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Hope you had a great one Adam! Cheers!

Two meals from the new year. First up is a chicken dish from Samin Nosrat's Good Things cookbook. I don't think I've ever had a cookbook recipe come out looking this close to the photo. It was also delicious, along with the saffron rice Claire made and a Samin salad with tomatoes, cucumbers and quick pickled red onion. Last night was the first pizza of 2026, in the form to a Detroit style with pepperoni, red bell pepper and mushroom. I need to find a local source for brick cheese.

I wish there were a travel team. But Red Oxx isn't a true prerequisite if you can kickstart it back into being.

LOL, Internet Storm Center didn't have anything on it at the time that I posted. Try this instead: Check Point Research

You quit...Amazon?!?!?

Quit. Do I need a Red Oxx bag to join the Travel Team or what?

In the last 36(ish) hours I flew out to Denver and back to check in on a friend that had a particularly rough second half of 2025 along with three other friends. When we learned he wasn't going to be able to come out east during the holidays we decided it was time to head west. So yesterday I got up at 4am, drove through the snow to Boston, hung out for 24hrs and flew back this evening. I am, exhausted.

VPI in a Lexus commercial

Couple of coats of high temp engine paint. Looks like poop, but it is protected and ready to go. Ran it at max temp for a while to cook of any vapors, then smoked a salmon. I'm back...

Thanks - missed it, but good to know it is out there, I will have to keep an eye out.

Ex.

Bookish (PBS) - getting my Brit-TV fix with this new series starring Mark Gatiss & Polly Walker (#crush!) as store proprietors by day/crime sleuths by night "hubby & wife" (quotes intentional) in this series set in set in post-WWII London. British accents as thick as molasses, using the vernacular of the time, all require intense concentration, but worth it. By the by, young Buket Komur is one to watch as an up-&-comer in the biz, imo.

Spent the weekend my Father and friends' cabin without the phone and any electric device beside a the lamp. Got cold. Not my cup of tea tbh. At least not in winter.

Happy belated Birthday, Grahame!

Not an expensive watch, or particularly horological interesting, but I missed having one. It’s a lot of watch for the money. No more watches; I have enough.

Didn't realize you were that old. 🙃

I'm going to have a belated b-day biscuit for you!

What do you normally shoot, Nate? Keep in mind that Lightroom/Photoshop still doesn't have full RAW support for the camera, which is quite annoying - I have about 5 days of images from winter break that I can't edit. I only found out about the one RAW format that Lightroom has beta support for. Not enough of a reason to avoid the camera - just mentioning it so you aren't similarly annoyed. I went from a not-very-good AF system (by today's standards) in the D810 to one of the best in the A7V. I nearly pulled the trigger on a Z6III around Thanksgiving so I could use the couple of Nikon lenses I already had, but the 30 fps and better AF pulled me over to the Sony side. I missed a lot of shots with the D810 when trying to capture my fast-moving niece. She just turned 4 a month ago, and the A7V was fantastic, keeping up with her fast-twitch movements. The pre-capture feature was great and certainly made up for my lack of skill. The D810 remains exceptionally capable in decent light for landscapes or scenes where AF speed/tracking isn't a priority, but with two more babies expected to join the family this year, I figured an upgrade would make my life easier in the coming years. The A7V also seems to do much better in low-light situations - I find I can push to higher ISOs before noise becomes an issue. Depending on what you intend to capture and how, the A7V might not be as much of an upgrade over the A7IV. For me, the upgrade was much more pronounced, and I am quite pleased with the purchase. I don't do much with video, so I didn't care as much for the hoopla around closed/open gate sensors. Last December, the D810 said Zara's left eye was in focus here, but obviously, it wasn't. Also with the D810, got lucky. And OOF again. Definitely pushing the limits of the D800 in difficult light. The noise/grain is obvious when pixel-peeping. I actually don't mind it as much in this image, but there were times when I did. Another one where I don't mind the grain. Here are some more where I feel like better AF, dynamic range, and noise performance would have helped capture what I wanted to. Some more from the Illumina Lantern Festival taken with the A7V. Exceptionally clean images. Some with the Batis 85mm (AF) and others with the Voigtlander 35mm (MF). It's no Leica, but Sony really does a fantastic job of working with manual lenses. I love their implementation of focus peaking.

RIP Ralph Towner....he was a great one 😪

Revisiting the music of my early childhood

Few more from the SSD