Freaky Friday's blog

Cryogenic made a good point in that it's a little premature to put these blog entries into the Food and Restaurant category. He was right, I killed 2 of the plants already :-(

I'd like to say it wasn't my fault, but hey, it kinda was. It was a 30 degree celsius plus day and I didn't give one pot enough water, so the 2 plants in that one pot shrivelled up and died. Oh well, the other 5 plants that are doing quite well now.

Here's a picture of the progress. The remaining plants are now starting to sprout new leaves! One plant was really sad looking and always sitting on the ground, so I propped him up with a few toothpicks.

In other gardening news... I bought myself a frangipani cutting from the local garden nursery. It's a red variety and probably deciduous. I replanted it in a pretty, black, glossy pot and hope it's not going to grow over 2 metres. Can't wait until spring when I hope it's going to have its first flowers.

Here's a picture of the frangipani:

I also bought some more frangipani seeds. Exotic varieties that look really pretty. It should be interesting propagating them from a seed! I just wonder what I'm going to do with so many different frangipani plants! I don't exactly have enough room to keep them all once they grow up. Luckily they grow slowly and I can always pawn them off to friends and family.

Finally got around to taking a couple of photos of the cherry tomato seedlings.

This one is what one of the seedlings look like in its final pot.

I ended up repositioning this seedling more to the side so I could fit a second seedling in the same pot.

This next one is a close up of the seeding.

The first of the cherry tomato plants have been transplanted from their baby pot into the "grown up" pot. It looks a little funny having this small, thin piece of greenery with 2 baby leaves sitting in a rather large 5 litre pot.

The other seedlings are just sprouting from their baby pot. One of them will probably be ready for the grown up pot either tonight or tomorrow morning, and the other 5 seedlings should be ready in a couple of day's time.

So far there are a total of 7 cherry tomato plants that have (so far) successfully germintated. It's probably too many plants just for 2 people so I'm planning to off load about 4 of them once they're large enough and don't require as much attention.

I forgot the camera yesterday, so no photos yet, but I won't forget today!

It's been less than I week and the cherry tomato seeds had sprouted and needed to be transferred into some soil. One of the seeds even broke through the soil and have 2 cute little leaves on them.

So far so good. It's a pity I don't have photos of the first two stages with the seeds on the paper towel and the initial sprouting of the seeds. Not that they're so exciting, but I just like to document things :)

Anyway, I'll post photos of the first cherry tomato sprout later today or tonight.

I'm going to try to grow cherry tomato plants and thought I'd document my success or failure at germinating and growing them.

This should be interesting since I'm not very good at keeping plants alive, let alone trying to grow one from a seed.

I've taken the first step of harvesting cherry tomato seeds. I ate about half a dozen or so just to get 7 seeds :) I hope that's enough, if not, I'll gladly eat another half a dozen to get another 7 seeds ;)

I removed the slimy coating from the seeds, laid them out on a piece of kitchen paper towel on a plate, gave them some water and stuck the plate in the kitchen pantry. So far so good.

I'm meant to keep them moist at all times and if all goes well, they'll sprout in a few days.

I'll post photos once I have a camera in my possession.

Eat as you like, pay as you feel

That's the concept behind Annalakshmi, a buffet-style, vegetarian Indian restaurant situated on the Swan River of Perth, Western Australia.

Annalakshmi is one of my favourite restaurants. Not because of the food (which is prepared by volunteers and quite tasty), not because of the view (which is STUNNING to say the least, I feel so lucky to be living in Perth), not because of the atmosphere (which has an air of traditional India with statues of various Hindu deities, intricately decorated tables and chairs and the volunteers were dressed in saris and salwar kameez) and not because of the service (which is super-friendly, they make you feel like you're part of their family) but because of their concept.

At Annalaksmi, you can eat to your heart's content, since it's a buffet, and on your way out, you pay however much (or little!) you feel like paying. It's like a donation and in return, you get a meal of traditional, vegetarian Indian food. It's a nice feeling knowing that some of the proceeds will go towards food and medical services for the underprivileged in India.

The last time I was there, some street kids came in for a feed and it warms my heart to see that the volunteers served and treated these kids no different than other patrons. I could see their kindness shining through and I was sitting on the other side of the room!

Website: Annalakshmi.

It bugs me when visiting a web site and it starts playing music without you actually wanting music being played.

It bugs me even more when there is no "Sound off" button.

It's a sure fire way of getting me to close the window before I've even had a proper look at the site.

Yeah, yeah, I could mute the whole computer, but I often forget to turn my sound back on and end up I would miss out on other notifications.

Ok end of vent.

For 55, who asked about re-seeding tile colours.

Also see flipflop's colour seeding tips.

So here are the seeding images I used for the Grim Reaper Smiley and the subsequent modified seeding images that were used due to "not enough tiles of a particular colour" problem I frequently get.

The general principle of re-seeding tile colours is to use the same seeding image, but to alter a portion of that image to get more colours you want and less of what you don't need.

The overview:

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The first seeding image didn't have enough yellow, so I took the first seeding image and added more yellow and more white (I thought I would need more white, turns out I didn't) and the result is the second seeding image.

You'll notice that fundamentally the areas of colour in the seeding images stay the same. When the second seeding image is uploaded, the tiles will be in the same position and mostly will have the same colour and only a small proportion of tiles will need to be moved. If you go to the front of interim snapshot #2 you can see there are about 6 tiles that are the wrong colour in the artwork.

Note: Don't EVER use the "Arrange tiles..." option in edit room when re-seeding tile colours... I've actually done this before on accident and wanted to throw something out the window (I didn't take an interim snapshot).

The same principle applies to the third and fourth seeding images. I ran out of charcoal coloured tiles and it took 2 tries to get the tile colours right.

Alrighty, firstly, what's yoga pose #4?

Yoga pose artwork #4 is a variation on eka pada rajakapotasana, or one-legged king pigeon pose.

Eka - one
Pada - foot/leg
Raja - king
Kapota - pigeon
Asana - Pose/posture

Final snapshot:

This artwork was started before the new replay feature was introduced, so the first two intermin snapshots don't have have a movie replay. It's a little unfortunate, because most of the work happened before the first snapshot.

I didn't intend to release this artwork for another couple of weeks at least, even though it was completed. I won't go into details but the short of it is that I had to take a snapshot before I really wanted to and because the snapshot was taken, I decided not to wait and just add it in the public gallery.

I'll try to make this a quick description.

I spent about 3 hours and pushed about 2500-3000 tiles (I move tiles more than once) to get to the stage of the first snapshot.

Same old ran out of tiles of a particular colour problem, that's why there are interim snapshots. This is the second one:

Still battling with tiles colours and colour hunting:

This third interim snapshot has the movie replay feature. For me, the two most interesting aspects of the first movie replay of this artwork are:

1) my obsession with the damn hands
2) the evolution of a hair style

So, feeding my obsession with getting the hands to look like hands, I wanted some white tiles to work with. This means more colour hunting and we end up with this:

And very quickly I found out I would need another round of colour hunting for white tiles since the first one didn't result in many usable white tiles.

The finished product:

And just for a bit of fun, here's my attempt at the pose:

I used this photo as a reference for the hands.

Yoga pose artwork #3 is virabhadrasana B, or warrior pose B.

Virabhadra = hero or warrior
Asana = pose or posture

Virabhadrasana B is a very striking pose, made even more striking with this perspective.

I had conceived of making this yoga pose for a couple of weeks even before moving the first tile. I spent quite some time getting the colours I needed for this artwork. I think I seeded the room about 6 times before abandoning it because of frustration, and I hadn't even moved a tile yet!

I eventually came back to this artwork and actually had a couple of renditions because I didn't like the flesh colours I had initially used. This is the snapshot of the initial stages of this artwork with the original colours I had chosen.

The flesh was too pink and the artwork ultimately too large. I would have suffered severely with not enough tiles had I continued, so this particular version was abandoned and I started again.

I had to create a new colour seeding image with more browns and blacks for the hair (there wasn't enough in the first version, as you can probably see) and the flesh colours more toned down so there was less variation in colour and also a more yellow tone to the flesh.

I had also shrunk the artwork down to what I thought would be the right size so I would have more than enough tiles to complete it.

I can say now that my judgement of size was just a little bit off. I ended up shrinking down the artwork another 3-4 times near the completion because I was running out of flesh coloured tiles rapidly, as you can see:

The light coloured flesh tiles were also standing out too much instead of blending in with the rest of the skin tones. The darker skin tones were too dark and too pink, making shading less effective.

I went back to colour hunting. Lightened up the darker tiles, took out some saturation, changed the hue to slightly more yellow. Darkened down the lighter coloured flesh tiles.

This seemed to work, and I managed to be able to finish the artwork.

The hand had been reconstructed here. I did the best I could with the limited tiles I had, but it still turned out mittenish. By this time, I'm rather frustrated and annoyed with this artwork and just wanted it finished and out of the way.

But I wasn't happy with the colours yet. The darker flesh tiles were now too yellow and with not enough pink in them. The lighter flesh tiles also suffered the same problem, too yellow, not enough pink tones.

Back to colour seeding to add more pink back to the affected flesh colours. After the final finishing touches, yoga pose #3 is finished, mitten hand and all.

And to clarify a few points made in the comments: The hand looks small because it's meant to be a perspective thing, the further away an object, the smaller it appears. That was deliberate. The mitten hand was not deliberate but laziness on my part. I probably could have made it better had I not gotten really irritated with this artwork. The hidden face was deliberate, that's the perspective of the artwork, which was deliberately chosen so I wouldn't have to make a face :)

Previous yoga art blog:

Making of yoga pose #2