspired by the need to get out of the house, and in part by Michael Laroque’s “Addicted” — VSCO Film 05 writeup. I really love Michael’s photography, and his discussion of Film 05 (I have Film 04 and Film 02, already) prompted me to pick it up after hedging for a few days — do I really need it?, I wondered. Michael knows that the point of these preset collections isn’t to make every photo look the same, but to find some inspiration in the looks they offer:

But it does mean I get to play with a new toolbox and with each and every release, some of the new emulations have triggered ideas, or found their way into my workflow in some shape or form. In many ways it’s like buying a great photography book… It inspires and shakes the status quo even if you don’t end up copying everything you’ve seen.

So, no, I don’t need it, and as a hobbyist I’m not going to make any money or anything. But I like them, and as I’ve mentioned previously, the film packs don’t take me back to my golden days of shooting film (though they do make me think about how long I spent shooting 35mm film in an automatic camera without thinking a moment about it); they help me find moods or textures or ideas that I might not have otherwise. So as someone who just enjoys this, it’s easily worth the price.

One of the things I really enjoyed last year was picking up photography again, reinvogorated by a new camera and its creative potential. By far the favorite photos I made through the year, regardless of camera, are of my wife and our preschool son, but those are just for us. These are a bakers’ dozen, particularly memorable for entirely arbitrary reasons, from among the rest.

A brief exchange about pho over on App.net last week brought on a craving I couldn’t ignore. I really love Pho, especially in the wintertime when spicy, savory and aromatic broth feels just right. (To be honest, it’s great any time, of course. But it’s the kind of thing that feels particularly full of vitality when it’s cold and the sun still goes down early as it does the first week of January.) My mountain town has had a couple of Vietnamese restaurants come and go, and while the current one is hanging on it’s not really anything special. So after having had this vegetarian Pho recipe stored on pinboard for more than a year, I went for it.

The broth is vegetarian except for the optional fish sauce. I’m not vegetarian and intended to put steak in anyway, so I kept the fish sauce for a little bit more funk and saltiness. While the list of ingredients initially was off-putting in its length, it’s really not so bad, and the prep was easy because everything goes into a big pot in big chunks (including the garlic, no peeling required).

After a couple of hours simmering, the whole pot gets finely strained and you have this cinnamon- or mushroom-colored broth. It’s really lovely. We ladled it over medium-rare bison steak and garnished with bean sprouts, basil, peppers, lime and scallions. It was everything I was hoping for: Spicy from the fresh peppers and ginger and headily aromatic with anise, with just a bit of sweet balance coming from the turnip and depth from the mushrooms. Really good pho at home, I’m a believer.

By the way, I decided to put the bison steak in partly because a) I had it, but mostly b) I wanted to call this buff-pho-lo.

We’re home again after about a week traveling northbound to my parents’ house for Christmas. All in all, I’m exhausted. But it was a great trip, full of some wonderful memories: my son’s first time skiing (about which I can just say joy and glee and miles-wide grins) which I will remember for the rest of my life; meeting my new nephew for the first time; seeing many family and school friends for the first time in years; the way my son was perfectly happy — more than happy, content and Merry — with the very first present he found for himself under the tree, no expectations of more but then there’s more OMG (because of course there was, thanks, grandma and grandpa); feeding my nephew and rocking him to sleep; my wife being ill for most of the trip, sitting together quietly after the house had gone to sleep.

Recognizing in my son that these memories are forming for him, too, that he will remember pieces of the last week as he goes on through his own life, an evolving story that will one day be all his own.

Bring it on, 2014.

Since buying the VSCO Film Pack 04 I’ve been post processing a lot of photos, and I am starting to get a feel for what I like and what seems to work well with the kinds of photos I enjoy shooting — and liking the results enough that I sprung for Film Pack 02 when it was on sale recently.

Working on some photo books over the weekend, I revisited some photos I made with my previous “big” camera, a now almost seven years-old DSLR that was my starting point for all of this hobbyist interest in photography. I have a shelf full of lenses and am deeply fond of many of the photos that came from them over the years, and proud of some of them, too. I picked up that camera for the first time in a while this weekend, organizing and cleaning up some bookshelves — It’s heavy. I had forgotten. I am so used to the weight and heft of the X100s, the feel of the shutter, and that big optical viewfinder, I think it would be hard to go back. I love its output and I love to use it.

A good tool encourages its user to explore its capabilities, to learn to be most effective or creative or (day I say) productive. This camera rewards my efforts to get better. I don’t have illusions about being a good photographer because I have a nice camera, but having a camera that makes even my hobby shooting feel like something that approaches a craft gives me a great incentive to learn and improve — and it’s a real kick.

Making the leap to Mavericks on my home MacBook Pro prompted me to think some about the dramatically different computing environments between my home and work. But that’s still a drafty post, so here are some autumn timey photos that I like, including the seasonally-required autumn leaves photos.

We also have a good new coffee shop in town that I quite enjoy:

Some photos from a jaunt around this year’s Route 66 Days car show. We picked a good time to explore it; our monsoon weather returned early in the afternoon and kept us bottled up inside for most of the rest of the day.