Last week, I spent all week catching up a big backlog of laundry. In the process, I found out that we have way too many sheets for our bed. (I think the problem here is that my tendency to focus on “clothes first, then sheets” means that it often seemed like we were out of sheets, when instead they were just all in the “To be washed” pile – I feel like I did a half dozen loads of just sheets!)

On a more relevant note, I also managed to put out four videos this week! (Saying this makes me feel better about the fact that I was feeling utterly unproductive creatively this week – seems I did more than I thought!)

Thumbnails from four videos labeled Mexican-spiced Chicken, Tuscan-spiced Cod, Chicken and Coconut Curry, and Charles River Drone Flight

This week’s videos:

Cooking

Cooking continues apace! This week involved cooking my 9th and 10th Blue Apron meals, wrapping up 5 weeks of food buying + cooking from the program without a missed week. I’m very happy with how this has helped me feel more comfortable in the kitchen, and I’d even say my food is tasting (slightly) better, with more practice knowing how much salt, pepper, and oil to include in dishes. I’ve learned a lot of lessons through the process, and one of them that I wrote about this week was the Power of Reading the Recipe ( a lesson I expect I’ll probably have to learn at least a couple more times).

On the video front, I was able to put together a handful of older Blue Apron Meals, looking back at some of what I cooked and the things I’d do differently now. This week I put out videos showcasing the second, third, and fourth meals I cooked with Blue Apron – and even with just a few weeks practice, I was able to see a pretty significant difference from those to my current performance! Check out the videos (linked above) for how those ended up looking.

This week is the week of my trial run of Shopping for Myself, so it will be an interesting change! I’ve put together my shopping list, so we’ll see how it goes. (Taking bets now on which things the store won’t have in stock…)

In the coming week, expect to see more time lapse videos of older Blue Apron dishes! If you have thoughts on the time lapse with commentary vs. quick cut style of videos, please let me know!

Drone

I had some drone footage sitting around that had gotten corrupted during copying by an SD card – which was disappointing, because some of the shots actually looked really good. Thankfully, while exploring the SD storage after cleaning out my desk – turns out I have 402GB of SD storage, not including anything still sitting in various cameras at the moment – I found that I still had the files on my SD card and was able to rescue them! This let me find what is one of the smoothest minute-long sweeps of footage I think I’ve probably ever filmed, sweeping from Magazine beach across the Boston and then back in to Magazine Beach, ending right about where Hawk vs. Drone took place.

Highly recommend you check this one out!

Another thing I sort of want to do is to dig into a bit of “How does your drone shoot such smooth video?”, which I think is actually a really interesting question to think about. I don’t think that’ll be in the next week, but something to be aware of – and thanks to AlexCaughtFire for making me think about it!

Gadgets, German, and Other

I have put a bunch of recording and other work into my upcoming gadgets video for which I put together the trailer last week, but sadly don’t have anything to share yet. I expect this to be at least a three-video series, though I’m still considering exactly how to share it.

German continues apace: We continued to work on trenbarre (seperable) verbs this week, and had just started getting into the past tense. Interestingly, the instructor doesn’t appear to have posted homework, so uh… hopefully I’m not just confused navigating our class website, and am accidentally skipping a bunch of work I should be doing!

And that’s it from me! Until next week …