Sometimes, covered in bottle caps, I forget that I’m actually a photographer. It’s refreshing to dive in to the archives and see what might look nice in my shop display:
Mussels and Seaweed - Click to View Listing
Washing Ashore - Click to View Listing
Lighthouse. Dirty (Negative). Click to View Listing
All these were taken about a year ago at Preble Light in South Portland, ME. My friend, Kendyll and I went driving around looking for a place to shoot pretty photographs of her. There was a rainstorm during our drive and we were like “Aw, crap,” because no one particularly wanted to get wet (although in retrospect: good photo op). But then the skies parted, the sun shone through the mist and all the photographs came out with this vintage-y light and soft, smooth lines. Too bad my negatives were so dirty… but I think it adds to them. Some more will be going up tomorrow, along with some fireworks pictures from Boston and some other random ones I found.
Click on this picture to vote for the Maine Team 4th of July Challenge
In other news: the Maine Team 4th of July Challenge is officially up and voting goes through July 3rd. Visit the Facebook album here and “like” your favorite listing. I’d implore you to vote for Mollie and my’s aluminum star earring and necklace set, but in the spirit of the birthday of democracy I just urge you to vote whichever one you like the best.
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Also — tonight we ate at the Salt Exchange, because our LivingSocial deal was up. Hmm. The food is so freaking good that it’s a shame the front of house isn’t as well trained as the back of the house. I’m not in to trashing restaurants that I eat at because I’m generally a ‘glass half full’ kind of girl so I will start off by saying that the 4 dishes we split were just about the most well constructed flavor parties I’ve tasted ’round these parts, and this girl’s even been to Fore Street. The proportions are perfect and you really don’t need to eat that much to feel satisfied (we were fine splitting four dishes).
Only problem is I’ve got handfuls of years of front of house restaurant experience under my belt, and I have a problem not projecting ‘what I would do’ when I see someone making service mistakes. We kept on hearing the hostess tell people that she would seat them as soon as she can, that she was just waiting for menus to come back. Now, I get this — because sometimes that is what it is but it doesn’t make sense to your average diner. They think to themselves “Oh, well we can just sit down and get our menus after,” or, worse — she suggests you sit at the open seats at the bar and there are two menus right on the counter when you get there … just too much information. Less is more. “Your reservation was for 6:15, I will seat you as soon as I can.” (We were there early). Serious lag between our ‘1st course’ (first 2 dishes we ordered) and ‘2nd course’ kind of truncated the delicious mouth and tummy experience. Because the portions aren’t huge it’s really easy to move from course to course pretty quickly, so when you’re caught waiting 20+ minutes between salad/mussels and pork/seafood the stomach starts to grumble again. Same thing when we were finished with 2nd course – the check came right away but we waited for a good while (at least 5 passes of the server by our table) with the check hanging off the table with my card right in sight. We opted to switch it out for cash and took off after we decided we just couldn’t wait any longer.
So about the food! So excellent. J. and I decided that Salt Exchange is probably best if you’re going out for drinks and want ‘a snack’ because the $8 Mussels is pretty excellent. 9 mussels plus some bread, pork and onion was really flavorful and totally worth our money. I didn’t see the dessert menu (if they have one) but it’d also be really nice to sit at the bar, split a dessert and have some coffees. The caesar salad was great, and pretty good portions considering they ‘warn you’ ahead of time about ‘small plates’ and how that means you should order ‘3-4 per guest.’ Uhh… they must be making that recommendation based on the average American’s consumption at meal time, cause we were totally find with the 4 total that we picked.
Mmm pork tenderloin was our main course and we had a crab crostini to pair with it. It had the best damn lime reduction…sauce…uhh… ever to dip the crab in. And here we are, hours later at 10pm and I am still content.
So, there it is – trying something new. Not that I’m snitty about my food at all – generally speaking we are most frequently diners at Rosie’s, Ruski’s, Hi Bombay!, Sengthai and Marcy’s. But it’s nice to dress it up a little every now and again…
Little Eye Designs 