Bouncing Jellies

Saw this on my IG feed today, posted by a momfluencer I followed until today. I was struck by the casual racism, the fact that so many people thought it was funny (rather than racist), and one of the comments on the post “Well I have the body of a Goddess - it just happens to be #buddha,” @doritosgirl21 (IG). I get it, “it’s just a joke,” and some people would say I’m being too sensitive. This struck home because I’m both Thai-American and Buddhist.

In case it’s not obvious, the implication here is that Thai people don’t care about our temples, and also that the Buddha has no care for his/her body, because that’s part of fat-phobic culture. If you’re fat, it’s because you don’t care about your body, are lazy, make bad choices, etc, etc. Ultimately, this kind of “humor” shows your ignorance and lack of care with how you express yourself. No one is perfect, I’m far from it myself. I try to take care with what I say and how I say it, and I make mistakes. On the other hand, someone who is a social media influencer, should probably take a moment to think about the things they post. I accidentally say something offensive or hurtful, it reaches a limited circle of people I know. What she posted, was liked by over 1500 people. She has over 87,000 followers, among them other social media influencers with thousands more followers. This casual racism gets amplified, and keeps it normalized. And as long as saying things like this is okay, then we’ll never be able to make serious headway with ending systemic racism.

I think this is Pieris japonica. I’m still playing around with the camera, to see what it can do and how it does it. This was taken in the early afternoon, overcast conditions, in the shade. The only edit is that I cropped it. It was taken in landscape, I cropped it to portrait.

Lens: RF35mm f/1.8 macro IS STM

The endangered Gray Wolf *Canis lupus*

Canon EOS R6

I got a new camera because I wanted a new lens. Canon released its RF 800mm f/11 IS STM lens and I was so excited to see that it wasn’t going to cost an arm and a leg, and an extended period of eating nothing but ramen in order to afford it. As you can see from its name, it’s an RF mount lens, meaning it wasn’t going to work with my DSLR, so I had to buy a new body. It was worth it. Canon’s other 800mm lens is an f/5.6L IS USM lens, all kinds of goodness, but also $12,999. I don’t make my living with my camera, so spending that on a lens that I wouldn’t even use all the time (800mm is not an every day lens) was a big no.

I took it out for a test run for the first time today. The f/11 means it’s going to work best on a relatively sunny day. Today we had partly cloudy, and where we went there was tree shade.

Pork Loin with Apple Cider and Rosemary

Ground beef stroganoff. After we managed to cook a chicken in the Instant Pot without blowing up the house, we figured we’d give it another shot. We like beef stroganoff, so we figured we’d give it a try. It’s one of those things we don’t make that often just because we don’t like messing with the mutliple dishes (pot for the noodles, pan for browning the meat, strainer). When we bought the Instant Pot, we got one cookbook to go with. I went through the recipes of the three books that were available at Costco at the time, and found the one with the most everyday things we’d likely want to eat (things we made at home anyway). I know many people just go it on their own, or find things on the internet, but since we’d never really cooked with a pressure cooker before, I wanted a book that would lay things out for me, and tell me what to expect (like how a pressure cooker works, and what to expect as it comes up to pressure and how long it takes). There’s nothing quite like staring at this machine that’s making weird noises, and wondering why it doesn’t appear to be doing anything.

So, what we found with this recipe is that after some quick prep, everything got cooked in the one pot. Brown the meat, add the onions and mushroom, sauté a bit more, pour in the broth, pour in the nooodles, moosh them a bit to get most of them submerged, and then pop the lid on and let the machine do it’s thing.