So, I’m a year older, or some such non­sense. I’ve always felt that birth­days as such were a silly thing, but I’ll take any excuse to celebrate.

This week­end, my fam­ily and I ate at the newly revi­tal­ized Johns. Some peo­ple have recently been orga­niz­ing iron-chef type com­pe­ti­tions between the chefs of the local fine din­ing restau­rants, and the Johns chef has so far been unde­feated. It was obvi­ous why. Every dish was beau­ti­ful, with a truly mas­ter­ful bal­ance of fla­vors, col­ors and tex­tures. On the day I can cook like that, I will for­ever be a happy man.

Some­time in the next week, I might also man­age to get my friends together for a meal. My mother has always said that birth­days should be cel­e­brated on no fewer than three occa­sions, and I’m fine with that.

Tonight, some friends and I made an apple pie. The dough was enor­mously dif­fi­cult (more so than ever before), but even­tu­ally we got the bot­tom and top crusts in the right place, mostly unbro­ken. It won’t be win­ning any beauty awards, but it smells great. It’s prob­a­bly cool enough to eat now, but I’m going to wait until I can buy some vanilla ice cream and enjoy it with friends.

fyre print

In other news, I finally have a real fyre print. About a year ago, Micah and I printed out some images on photo paper using an inkjet and hung them up all over the apart­ment. At the time, we joked that we should sell prints; the 8.5x11” print­outs looked good, but noth­ing spectacular.

This one is com­pletely dif­fer­ent. At 22″ square, it demands a lit­tle more atten­tion than a nor­mal sheet of paper. Printed at the guerilla stu­dio at SIGGRAPH and framed with lots of coupons, it turned out to be sur­pris­ingly inex­pen­sive. How­ever, look­ing at it up on my wall, I can eas­ily pic­ture it hang­ing up in a gallery with a weighty price tag next to it.