sarah sosiak

Where I’m Going / Where I’ve Been

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A few weeks ago, friends and I were talking about how far north/east/south/west we’d each travelled. I started plotting places on a map to figure out my extremes, then continued until I had a relatively* exhaustive map and started adding places I’d like to go.

My NESW extremes (as measured from San Francisco) are:

• North = Gullfoss, Iceland (64° 19′ 34″ N)
• East = Helsinki, Finland (24° 56′ 15″ E)
• South = Xelhá, Mexico (20°19'2.22"N)
• West = Honolulu, USA (157° 49′ 34″ W)

Legend:

* Major-metropolitan areas are collapsed to a single city, I still need to fill out California, and I’ve not included every city/town/village I’ve spent time in in Ontario or stopped in while driving the Trans-Canada Highway. (That would make for a rather long (and tedious) list. Assume most of Eastern Ontario and the larger places between Sydney, Nova Scotia and Edmonton, Alberta along the TCH.) I’ve also spent a night in a small ski-town in Austria whose name I don’t remember.

Wild Things

 

At the California Academy of Sciences.

Flickr Favourites - 2009

Favourite photos from 2009. Slideshow below (On Flickr):

Mixed Media

Composite of the car-turned-container-garden at Flora Grubb Gardens.

Happy 2010!

Happy Chrismahanukwanzakah

Bryant Park Holiday Rink, NYC

Eggnog Pancakes

Over on Twitter last night, I mentioned an experiement in making eggnog pancakes. I know I'm far from the first person to try this, but thought I'd share my method to spread the word on what just may become your newest holiday tradition.

I found that the sweetness and flavour from the eggnog held up on its own...no need for syrup. And that the extra sugar in the eggnog caramelized on the surface of the pancakes to add a pleasent bit of sugary crunch.

Super-simple instructions:

1. Take your favourite pancake recipie -- I used this recipie, as found on Kottke.org.
2. Replace whatever milk the recipie calls for with eggnog -- I added an extra splash of skim milk to thin the batter as I prefer my pancakes more crepe-like than fluffy.
3. Sprinkle in a bit of cinnamon & nutmeg.
4. Cook.
5. Enjoy.

100(ish) Books

98 of the 100-ish books I’ve read since I started keeping a list in TypePad:

       

          

           

           

          

          

          

          

          

       

I say 100-ish  because I know there are a few I’ve missed and there are probably one or two here that I didn’t finish. The two missing thumbnails:

1. Paul Auster: Timbucktu
2. Michael Chabon: Mysteries of Pittsburg

The Educated Imagination

Literature speaks the language of the imagination, and the study of literature is supposed to train and improve the imagination. But we use our imagination all the time: it comes into all our conversations and practical life: it even produces dreams while we’re asleep. Consequently, we only have the choice between a badly trained imagination and a well trained one, whether we ever read a poem or not.

-- Northrop Frye in The Educated Imagination

London Shadows

Neat. The current Google Maps aerial view of London features nice crisp silhouettes of the buildings along the south bank of the Thames.

Close up of the area around the OXO Building and Tate Modern here.

Update: Another close up, showing the HMS Belfast and Tower Bridge here.

The Future – 1 : LHC – 0

Story here.

The Sunset Tree

Friday night's sunset, from Strawberry Hill.

Remixed

Remix of the Creative Commons logo by Shepard Fairey. Get your tee by donating to CC's Fall Campaign.

Mmm...Q4 Food

 

Thanks to the bounty from a pumpkin picking up in Sonoma on Sunday, it's Squash Week at Casa Sosiak. For dinner tonight, I made this butternut squash with browned butter, and am about to start in on roasting my first pumpkin to make puree for pumpkin muffins.

Good Morning

Sunday morning with tea, a pecan bun from Arizmendi Bakery and the New Yorker.

Patio Lights | Norwood Club

 

From the archives. This photo's popped up on a few other blogs, so I suppose it's only proper that I post it on my own. The back patio of the Norwood Club in NYC.

Day at the Beach

 

I found this photo -- from a beautiful evening at Crissy Field last spring -- on my phone the other day. Now that we're deep into San Francisco "summer" (read: cold and foggy with a side of wind), it's living on my desktop as a reminder of warmer times.

29 000km later…

Update: It was pointed out that my photosets didn't capture some of the highlights of the trip, so now...with more words. (And a map.)

June, from just east of the Baltic to the middle of the Pacific, in pictures.

View Escape the Fog - 2009.06 in a larger map

Helsinki (on Flickr)

Where I fell in love with delicious cardamom pastries, experienced 120 straight hours of daylight, climbed a church to get to the park on its roof, visited the gorgeous Kiasma Museum of Modern Art, wandered the Finnish Museum of National Photography, ate a lot of great tomato-cheese-lettuce-on-rye sandwiches, and explored Suomenlinna, the Swedish-then-Russian-then-Finnish sea fort off the coast of the city.

Tallinn (on Flickr)

Where I fell into conversation with a local, and spent the afternoon wandering the off-the-tourist-track bits of the Old Town talking about heavy metal and life in Estonia.

The UK (on Flickr)

Where I spent quality time with good friends, went geocaching in the woods and accidentally found a film set, took a quick trip to Oxford, saw a Body Worlds exhibit, visited the Cabinet War Rooms, spent an afternoon in my favourite building in London (St. Pancras Station) and discovered the genius in using butternut squash to make a veggie burger.

Hawaii (on Flickr)

Where I spent more quality time with more good friends, climbed the rim of a volcanic crater tuff cone, celebrated Pau Hana on Waikiki beach, went for a moonlit swim in the ocean, visited a Buddhist Temple, surfed, body boarded and ate a lot of fish.

Kiasma

The ramp at Steve Holl's Kiasma (the Finish Museum of Contemporary Art) in Helsinki. More on the building here.

More photos of the building and current installations on Flickr.

Retro Futurism

In the thousand year old Old Town of Tallinn, Estonia.*

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* Via Helsinki, via London. More photos to come.

TV: Carrier

Speaking of fantastic documentaries, I meant to post about Carrier back when I was watching it last fall. The 10-episode series from PBS follows the crew of an aircraft carrier on a six-month deployment from San Diego to the Persian Gulf and back. From hulu.com:

In the middle of the ocean, a thousand miles from nowhere, a floating city rises above the sea. Twenty-four stories high, three football fields long, carrying 5,000 sailors and marines and 85 military aircraft - this is the USS Nimitz. From May to November 2005, a team of documentary filmmakers embedded aboard the USS Nimitz as it deployed to the Persian Gulf in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom. The result is a raw and honest look at the United States Navy and its role at a critical turning point in the controversial war. With startling intimacy, CARRIER follows a core group of subjects as they navigate personal conflicts around their jobs, family, faith, patriotism, and the rites of passage - all against the extraordinary backdrop of the war in Iraq.

When I was midway through the series, a coworker who’d finished it warned that gets “intense”. And...whoa...yes it does. It’s rare that I get teary at television, but this caught me a few times.

The entire series is available for free on PBS and Hulu (though, I think video from both those sites is blocked outside the US). The DVD is available on Amazon and Netflix.

The opening of the first episode gives a great overview of the show (watch until about seven minutes in):

Film: The English Surgeon

I saw a fantastic documentary last night: The English Surgeon. It follows a British neurosurgeon as he and an Ukrainian surgeon work to diagnose and treat patients in a make-shift clinic set up in a KGB hospital. The film is a fascinating look into neurosurgery, life in Ukraine, and the disparity in the level of care available in the two countries.

The film focuses on the treatment of a man suffering epilepsy brought on by a brain tumour, and shows (in graphic-but-fascinating detail) the surgery to remove it. The staff can’t perform the usual protocol where the patient is put to sleep while the skull is opened, then woken for the tumour removal (so that critical areas of the brain can be mapped and avoided), so he remains awake for the entire procedure. Amazing to watch.

Highly recommended if you’re interested in healthcare, neurology, life in Ukraine or just good documentaries in general.

The trailer (warning, a few medically graphic moments):

 Where/how to see it:

• San Francisco: Catch it at the Red Vic tonight or tomorrow.
• New York: A run starts at Cinema Village on July 24th
• The DVD is available in the UK now, and comes out in the US (and Canada?) September 8th. (It’s available for queuing on Netflix and pre-order on Amazon now.)

photos from big sur

 

At the end of last month, I drove down to Big Sur for a few days close to nature, and far from technology. (Need to be unreachable? A 150km long cellphone dead-zone starts just south of Monterey.) As anyone who’s been here will tell you, the area is simply stunning. Mountains, water, plants, wildlife, a fun stretch of Highway 1 and little else.

I stayed at an excellent family-run resort called Treebones, a collection of campsites and yurts nestled in the hills above the ocean. Highly recommended. The atmosphere was relaxed, the yurts were a nice compromise between camping and…well…not camping, and I met some interesting people* over breakfasts and dinners on the communal deck. The only downside was that coziness and amazing views made it hard to venture further afield. I did a bit of hiking around the south end of Big Sur, but left with a list of places left to visit on a return trip.

Slide show below (and on Flickr):

* Including a man from Scotland cycling from Seattle to Miami, via Los Angeles (and writing a great blog about the trip), and a couple I have a connection to via a friend from New Brunswick. Small world.

photos from seattle

A few weeks back, I flew up to Seattle for a long weekend of catching up with friends, eating fish and lazing in cafes waiting out the rain. I fell back into my habit of forgetting to take photos of people, but otherwise like this how this set came together.

Slide show below (and on Flickr):

de young

The de Young museum in Golden Gate Park, as seen from the roof of the Academy of Sciences.

(Best viewed large.)

localization

The cover of the March 2009 issue of The Atlantic, as purchased in Toronto. Compare to the below, spotted on newstands in New York:

(I'm 99.5% sure I saw a "Chicago Wins" cover in NYC as well.)

milk bar

The desert display case at Momofuku Bakery & Milk Bar, home of cereal-milk-as-upscale-treat.

flickr favourites - 2008

Taking a page from Richard, I've put together a Flickr set of my favourite photos from 2008. Of the 572 photos I posted to Flickr over the year, 66 got the nod. I like that I have a decent number of portraits here -- 2008 was the year I finally started to break out of my shyness around taking photos of people.

Slide show below (large version on Flickr):

meta-licious

I have a thing for all things meta. Like photos of photographers. (And photos of photos of photographers. And...well...you get it.)

bio-dome

Portals on the roof of the California Academy of Sciences. More shots of the building and its collection (including the two headed snake) here.

towers & tree

bridge, park & city

surfers*

Another great Sunday at Baker Beach.

* Correction: Thanks to Daisy, skimboarders, not surfers.

bridge & city

hot glass | cold beer

At Public Glass' Hot Glass | Cold Beer fundraiser.

Come on out and help us celebrate Halloween by supporting Public Glass. Select a hand blown drinking vessel, allow us to fill it and sit back to watch and evening of glass blowing demos by Bay Area artist Guido Gerlitz. Music by Loose Change Collective.

10/31

72 hours in new york city

Full set on Flickr.

teddy bear hangover

Teddy Bear Hangover, originally uploaded by rbanks.

90 seconds in grand central

photos from toronto & ottawa

Oh, hey. I went to Toronto last month. And Ottawa. And ate a lot of waffles. And took some pictures.

More photos on Flickr.

rides rides rides

Ticket booths at the Canadian National Exhibition, Toronto's take on the county fair.

fog to the west

Serious fog rolling in over Twin Peaks tonight.

model city

Downtown San Francisco, looking across Union Square from an elevator in the St. Francis.

descent

Escalators in a London tube station.

presidio parkour

Photos from a Parkour session in the Presidio yesterday are up on Flickr.

victimless leather

The Victimless Leather exhibit at the Design and the Elastic Mind show. A tiny coat made out of living mouse stem cells. I'm glad I saw it before the museum had to kill it:

Paola Antonelli, a senior curator at the museum, had to kill the coat. “It was growing too much,” she said in an interview from a conference in Belgrade. The cells were multiplying so fast that the incubator was beginning to clog. Also, a sleeve was falling off. So after checking with the coat’s creators, a group known as SymbioticA, at the School of Anatomy & Human Biology at the University of Western Australia in Perth, she had the nutrients to the cells stopped.

-- NYTimes

well, that's one less unexploded ordnance in the neighbourhood

Photo by Jim Herd/SFCitizen (via SFist)

Now I know what happens when your neighbours find a live WWII mortar shell while cleaning their garage.

Full-on bomb squad, bomb-removal robot, police barricades, warnings to go inside and stay away from the windows, etc.

Bizarre.

decay

The dining hall at Alcatraz.

San Francisco's been good for my fascination with decaying and abandoned buildings.

Looking through my photostream I'm surprised I have so few shots of Hill 88 and none of the Presidio Hospital or Sutro Baths. Must resolve that.

alcatraz

Photos from a trip to Alcatraz back in March are up on Flickr.

putting it all together

I nailed two moves at Parkour tonight that had been haunting me for weeks -- jumping clear over a long, low block and scaling a 5 1/2' wall without breaking my stride. Both looked so simple when others did them, but I'd just not been able to pull the required body mechanics (or sheer muscle) together. Rather pleased with myself right now. ++.

That clean jump over the low wall (~3') from my last post? Nailed that a few weeks back. Next up, figuring out the cat-pass: