Last month, I dug out the camera for a couple quick sessions. One was a series that I’d been meaning to do for a while: shots of the Sydney skyline from where I work at Pyrmont:
 
 The other was an attempt to get shots of cosplayers at Supanova. I’m still way too shy to ask strangers to pose for me, so most of my good shots don’t involve wacky characters. I did get one Supaboy, though, as well as a couple good shots that used the late-afternoon sun to great effect:
I was reflecting recently, as I made a complete butchery of removing the skin from a shoulder cut that I will turning into pulled pork today, that butchery isn’t a fair word when you mean “a friggin’ mess.” Maybe I’m just a little sensitive since Four Corners did their exposé on Indonesian abbatoirs, but I have long felt (and I’m not alone) that since I derive my own sustenance and life from an animal, I should treat its gift to me with as much respect as possible. And good butchers do just that. They have the tools and training to prepare cuts in ways that I never could.
So, as I spent a good thirty minutes wrestling the skin off that “easy-carve” joint (not facilitated by the cat demanding her cut), I decided that I wasn’t just going to waste the excess that the recipe told me to dispose of. I made my first attempt at crackling. It wasn’t awesome, but it was good enough. And I hope that using more and more of the animal, instead of just the bits I was focused on can make up for the fact that I wasn’t a very skillful butcher.