Birthday

Thus blog turned ten years old on August 8, and I missed it! How silly.

House portrait in black walnut ink, 8 x 10 inches

detail:

House portrait in walnut ink, 11 x 15 inches

black walnut ink on bristol paper

Details:

self portrait (digital)

self portrait (digital)

Self portrait

Sheriff of Nottingham

digitally manipulated image of the game

Wings of Glory WWI Dining Room Table Combat

As a birthday treat for me, my daughters (ages 10 and 11) told me they would play me a game of Wings of Glory WWI.  Last night they made good on the promise, and they also roped my wife into it (she didn’t protest and was a good sport, although I know she has no interest in the game and would have preferred to rest after her long day at work.)  So I dragged my big sheet of green-painted MDF out of the garage, got out the game, and explained the basics of the rules.

I let everyone choose whichever planes they liked, which meant we had an unusual combination of planes.  Somehow, a British Airco D. H. 4 two-seater teamed up with a German Albatros D. Va versus another Albatros D. Va and a Fokker Dr. I (The Red Baron!).  I had the Fokker and was teamed with my younger daughter; my older daughter had the D. H. 4, with my wife on the other Albatros.

We played a simple dogfight using basic rules and only a few types of special damage (smoke, fire, wounded crew, and the boom card.)

We started on opposite sides of the table and closed…

Planes were wheeling about in battle.  My Fokker came under fire from all angles, but I had tremendous luck with my damage card draws: 0…0…0…2…0…

I was dishing out some damage to both enemy aircraft, and the D. H. 4 was smoking.  Finally though, my luck dried out.  Here is my succession of damage cards:

My Fokker Dr. I, crashed:

My younger daughter played through another turn, but then announced she was done.  She gave her Albatros to me to take over. 

My older daughter was eager to continue

…But after a couple of turns of tight circling, in which I did a pretty good job of staying out of the D. H. 4’s large firing arcs, I was shot down again, leaving the oddball German/British coalition victorious (but both with heavy damage).

Both of my daughters had been resistant to my suggestions to try the game over the past year, but I think they both had fun last night.  They might even be willing to try again.  If we do, I will set up a simple mission (photo reconnaissance or balloon busting) so that they have a storyline and a goal.

Pen and ink house portrait - 8 x 10 inches

My friend, the pewee bird

Early in the college phase of my life, I became friends with a girl who lived in Pewee Valley.  At some point, driving along in a car, we had a conversation about the name Pewee Valley, and Angela explained to me that it was named after the pewee bird. “Pe-WEE, pe-WEE, pe-WEE,” she said, “That’s it’s call.”

Not too many years before, I had taken an on-and-off, very casual interest in bird watching.  Well, maybe not so much bird watching as bird awareness.  I wasn’t exploring wilderness areas with a pair of binoculars and a checklist; but I was watching the bird feeder, and using a Peterson field guide to identify birds.

This “pewee bird” was a new one on me, though.  I didn’t recall ever seeing or hearing one, so I mentally categorized the bird as something slightly exotic, living in the wilderness of Louisville’s periphery, possibly mythical.

Fast forward a quarter of a century. The memory of the pewee bird description stayed with me, but I still didn’t recall every noticing one.  Awareness of the memory probably just never surfaced often enough, or at the right time, for me to bother with an internet search to learn more about it.  So, for more than 25 years, the pewee wasn’t much more than a feathered mental chupacabra.

That brings me to a few weeks ago.  I was sitting in our family room with my daughters and my mother-in-law, as dusk settled ouside; we were all reading.  After a while, I became aware of an intermittent, high-pitched bird call from outside.  Not super loud, but loud and high enough to penetrate our wall and windows  more distinctly than the rest of the evening bird racket. “Phwee-EEEH.  Phwee-EEEH.”

I looked at my mother-in-law and asked, “What is that? That bird?”  She said she didn’t know, but had heard it the night before, too.

I went outside.  There, the call became less distinct, because it was mixed in with all the other bird noises that I couldn’t hear from indoors.  It was somewhere off in the trees, but I couldn’t see anything.  I was puzzled; I had no idea what it was, and went back inside.

Over the following days, I heard the bird again.  Finally, I went to the Cornell University bird web site, and started listing to the bird calls of birds I already knew, thinking that maybe one of them was making calls I was unfamiliar with (I had recently been surprised to learn, via Cornell’s pages, that odd piping notes behind our house were blue jays; I was even more surprised a couple of months ago when I witnessed, from my front yard, a blue jay imitating a red tailed hawk.)

 I listened to a lot of bird calls and still had no answer, but resolved to continue the search later.

A short while after that, we were visiting friends at their house in the Highlands neighborhood of Louisville.  As we talked and played basketball in the back yard, I again heard the bird call off in the trees.  Phwee-EEEH.

I thought for a minute.  How do I search on the internet for a bird call?  I would need a description that matches the call.  Very high-pitched, whistling, sounds kind of like “Fweeee” … How else could the call be described? “WeeyaEEEE?” “PweeEEE?”…

…holy crap. “Pewee?”

I pulled out my smart phone and looked up “pewee call.”  I was taken to the Cornell page for the eastern wood pewee, and sure enough, found the call.

Apparently, it’s not a rare bird at all (although if my experience is any indication, it’s not exactly common in residential Louisville, and vanishes altogether to South America in winter anyway.)  I got the visual description of this small member of the flycatcher family, so I knew what to look for.

There, in my friends’ driveway, I played the recording, and I think it actually provoked the pewee that was in the tree-line a good way off to fly over to a nearby tree.  Regardless of the reason, it did fly to a tree by the driveway, and I could see it.

I probably had seen it before; except for the loud, distinctive call, the eastern wood pewee is easy to overlook.  They are small and olive-drab, matching the colors of the tree branches on which they perch, looking very nondescript from a distance (especially if your distance vision is as bad as mine.)  A more detailed view will show them to have cute crested heads and cute short tails, but from a little way off they just look like any old small bird.

There are at last two living near my house, and I hear them and see them almost every morning and night.  In fact, a couple of nights ago, as I mowed our back yard, one flew down to a post in the middle of the yard, watching for insects that I was stirring up.  I got within fifteen feet of him, lawnmower still running, before he flew off (and I don’t think he flew away because of my proximity; I think he was chasing a moth.) 

I am very happy to have made this acquaintance, and every time I hear them now, I smile.

Blackberries coming in

Which did I get more of: blackberries, or mosquito bites?

I almost have enough for blackberry ice cream. Maybe this weekend.

"Hey, doughnuts in the breakroom, everyone!"

Game of Hanabi

One of my daughters got a copy of the card game Hanabi for Easter. This situation—my children getting a game that I really like--presents a small problem for me. It's their game, but I want to play it and take it to friends' houses and treat it like my own. That's not a major problem, because I can't imagine my children telling me "no" when I ask if I can use one of their games, but it does make it look like I got them a game just so I could play with it myself. It just feels a bit awkward and would be easier if I just had my own copy, but then, it would feel silly to buy another copy when we already have the exact same thing in our family.

Anyway, I've played it a couple of time, and enjoyed it a lot. The most recent time was last weekend, when I played it with three friends. It felt awkward getting started because I was trying to simultaneously get them interested in the game, remember the rules, read the rules, and play the game for the first few minutes, but after a short period of time we all had it. And I had a lot of fun.

The most fun was seeing (and hearing) everyone working through their own internal debates on what to do on their turns, while also trying to keep from saying more than they were supposed to. It resulted in a continuous stream of incomplete sentences, along the lines of, "Well, if you have…and he has…wait, hold your cards up so I can see them…OK, but if I…and we have two clock tokens left…but then you could…no, wait, what about…so I could tell you…" I found it pretty funny.

We got a score of 18 without dropping too many accidental meta-hints, which I guess is pretty good.

Mysterium

Shadowrun Troll

Bingo the dog shaman

June creek fishing

Last weekend I went fishing for the first time in several years.  I fished a stream. I caught nine or ten fish, all small, but all fun to catch.  I really want to spend some time looking for decent sized catfish and drum in there; there are bound to be a few.

beet hummus

I made a batch of hummus, and added two roasted beets. I also roasted the garlic. I think roasting the garlic made the flavor overly mellow (I had never done that before.) It is good, but not as strongly flavorful (read: garlicky) as usual. I don't really notice the beets, apart from the snazzy color.

 We recently bought some butternut squash hummus at a farmers market, and we all enjoyed it. That, and the various forms of pesto I've recently encountered, got me thinking about how all kinds of things could probably be added to hummus and pesto.

We just got our first big box of produce from a CSA. It has beets and chard. I have grown quite fond of beets in recent years, but no one else in my family really likes them. It occurred to me that cooked beets might be an interesting addition to hummus. So I Googled it, and sure enough, I found recipes that went along with what I had in mind.

So last night I made beet hummus, which was really just hummus with some roasted beets added to it. I also roasted the garlic this time, and added some coriander and a dash of cayenne. It was good, but I think the thing about it I like best is the bright magenta color.

a bill on its last legs