Ready to go off road

My new bike

Four days before the one-year anniversary of my Cannondale R700 road bike, I bought a Specialized Stumpjumper mountain bike yesterday. Now I can finally go bicycling in Nordmarka (the forest north of Oslo)!

To the sea

Me underwater

Last weekend I visited my mum at her cabin near Fredrikstad. As in May, I went by bike. But opposed to last time, this time I also returned home by bike.

My mum's brother has a cabin next to hers, and together with his family we visited "Søsterøyene" (the sister islands) and chilled off in the nice water. There, I tried my uncle's diving mask and snorkel--my first attempt at using a snorkel since I was a kid and swallowed our whole swimming pool through one. With this dramatically improved underwater vision, I finally managed to take a couple of fair underwater pictures--though at the cost of a salty refill...

At great pleasure for the local seagulls, I also went fishing for mackerel with my cousin and his girlfriend, which turned out very successful to both humans and birds--as long as we don't consider the lives of 31 small mackerels a major loss.

Talking about the sea: Yello has a song titled "To the sea" (featuring screaming seagulls and splashing waves and everything) on their album Pocket Universe. The song comes in a normal and a remixed version, of which I believe the remix is a perfect match for spinning--when the outdoor bicycling season ends.

Moving on to HDR photography?

Today, Arnljot sent me a link to an interesting article about High Dynamic Range (HDR) photography. In brief, the concept is to take multiple pictures of the same (unchanged) scene at different exposures, and use special software to render a picture that captures details in both bright and dark areas.

I'm definitely gonna give this a try, and hopefully come out with results good enough to be uploaded to flickr.

Frozen strawberry margarita

Wrapping up the strawberry season, I have concluded on a nice way of blending a frozen strawberry margarita.

Serves two:

• 5 dl fresh strawberries (without the husk)
  
• 5 dl crushed ice
• 1 tbsp sugar
• 4 cl tequila
• 2 cl Cointreau
• 2 cl fresh lime juice (about half a lime)

Put everything in a blender, and blend to a fine pulp. Add sugar to sweeten, lime to freshen.

Enjoy!

PS. Sorry for the missing picture--I was too thirsty to stop for photographing the drinks...

The truth

Reading a document on internet browser statistics, I came across a quote at the end of the document:

"The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple"

Oscar Wilde