After the museum, our trusty friend Yelp let us to Barney Greengrass, aka “The Sturgeon King.”

Once again, there was a wait involved. As you can see, everyone was thrilled to spend some more quality family time together on the frigid streets of New York.

We started with some Potato Latkes.

I went with the Sturgeon on a sesame bagel.

Eliza had smoked trout. Yikes! That thing’s got a head.

For the uninformed, the Holga is basically a very cheap, plastic camera that takes poor pictures in an unpredictable way. Meet Holga:

It’s the unpredictability that’s fun. A digital camera, by contrast, is like a meal at a chain restaurant. You know exactly what you’re going to get. And yes, most of the time, that predictability is great. But one of the forgotten pleasures of shooting film is the mystery and sense of anticipation that lies between shooting and developing. The Holga takes that mystery and turns it into pure chaos.

These are the few (barely) salvageable images from my last Holga roll, which goes all the way back to our famous road trip. They all have the Holga’s characteristic vignetting, one of its more charming tendencies. But they also have an odd out-of-focus look, which may be due to some sort of double exposure. Or maybe there’s something wrong with the lens. Could’ve been light leaking into the camera, too. Holga is known for that. I can’t tell exactly. This is the first time she played this particular trick on me.

Also, you can also clearly see the effects of double exposure in the light vertical strips on the sides of the images. I had the camera on the wrong setting and wasn’t advancing the film far enough after each shot. Check out the right side of this photo:

But the more time I spend with these photos, the more I like them. I am a fan of the accidental. This entire blog, after all, is dedicated to my love of aimlessness. And what represents that better than photographs that are accidentally blurry, grainy overlap with each other, and yet for some reason are oddly intriguing?

I snapped this just after seeing Funny People at the Alamo. Great movie, by the way.

I suppose it’s fun to screw up when there are no consequences. It’s fun to stumble. You see the world in a new way when you’re falling down. And for some reason, when the picture is blurry you spend more time looking for the details. Maybe there’s something there worth finding.

Some fun stories in a few of these. That National Grain painting is by our old friend Rodney White, painted as a favor before he hit the big time. Top left: chicken shit bingo.

He looked smashing, of course. Here he is getting ready to sing Tom Waits’ Little Trip to Heaven (On the Wings of Your Love) at our reception. I cried. It was wonderful.

But I wondered – how hard could it be to make a bow tie? Ben loves to wear them whenever he has the opportunity to dress up, but he can never seem to find bow ties that suit him in the stores.

So I enlisted the help of the multi-talented Becky Joiner at the Stitch Lab, bought some fabric, and whipped up a few bow ties just for Ben.

I love this out of print dandelion fabric.

The automatic buttonhole feature on my snazzy new sewing machine is awesome. Now I need to work on placing them in a straight line.

We found this cool fabric at Britex in San Francisco. I’m still dreaming of that lovely store.

I loved stitching this little bird.

Jaxon models the bib.

I decided I needed more stitching instruction and signed up for Rachel Hobson’s hand embroidery class over at Leslie Bonnell’s Stitch Lab. I was one of only four students. Rachel first gave us a thorough lesson on tools of the trade, materials and resources, and methods for transferring patterns. Then she guided us through the stitches shown on my sampler below. We learned the blanket and back stitches (shown on the sun). The french knot (ooo la la!), chain, split, and satin stitches make up the top of the flower. We also practiced the stem and lazy daisy stitches (on the stem and leaves) and the herringbone stitch for the grass.

Rachel’s class was wonderfully fun, but it wasn’t until the next morning that I realized the calming effect stitching has on me. I finished my french knots while waiting in my car for an early meeting to start and instantly became relaxed.

Shortly thereafter, I purchased a couple of iron-on transfer patterns from Sublime Stitching and became totally hooked. The repetitive motion of the needle popping through the fabric, the freedom to choose whatever stitch and color you like, and the instant gratification of creating something beautiful in a couple of hours – I’m now a total junkie.

I decided to strike out on my own and embroider Ben’s band logo on a kitchen towel. I taped it up on the window and traced it with a water soluble pen.

And then I stitched.

And stitched. Here while watching Play It Again, Sam. A pretty awful movie in my opinion.

Here’s a Sublime Stitching pattern for some of Daniel Johnston’s famous Austin artwork.

I love that juicy satin-stitched mouth.

My new creations are all kitchen towels. We now have a few more than our tiny kitchen drawers will allow.

I’m going to move on to napkins now.

But sometimes it’s nice–charming even–when something does merely one thing. It helps, of course, if it does that one thing in style. Witness this little charmer we picked up at Giant Robot in San Francisco.

It really is charming. And that isn’t just a matter of it’s style, but a reflection of its simplicity. Sure it only does one thing, but it does it reliably and without confusion. It doesn’t crash. It requires no tech support.

And there’s also the dial. The digital world has removed many of the dials, knobs, and rotors from our lives, in exchange for buttons and sliders. I suppose it’s just nice to have something round around.