I finally made it to the Butter Museum today that's been taunting me since I first arrived. They run a weekly butter making demonstration on Saturdays at noon. On top of being an excellent demonstration to attend I can also definitively say that I have never once known nor thought so much about butter before in my life.

The butter making began with churning a small container of creme, the fatty part of milk that was originally scooped off large pots as it separated in a process that could potentially take days. Luckily, we only had to make a third gallon or so and could easily control the temperature. After some time churning, the butter almost instantly changed form, coagulating into a wet butter mass in a sea of buttermilk. Fresh buttermilk in fact tastes like milk and butter, neither being flavors that I particularly enjoy, and stays with you for the next hour.

The picture shows the next step in the butter process. The coagulated butter is drained and washed with water repeatedly, leaving behind pitchers of more and more diluted buttermilk. After washing and squeezing the butter with paddles to remove as much excess watery buttermilk as possible, I finally got to try the fresh butter on some soda bread. Excellent texture, mild flavor (unlike the buttermilk), perfectly complementary, and worth running across the city for.

Irish butter, specifically from Cork and Kerry County, was world famous in the early 1800s, being shipped all the way to the Americas and even Australia using high percentages of salt (~30%) as a preservative. Across the street from the museum is the old center of the southern Ireland butter trade, a grand circular structure since destroyed in a fire and now acting as a performance hall. This butter market linked farmers with merchants through standardizing quality and price. Its downfall was a consequence of the invention and introduction of steam powered mechanical churning machine which led to consolidated creameries.

Other historical fun facts I learned include the widespread norm for old Irish kings to plan cattle raids in a culture that strongly tied personal worth and triumph to ownership of dairy cows. And the preservation of butter underground within decomposition limiting bogs. Unfortunately for my modern palate, this butter was often strongly flavored with garlic because it would go rancid!

Last weekend I had a couple of hours free and decided to go to Blarney Castle about a 25-minute bus ride away. The castle is surrounded by well cultivated gardens and paths that almost excuse the €19 student entrance fee. The dungeon was inaccessible for the season due to hibernating bats but main castle built in 1446 was almost entirely visitable. Being a castle, significant effort has been made to be generally inaccessible and exceptionally difficult to siege. Double walls filled with compacted dirt once formed a perimeter, of which only one moderate section remains today. Ceiling holes over main entranceways allow for attacking from above, stabby windows are plentiful, and two steep spiral staircases prevent rapid advancement. Scarce ornamentation from any periods of normal use remain, leaving behind grand openings without wooden floors or ceilings with only fireplace and wide communal poop holes

Although the castle and surrounding poison gardens were plenty cool, the gift shop was equally important. And you bet it was glorious! Chocolates, cashmere scarfs, mugs, jewelry, the over the top stereotypical Irish everything. But best of all was the postcard section where I learned that as part of the 2008 Cork Midsummer Festival about 1200 people posed all in front of the castle in a massive nude photoshoot. And they sell postcards of the event in the gift shop. So you can guess what I got!

The first couple hundred photos I took on my old camera have a burnt-in date watermark on them, a setting that took me some time to learn how to toggle off. Although somewhat garish overall it forms part of my nostalgia for the time. Combine that with the absolute ton endearing amount of chromatic aberration present in this picture and it has more than enough awe and character for me.

This was taken on a road trip that led us up through northern California. Half of the pictures I have are my brothers hiding inside of or standing on top of the giant redwood trees. It doesn't take very much for my love of scale to make itself known. I'd be all over even one large tree but here there were many more than that.

If only there was a large vertical greenhouse capable of keeping one of these alive in my backyard. I bet a Civ E could whip up one of those in no time.

This is the organ control board at Saint Fin Barre's Cathedral, about a 10-minute walk away from me. The cathedral is built in a gothic style despite being relatively recent with construction beginning in 1864 with its exterior complete a decade later. The cathedral is almost entirely the architecture, design, and art direction of one William Burges. Burges won the open design competition against 62 others by blatantly breaking the competition rules, claiming that the budget allocated (£15000, about $2.2 million today) was insufficient for his ambitions. The total cost ended up well above this initial allocation (>>£100000). Burges kept copious architectural sketches, plaster statue designs, and itemized logs to allow for fundraising and continuation after his death.

St Fin Barre's had some of the most vibrant stained glass that I have ever encountered. The artist most prominently featured throughout the cathedral was well known for believable skin tones à la white Moses and gradually shaded glass. Unlike others of his day who painted atop single colored glass, he covered stained pieces in layers of resin before bathing them in acid to bleach the color out of what was left exposed.

The organ was originally entirely above the entryway before being gradually expanded over the years. As of its last major restoration in 2010, the organ player and hundreds of pipes are located adjacent to the choir near the front. In order to keep the pipes eye level and avoid blocking stained glass windows the organ’s bulk was placed within a 14-foot hole! More recently, a remaining row of pipes above the main entrance in the original location of the organ was reconnected using fiber optics.

The control board is personally enamoring to me with its incredible number of keys, knobs, and petals. How would you go about learning how to use half of it? And there are two people younger than me currently being taught. Next week there are live performances of the organ. Let’s see if I can get out of bed on time.

Some of the organ pipes (with still hundreds more unshown pipes) and the inside of Fin Barre's will come tomorrow. Cliffhanger!

In solidarity with everyone freezing their butts off both at home and school who did not take the third option of being out of the country I would like to share one of my favorite pictures from last winter and the bit of writing that accompanied it at the time.

I am still surprised by all the snow and frost this winter. What a shocker that it can be both cold and pretty, not just miserable and ugly like it was for most of last year. The first few weeks back have been filled with only occassional days above freezing. To the extent that I have twice now stumbled across ducks from the campus pond way across campus drinking from pools of salt water on the side of sidewalks. Salty probably beats pure ice. Apparently the pond was so frozen that people were out walking across it, although I am much too much of a wimp to partake.

This was taken at a little past noon, right before the sidewalks began to be properly cleared of snow. It was the first time in the last year and a half of being here that school has been completely cancelled due to weather. But alas, I only had the joy of missing a single discussion with no respite from any of my otherwise hard classes. Woe is me, stuck in a bunch of snow, intimidated by the ducks that taunt me from the freezing water.

I've artificially limited myself to a maximum of one or two photographs per day, to not just dump reams of photos in a public drive somewhere without signifance. I don't plan to have any real chronological order although I expect it to be more or less possible to catch up on what I'm doing with more current posts. At times, I expect not more than a sentence or two to be written but I am alright with that. After all, sometimes you just look at something and go "Yup, makes sense to me. Don't need to english class this."

This image was taken with my old point and shoot from a moving car after getting up at 4:00 in the morning to go upcountry and watch the sunrise. I don't know if the remarkably clear sky is usual or was a result of sheer luck, but I love the dual sets of clouds that secure their respective mountains and demonstrate the sheer scale of Haleakala.

I wrote the initial draft of this introduction over a year ago. In that time I have found numerous excuses to avoid continuing and shelve this scrappy project. However, I am happy with its current technical state and am inclined to make a valient effort. I have never before been so far away from home yet I find it important to still search for the beauty in where I am. If I can get into a habit and write some of my thoughts down too while at it then all the better.

This is the beginning of a little experiment I'm trying out. Not to be a collection of Nathan's greatest hits, though those will certainly find their way in occassionally, but instead a sprinkling of what I find meaningful or plain beautiful. This, in one form or another, is something that I have wanted to try out for a long time. Preferably outside the reach of flashy apps vying for attention where it can be something for myself and potentially a few others. Nobody will accuse it of lacking character that's for sure.

Hello World.

-Nathan