Strangers Asking for a Photo Over years of traveling, it's not uncommon for people to come up to me and want to take a selfie with me because of my features. This is especially common in most of Southeast Asia. I'm always happy to let people take a photo with me with the caveat that I get to take a selfie of us too. This is a collection of some of those photos from around the world.

Visiting with Friends in Austin I had a lot of friends to visit with in Austin and wound up spending a lot of time helping Ann and Abbi with their dogs. I also made sure that everything around the house was in good form for the upcoming winter months.

Strapping Atti to my EKG Since I was gifted an EKG for Christmas (or pre-Christmas, really), but never really had many opportunities to play with it, I've recently been working to figure out the inner workings of it a little better. As Rachel is a nurse, she was able to help me to understand some of the nuances a little bit better and of course was also a willing volunteer. While playing with it, I got curious if they use the same EKGs on animals and after some quick Google searching, it turns out that they do. The leads are just configured a little differently. So we did some research and figured out specifically which leads are used for dogs and where they're specifically attached. While we got some basic readings from the machine, we couldn't get a consistent heart rhythm on Atti and figured that it had to do with her thick fur. I should note that Atti was a surprisingly calm patient. One of Rachel's sisters is a veterinarian and so she is going to ask her what we're doing wrong, but I'm determined to see Atti's heart rhythm now.

Walnut Art Easel Building Rachel had been talking about getting a proper easel so that she can do her drawings with a proper setup. She looked up a handful of YouTube / TikTok woodworkers who each had their own slightly different version. I took a few ideas and came up with a way to build the easel. So I took Rachel up to Woodcraft so that she could pick out the base wood. She went with Peruvian Walnut - an absolutely beautiful selection. So I hand picked two different boards and got to work.

Proper Hair Coloring My last effort to blue my own hair worked, but was also a huge pain in the ass and made a bit of a mess. Plus, I really didn't do that wonderful of a job with it. Rachel was pretty excited with the prospect of getting to do my hair. She isn't a hair stylist or anything like that, but as an artist has a pretty amazing ability to visualize colors, textures, and the like. And of course from my own point of view, the worst thing that would happen is that I'd have to wait for my hair to grow back out. Thankfully, however, that won't be necessary as she did an absolutely spectacular job. ...despite the fact that I only had a full sized paintbrush and baking foil instead of the much thinner aluminum foil sheets (typically used for hair coloring). She's been reading up on how to properly bleach hair that's already been colored with blue dyes and I'm guessing that project is around the corner.

Easel Leg Sample Piece I was trying to explain to Rachel exactly what my idea was for the easel legs that I've been working on. It's been a fun process since she's been eager to learn some woodworking and I'm all too happy to teach. So I took a small piece of the remaining walnut, performed a 1/4" deep dado cut down the center line, and fit it with a matching piece of pine. The pine was glued into the dado cut, clamped, and left to dry overnight. The next day I showed her how to make the various cuts so that the two pieces would appear as one. I didn't spend the same amount of time that I will for the actual project this is part of, but I also showed her how the various sanding efforts will go. I went through 220, 320, 600, and 1200 grit sandpapers and then used my mystery oil. The end result was phenomenal and that's just with a cheap piece of pine scrapwood. I'm planning to purchase some kind of maple to inlay the walnut with.

Pork Tenderloin with Salt Encrusted Potatoes Since I spent the end of 2021 teaching myself to be much better at cooking, I'm always on the lookout for a new recipe. The internet is full of them. I came across a cooking video on TikTok explaining how to make salt encrusted baked potatoes. Oh wow. They were absolutely amazing! But since I wanted to cook them, I needed to come up with a meal. So I whipped up a delicious pork tenderloin, sautéed some pears to go with them, and then made the salt encrusted potatoes as a side. The plated meal wasn't much to look at (since it was mostly all dark colors), but the taste of everything was just incredible. Since the recipe for the potatoes called for 6 egg whites, I had 6 yolks left over. So I decided to make some egg yolk cookies. They all came out amazingly well, but the jelly ones were SO good that we had to make another batch.

Withdrawl There are some texts displaying in the screen about the with drawal. Ludlow: (shooting guard) Hurry up bitch, move it. Jeff S: (with AK-47) Holy shit Ludlow, what did you do? victims: Guard E. Perooz, Erica Harris (paralized from waist down - bullets severed spinal cord), Joseph Welch (man with watch, Rolex taken by Ludlow)

Short-Cut This picture is drawn with the hand and wrote some text above the persons images. Putt shoots out a door with a grenade launcher and shoots 4 guards (one survives - the woman). Robertson kills one guard with a shotgun who survived the fusillade from Putt's M-16. Ludlow, Nery, and Deanna rush into the doors to follow Steve and Putt. Only Nery survives from his camera crew and sound crew of eight people.

On The Subway A white male wearing a green polo with white stripes sitting next to a woman in an orange scoop neck shirt with three-quarter length sleeves with a green leather purse on a subway. subway Eric and Amy sitting on the subway.