Dad and I went out detecting for a couple of hours on Saturday. We hunted the grassy slopes around a middle school that was built in the 1930s. I found a wheat cent from the 1950s and some odd little machine parts. Dad found a huge drill bit lying on the ground near the street, no doubt left over from roadwork. He also found about sixty cents.
I had a really good time, despite the lack of interesting finds, and I'm eager to get back out again.
She and I went on an expedition to E. P. Sawyer to catch a grasshopper for study. That seemed like a bit of a challenge for the middle of November, but since it was a sunny afternoon I thought we'd have some luck. After a bit of hunting we found a little one to examine and use for photos.
Yesterday I made gingersnaps for the first time. They came out pretty well, although they could have used a little less ground cloves and a little more ginger and snap. In fact, the came out with very little snap; they were sort of cakey. The taste was good, though, and everyone in the family seemed to find them agreeable. Fortunately, they were very easy to make, so it will be fun to experiment with them to improve the recipe.
Well, my "how Mark views the calendar year" post was such a hit, I've decided to share another view of the life of my mind.
I spend time thinking about my considerations in food as compared to other members of my family, particularly Kim. It occurred to me that I have two separate, and sometimes competing, categories of desirability when it comes to food- "delicious" and "interesting." To me, something can be interesting-tasting, causing me to want more, even if there is something unpleasant about the taste. Texture plays a large role here, too, for food can have an interesting feel to it that competes with a dislikable flavor.
So I made a chart. Zone 1, of course, is the best, showing examples of food that I find both delicious and interesting. However, anything in zones 2 and 3 are still good. I will eat them and enjoy them.
You may note that there isn't much in zone 4. There aren't many things I won't eat. I couldn't think of anything to put in the far corner of zone 4 that anyone would actually consider food.
I stayed up a little too late last night trying to finish a numismatic job I undertook almost two years ago: cataloging the world coins that one of my uncles received from his uncle as a child. I've been working on it very inconsistently and could have finished it a long time ago if I hadn't let other projects take priority. The only think I have left to do is put a couple of nicer-looking coins in some protective holders, and I'll call it quits.
Here is one of the best of the prints I ran a few days ago. You can see the registration problem I was having, especially if you click on the image to enlarge it. The misalignment of lines in the garlic is pretty evident. I suppose that the third and final color, black, could either worsen the problem or sort of hide the error, so this one might still be OK.
I started printing color #2 on the garlic last night. This was mostly a test; I used some "reject" prints first, and then used one or two that were close to being reject. Results are mixed. The colors look great together, and I like the overall effect, but proper registration has been tough. This print has more tiny details and thin lines than had the giraffe print, and I didn't leave room for mistakes (with the giraffe, due to the nature of the shapes and how I carved them, very slight registration problems weren't as noticeable.) Being a millimeter off makes a big difference. The hardest part, though, is the ink. The only thing I've ever used is Speedball water-soluble ink; it's the only thing I've seen at any local stores. However, every printmaker whose opinion I've heard has been sort of down on those inks. At the very least, I'd like to switch to oil based, because the drying time for water based ink is so short that it makes the work sort of frustrating. It's also supposed to transfer better, which I would appreciate. I won't be doing another reduction-cut print for a while. If I can generate a little art supplies capital, I'll get some better ink and better paper, and then I'll do it again. For a while I'll just stick with single-color prints, though. I don't want to sound too down on the garlic prints, though. It's tough work, but I'm optimistic about the results. (photos to follow sometime soon) |
Well, I'm tired of having that BBC page as the lead post on my blog, so I guess it's time to offer another glimpse into a dark corner of my brain. Here's something I think about whenever there is lots of food sitting out for picnics, cookouts, holiday parties, etc. This means I'll be thinking about it a lot in November and December, since they are the months that are most packed full of this sort of thing out of the whole circular counter-clockwise running year. Imagine a food storage container, virtually any kind that has a lid (as represented by figure A, depicting the container with the lid sitting next to it.) It could contain a casserole, or cookies, or corn pudding. You worked hard on the food, using your nice clean kitchen and nice clean cookware, and you washed your hands before handling it. You put the food in it and close the lid. The food is now protected. Then you put it in your refrigerator, where the bottom of the container sits in whatever has spilled, dripped, or leaked onto the shelf since the last time you cleaned the refrigerator. Then you take it out again to bring to your Christmas party, or Holiday brunch, or whatever, and in the process you sit it on your kitchen counter, then on your dining room table. You carry it in your hands, then your three-year-old carries it for a few minutes, then you sit it on your car hood as you load stuff into the car. Then you sit it on your car seat or in your car trunk. Then you carry it into the party, where it sits on someone else's table, but before you sit it down their dog licks it a few times, then people bring more food and your container gets slid around and moved from place to place to make room. Stuff gets spilled on the table: cookie crumbs, gravy, juice, pieces of ham, frosting (note the brown crud on the table in figure B.) The outside of the container it now pretty much like your kitchen floor or your car hood. This doesn't matter, though! Your food is still in the container. It is protected. Then the container gets opened up. People eat out of it. It's just the way it works, everyone is okay with it, people reach in and pick up cookies, or use the spoon to scoop out the casserole, or whatever. That's person-to-person contact, with risks minimized by hand-washing perhaps, but everyone knows it's happening and you just deal with it. But here is the thing that I always notice: People take the lids off the containers and put the lids, upside-down, underneath. The inside of the container lid is now flush against the bottom of your food container. The inside of the container lid is now the same as the upholstery of the trunk of your car. So then the party wraps up, and everyone puts the lids back on their containers. The food is now stored with everything the bottom of your container has touched. (figure C.) Why not just go around licking kitchen floors? I know it's silly. I really don't care that much; I mean, I'd wrestle a chocolate chip cookie from a dog's mouth. I do, in fact, eat things that fall on the floor on a fairly regular basis, even though I know that the 5-second rule is a load of baloney. It's just something I think about, every time I see it occur. |
| Happy Guy Fawkes Day! Do they say that over there? Or do they just say "God save the Queen" and shoot of some roman candles? |
Here's my most recent drawing. It's 5 x 7 inches, and again drawn with my homemade black walnut ink. I've also commenced cutting away more of my linoleum block so that I can print the second color of my reduction-cut garlic clove picture. I'm finding it very difficult to figure out how much to cut away for the second color. It would be nerve-wracking, except that I can't really attach that adjective to such a slow process. I also painted for a couple of hours last night! It's the first oil painting I've done in a really long time. I modified a painting that I thought I'd completed six years ago but was never happy enough with, and then worked a little on an unfinished but promising painting that I've had waiting in line since October 2007. |
We walked in the Halloween Parade in St. Matthews, in Kim's dad's neighborhood. The parade has been held annually for about fifty years, and consists mostly of kids. Then we trick-or-treated there and then again on my parents' street. (We don't know the bumble bee dog or his owner, they were just passing as the photo was taken.) |
This photo is from a few weeks ago. The assignment was for art class, in which they were studying folk art. The students were given a block of wood and told that they must make a toy from recycled, reused, or scrap materials--in the folk art/craft tradition. This particular artist took the "recycle" part pretty literally, and focused mainly on stuff she could pull from our recycle bin. She decided to make a school bus, and created it all herself (there was minimal parental help, consisting mainly of helping her press down the Scotch Tape firmly.) I'm so proud of her! |
I actually posted a photo of this on here once before, but it wasn’t completed then.
| I am officially changing my name to Houston,. Nevada. The apostrophe is my middle initial, short for ,texas. It is capitalized, though it's hard to tell. Also, my own mental parliament is about to vote on my official song. |
My painting of the Peterson-Dumesnil House is now up on the LVAA Art Auction site: It's on page nine. There's a lot of good stuff up for auction, and a lot of names I recognize. I'll be happy to see the works in person. |
Last night during and after dinner, Jill was pretending she was Dora and that I was Swiper. That morphed into a pretend game within the pretend game a little later in the bath tub, when she put a wash cloth on her head. She pointed at me and said, "Let's pretend that I'm Mother Mary and you, Swiper, are Jesus." *** I noticed a bright heavenly body between Venus and the sun as I drove to work. I wondered if it was Mercury, but I figured that it was much too bright. Then the thought struck me that it might be Saturn, and that I was perhaps looking between and past Venus and the sun and back out into the solar system. I checked an online star chart, and it turns out I was right. So if you are out just before sunrise sometime soon and look to the east, you'll see Venus shining very brightly; and just below that is another star, not quite as bright as Venus. That's Saturn. Mercury is currently situated very close to Saturn from out point of view, but I don't know if it can actually be seen right now. I've never seen it. *** |
The stars were bright and beautiful when I went out at 5:30 this morning. On mornings when they are bright I search my memory for the names of stars and constellations. I was reasonably good at identifying them when I was in my late teens, but I've forgotten most of them now. Orion is always immediately recognizable wherever it is in the sky, as are the Pleiades close by. It's sort of odd that I have a harder time with the Big Dipper; that's because light pollution and trees are always worse in that direction. Two bright stars really caught my attention this morning. One, as I looked at it, had a tellingly reddish tinge, and I wondered if it was a red giant. Usually I can see the red in Mars on nights that it's visible and identify it by its color and brightness. This time, though, I didn't recognize this particular "star" as Mars, but it was Mars anyway. This I found when I looked up a star chart on my computer afterward. The other star was Sirius. I had wondered if it was; as the brightest star in the sky, it's very noticeable. At first I thought it might be Venus, but it wasn't bright enough for that and I didn't think it was in the right place. Then I thought perhaps it was Jupiter. Once again, the Internet cleared it up for me later on. I'll be taking a star map with me next time. |
I just returned from a lunchtime sketch excursion to I used a whittle-down stem to draw with (I'd have used a brush, too, but I accidentally left them at home) on a small piece of paper. It was looking pretty nice, I think, but I pushed it a little too far and it got sort of ugly. It was a good experiment, though. It's my plan to take some acrylics over during lunch break this week to do a little painting. |
Here's a Web site that I find a little too engrossing. There are some amazing images here from the ongoing Cassini mission to Saturn. This photo is of the 17-mile-wide moon Pan casting its shadow across Saturn's rings during Saturn's recent equinox. ( http://ciclops.org/view/5748/Pans_Lengthening_Shadow ) |
These two itty bitty ones are the volunteers that grew in the back corner of the yard where I used to have the compost pile. They are absolute darlings, if you don't mind me sounding totally gay. The very bottom of each has a clearly defined green spot. I included the spoon in the photos for size comparison, not because anyone (not even me) will attempt to eat them.
| Here's some news from Saturday that I missed until this afternoon: http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/americas/09/13/nobel.borlaug.wheat/index.html I hope more like him step up. How many people have been credited with saving hundreds of millions of human lives? |
No, I didn't find the balls with the detector, I just found them while I was detecting. Same for the little plastic bear head at upper left. I don't know what the thing that looks like a padlock (next to Jesus) is.
Yesterday afternoon I spent a few hours doing some long-overdue yard work. I mowed and then used the weed-whacker, and as I cut around the vegetable garden I found, hidden under some tall grass by the fence-- A pumpkin! It's as big as a badly over-inflated football and is still mostly green. The vine supporting it is barely alive, but it looks like I might have a pumpkin for the front porch after all. |
The night before last I mixed up some bread dough, and the girls helped me knead it (they had a lot of fun with it; Jill provided a constant loud narration of all her actions, as if she were showing an auditorium full of students the proper method). The dough came out fine, but I left it sitting on the counter to rise for a little too long. We were done kneading it around 7:30, and I didn't put it into the over until nearly 24 hours later. Now I realize what's causing a problem I've had with some of my bread and pizza dough. It's over-fermented. The bread is edible, it just has a slightly bitter edge to it. We tried some while it was still warm, and Kim thought it had a little bit of a taste or smell like wine. I detected an odor of beer. It's not awful by any means, but my daughters didn't much care for it and I'll do my best to shorten the rising time from now on. |
I just don't feel like putting anything on my blog without pictures, but it's been ten days, so I guess I better put up something just to maintain my image of freshness. I just got back from getting my allergy shots. The nurse who gave them to me is pretty nice, but she makes my arms sore. I feel like someone punched me. The shots don't hurt when I'm getting them, but I sure feel stiff afterward. Last night I had a dream related to the movie "The Car," which I saw on TV about 25 years ago. It's a really bad movie about this demonic car that runs people over and is terrorizing a small town. In the dream, it was directed by Franco Zeffirelli, but it was real, and the car was stalking me and my family. My garden is neglected, which it is every year at this time. The pumpkins and squash are nearly dead from powdery mildew or other diseases; I will be very surprised if I have any pumpkins to harvest. I might get a couple more summer squash before the plants keel over. The tomatoes, though, are still running nuts. I have lots of cherry tomatoes that I haven't had time to pick, but I can't send the girls out after them because the mosquitoes are so horrendous. I have ten big tomatoes on the kitchen counter. I might have to dry some again to store for the winter. We went camping last weekend from Friday evening until Monday. We had a great time, and the girls loved their first camping trip. It was nice spending time with friends, and we got a lot of help from Ed and Loraine, who loaned us some vital equipment for outdoor comfort (most notably, a great tent). |
