Hi. How’ve you been? I haven’t written anything here in two weeks, but it seems like it was yesterday. Here are some pictures to catch you up on the last few days.

One day it rained. We had flowers in bloom and the petals of this one caught a lot of water. I thought that was pretty, so I tried, and failed, to capture it:

We had great chicken biscuits from Plucked Up, a hipster chicken joint (of all things), a Columbus restaurant on the recommendation of a stranger. She did not steer us wrong:

The homemade biscuit had a spicy pineapple marmalade.

The Yankee made homemade pasta. It was so delicious we dried a little bit for later:

So we’ll be getting a pasta maker soon, I suspect.

I made a small light diffuser box, which was the second most fun thing I did in the last two weeks. The first two or three things I shot in it were cat toys, because they were nearby. Now I’m wandering around looking for small things to photograph.

Here’s an Franklin D. Roosevelt – John Garner pin, from Green Duck Co., Chicago, circa 1933 or 1937. Garner helped push FDR’s New Deal legislation through Congress, but “Cactus Jack” and the president would clash over policy during the Depression. Garner also believed Roosevelt should not seek a third term and challenged FDR for the 1940 Democratic presidential nomination. Dropped by Roosevelt and beaten, Garner left D.C. in 1941 after four hugely successful decades, promising to never cross the Potomac again, and he never did.

And here’s a Unigate milk bottle featuring an ad for a shopping center in South London. It’ll run you about £6 on eBay. I got it because I liked the graphics and I asked nicely at a cafe. Milk bottles, it turns out, have become a big nostalgia item in England.

The most exciting thing I’ve done in the past two weeks was to take a 30+ mile bike ride on my new Specialized which had at least three categorized climbs on it. And I got to do it chasing The Yankee across state lines.

She took these pictures near the end of that ride:

And to wrap up the exercise for July:

If I’m going to eat chicken biscuits with spicy pineapple marmalade I need to exercise more than that.