I Haz All the Megapixels

[chomiji]

So! New cellphone, with much spiffier camera: 13 megapixels vs. 5 (!) on my old camera. And it's a beautiful spring day.

Our mini-daffodils in bloom beside the front walk

Busboys and Poets restaurant and bookstore (curiously blurry ... I need to learn how to work with the autofocus in dimmer light). We got there soon after it opened for brunch, or it would have been much more crowded.

My brunch at Busboys: cheese, tomato, and spinach omelet, grits, whole grain toast with whipped butter and strawberry jam, fruit cup (which I shared with the Mr. because it's huge). Also: Passover is over! BREAD!

The Takoma Farmers Market, from across the road.

Our house, curiously overexposed (probably I should have used some special setting or other), through new spring leaves.

Street trees (Eastern redbuds) in bloom.

The phone store guy moved over all my stuff from my old phone, so I still have the icons I used for businesses in my contacts list, my downloaded fics and free e-books (which I have imported into a freshly downloaded Aldiko reader), and my old cellphone wallpaper ... which looks all blurry because the screen has a much higher resolution. I need to find the wallpaper specs (it's a Galaxy S4 - the newer ones are too big for my chunky little hands) and make a new one.

ETA for my own reference: 1920 x 1080 pixels for S4 wallpaper, says the Intarwebz.

Comments

[kis]

Oh, I'm glad you got a new phone, because I really enjoyed looking at these photos. To me, it's all wonderfully foreign-looking. And sunny!

[chomiji]

My daughter was bemused by that comment because she thinks that we don't look that different from the U.K. Of course, her experience of that is mainly London and the interesting B&B at which we stayed in Wales, which was a converted servants' quarters on an estate-turned-winery.

I'm guessing it's mainly the front porches (verandas) on the houses and the very 1950s shopping block showing behind the pavilions of the vendors at the farmers market? Also, U.S. suburban homes tend to have largish front yards (gardens) compared with British/Scottish houses in similarly dense neighborhoods, and we tend toward lawns rather than flowerbeds in them. Also, the yards run into each other for the most part, rather than having walls or hedges.

I'll have to shoot some more pictures around the neighborhood for you!

[kis]

It's a combo of the porches and building materials. You seem to use so much wood in the US.

[tuulentupa]

Heh, I was thinking pretty much the opposite from kis: this could be in Finland! Though not yet, spring isn't that far here yet. But these pics really made me look forward to it.

[chomiji]

Interesting! Do your houses tend to have the same sorts of architecture that ours do? Our street is rather a mishmash of types because the oldest ones (including ours) were built close to a hundred years ago, and then over the course of the 20th century, the house lots were subdivided, and newer, often smaller houses were build between the originals, in completely different styles.

ETA: The Park family's house (on the left, with the huge solar panel array on the south-facing roof) was originally just a single story. They added a second story a couple of years ago. It came on a huge flatbed truck, and an equally huge crane came and lifted it atop the original house (the original roof had been removed).

[tuulentupa]

Yeah, they do! Though houses with the kind of roof as yours have tend to be old, in general from before the wars (WWII, that is). Here's one quickly googled example, practically my neighbour.

[rachel_riecheru]

Those are some great pics, I love the one of your house :) it's very big! :D

goodluck with the new phone :) new devices are the best :D

Hope you're well *hugs*