Watermelon carving

I did this as a centerpiece for a fruit table at an elementery school art show.

Black walnut ink house portrait

I finished this one a few nights ago. It is 11 x 15 inches.  Overall, I am satisfied with it, although frankly there are some elements of the house I'm not entirely happy with.  I'm happiest with the trees.  I enjoy working on trees and I'll try to do some more tree drawings soon.

Fat asparagus

This is a hefty vegetable. I chopped it down and dragged it into the house last night.

Pen and ink house portrait

 Here's another, finished late last night.  This one is 6 x 9 inches on cold press watercolor paper. This is a pretty house and it was pleasant to draw.

Asparagus

The last blog post is a photo of asparagus from my garden. I planted it the year before last, and this is the first year that I’ve felt like it is coming in well enough to harvest. I’ve sautéed a few bunches, and it has been quite good—flavorful and tender.  I have had quite a few gardening flops, but this isn’t one of them.

Kim doesn’t seem to react this way, nor does anyone else I know, but I find asparagus comical.  Every other thing in my garden starts as a seedling or a sprout that I have to wait on to develop, or I have to wait for it to grow fruit to pick, or to grow enough leaves to snip off.  But asparagus gives me the goofy impression that there is a tiny guy hiding under the soil with a bundle of full-grown asparagus spears under his arm, and he keeps reaching up and poking them through the soil for me to pick.

Creekside art

I had some time to kill in Taylorsville while the girls attended a birthday party. Luckily, Waterford Park was nearby.

Bedecked

Maybe a little gardening, 2013

My own personal 2013 gardening season is underway.  I don’t have any big, long-term plans.  Judy gave me some spare broccoli, arugula, and kale seedlings, which I planted on Sunday.  They look pretty happy where they are.

I also sowed some bachelor’s button and cilantro seeds, all mixed in the same spot.  Next to those, one of the two rosemary plants from last year appears to have survived the winter.  I hope it starts growing again.

I’m looking for signs of my asparagus, of which I have four of five plants.  I recall from last year that it was sort of late in the spring before I saw it pop out of the soil.  This will be the first year that I’ll try harvesting from it.

The Asiatic lilies and glads are popping out.  Last year, the lilies had just been divided, so they were looking a little scrawny.  This year they should look pretty good.

I have seeds for green onions (scallions) and peas, but I need to find a spot for them.  My windfall of arugula and kale took their space.  The girls have little garden boxes Judy made with them last year, and which are so far empty.  Those might be just the spot for them, or at least the peas, which the girls like growing, picking, and eating.

The hostas by our front porch looked bad last year.  They didn’t do well, for some reason, and so far I haven’t seen a sign that they’ll be back this spring.  I wonder if they actually have been “done in”? Over the weekend, Helga gave us some ground cover that she had dug up.  It gets little purple flowers on it, but she didn’t remember the name, and I’ll have to try to figure it out somehow.  Anyway, I put that at either end of the hosta bed, and I guess we’d better start looking for a replacement for the hostas. I still like the astilbe idea, but have not been able to sell Kim on it.

Tree mural...done?

 Well, yeah, I'm calling it done.  I can easily rattle off five things I'd like to change or work on some more, but I am done with this section of the mural. I think I got it to a state where it looks attractive and the family I am painting it for can be very satisfied with it; I will only work on it some more if they tell me otherwise.

Egg dying at the Gilbert's

NCAAW, U of L vs. Purdue

"Horse & Jockey 3" pen & ink

11 x 14" on cold press watercolor paper.

Mark's Madness! Brackets!

Horse & Jockey prints

I just had reproductions run. This is the first time I have done this via offset printing; I had them run digitally before. I am very pleased with the results. I feel that there is a good range of tone and subtlety in the prints.

Tree Mural, in progress

I'm not far from completing another section of the play room mural I started for someone last year. This is in the same room as the giant Crayola box.  They asked for a tree in this corner, and left the rest up to me.  I liked the idea of putting in something extra colorful, so I chose macaws. I had planned out a mountainous background, but the water was a spur-of-the-moment idea.

 This isn't actually the most up-to-date photo. Last night I put a lot of work into the tree trunk and limbs, giving them a little more color and dimension.  I must get a good photo of the trunk as it is now, because I think it's my favorite thing about the painting.

Next I will add tall grass to the area between the tree and the water, and then some touching up, then I'll be done!

Silver

In the refrigerator change box at work today, right on top: a well-worn 1956 Canadian quarter, .8000 fine silver. That makes the second silver quarter I've found in the past few months.

Fried potatoes

 

I have fixed potatoes quite a few different ways, with varying degrees of success. I don't think I've ever ruined a potato recipe, probably because potatoes are so simple and sturdy and edible to begin with that you actually have to work hard to make them really bad.

However, I've rarely had potatoes come out as something that seemed excellent.  Sure, the baked potatoes I've made have been very satisfying.  I've made boiled and mashed potatoes, and they were fine.  Potatoes I've fried have been OK.

Sunday, after fishing, I came home hungry.  There was a half-bag of smallish red potatoes on the counter, and I decided to fry them (to accompany some reheated crock pot chicken), and to finally do it right.  I actually tried to adhere to a recipe.

So I trimmed them, cut them into smaller pieces, boiled them for fifteen minutes, and then sautéed them in a mix of butter and canola in a cast iron skillet until they were brown.  The recipe called for rosemary, but I had none, so I sprinkled them with parsley flakes and coarse salt.

Maybe it was the fact that fishing in cold weather makes me feel a little calorie starved, but by golly, those were the best potatoes I have ever fixed.  They were perfect.

Otter Creek fishing...no luck, but fun.

Kentucky fishing licenses expire at the end of February, so I decided to take mine out for one last spin yesterday.  I went to Otter Creek Outdoor Recreation Area, since it had been a very long time since I had been out there, and it’s one of my favorite spots to be outdoors.

I parked at the end of the road that leads down to the area near the Blue Hole, and hike from there. I headed downstream first, and fished in spots I could get down to the water. The banks were steep and slick with mud, so I had to find gullies that I could descend through and gravel bars to fish from.  Fortunately, there are quite a few of those.

The first spot I fished in, I got a couple of good hits on a spinner.  The second hit, I could see the fish in the water, thrashing; it looked great, certainly a respectable size fish, but it threw the hook.

The first spot I fished

After that, nothing. I fished as far down as the old stone remains of a mill, which was a beautiful spot to fish, but there was nothing doing.  It was hard to decide between changing lures or moving to a different spot, but since fish had hit my white spinner, I stuck with that, and occasionally switched to a second rod that had a cream-colored curly tail jig.

In the mill ruins

This time of year, one is likely to only catch trout or smallmouth in a creek like that (the trout are stocked). However, there are plenty of spots that would be good in the future to look for largemouth, catfish, and various species of sunfish. There were lots of nice little pools alternating with rocky riffles.

At one point as I was walking, I saw four deer standing in the creek ahead. I moved as close as I could, taking pictures, before they bounded off.  The deer were still far away and hard to make out in the photo, so I circled them in red.

White tail deer



At mid-afternoon, I moved to the old boat ramp area on the Ohio River. I baited up with some chicken livers, thinking that a couple of days of milder weather and sunshine might have prompted some channel catfish to move in shallower to feed, but I had no bites.

It was a nice place to hang out, though.  From that spot, one can see five or six miles of river.

I spent quite a bit of time watching the Indiana side. Upstream, on the opposite bank more than a half mile away, I could see two people.  They were tiny dots, and they were there the whole time I was. I tried to figure out what they were doing. They were climbing up and down the bank, walking all around.  At first I thought that maybe they were playing with a dog that was just too small to see, because their wandering around was just like the behavior of someone outdoors with a dog. However, I don’t think they had a dog.  Maybe they were looking around for artifacts washed from the bank, or collecting driftwood.

A tug, the Donna Rushing, came dramatically into view pushing 24 barges around the upriver bend, and I watched it get farther and farther away. Miles downstream, I could see another one, tiny with distance, approaching, but I left before it drew near.

The Ohio River, near the boat ramp. I've painted down here a few times, too.

Bed and Breakfast - black and white drawing

 Here is the small house portrait I completed last week. It's 6 x 9 inches.  It's a bed and breakfast, and the business owner wanted a horse featured, since the area used to be a horse farm (and home to a Kentucky Derby winner.)

Sepia cowboy

Books

 

 

I recently finished "Shades of Grey" by Jasper Fforde, which I borrowed from my brother.  I was not sure what to expect from it. He had described it to me, and I had read the book jacket, so I knew it was a strange, somewhat comedic story set in a the far future when a person's social standing is determined by what colors he or she can see (everyone, it seems, has some degree of colorblindness.) 

 

Kevin had been recommending the book to me for years, and I'm glad I finally read it, because I really enjoyed it.  It was very strange and imaginative, yet at the same time grounded in recognizable details of daily existence. 

 

There are two more as-yet-unwritten books planned in the series, and I look forward to them.  I guess I should also try Fforde's other books; Kevin likes them, too, and so does my friend Loraine.

 

I am now reading "A Feast for Crows," the fourth book in the "A Song of Ice and Fire" series by George R. R. Martin.  I'm almost half way through it, and I can see why most people think it's the weakest book of the five books so far written (two more are planned).  Yet I am still quite enjoying it. 

 

It fun the way Martin takes what is on its face a clichéd-sounding fantasy story scenario (huge fictional Medieval-style kingdom full of conspiring nobles who go to war with one another, paying little attention to the silly tales they hear of an ancient evil coming back to haunt them, while meanwhile a young princess across the sea marshalls a barbarian army…etc etc.) and then populates that story with interesting, believable humans.  I think that's the central conceit of the story: What if a typical sprawling epic fantasy didn't have real heroes and villains, but instead had the sort of people that existed in Europe a thousand years ago?  Which is to say, there is a lot of death and dismemberment, bad mistakes, horrifying predicaments, and brutality. 

 

There isn't much magic, and some of the humans are worse than what few monsters show up.  It's pretty grim, but there are still sympathetic characters that I root for and hope will make it to the end, and even many of the bad guys become more understandable as they are fleshed out.

Stolen artwork -- recovered!

One of the owners of The Comfy Cow called me today to say that a lady had called him to say she had my drawing that was stolen last February. He gave me her name and phone number.

 

This evening I called her, and then went to her apartment near the river in New Albany.  She gave me my drawing, in great shape and undamaged except for some stains on the backing board of the frame.

 

She told me that up until the middle of last summer, there had been some teens, eighteen or nineteen years old, living in the apartment behind hers (She didn't say so, but I think she meant it was a boyfriend/girlfriend).  Last June they had a big fight, and the place was trashed.

 

The landlord told this lady that he would knock off some of her rent in return for her going over to this apartment to clean it out. She found my drawing on the wall there, liked it, and hung it up in her apartment.

 

Then, yesterday, she and her roommate were watching "Antiques Road Show" and saw them discussing artwork appraisal.  They looked at my drawing on their wall and wondered if it was worth anything.  My name is on the drawing, so they Googled me and found my web site, on which I have the drawing listed as stolen with a request to contact The Comfy Cow with information.

 

So she called The Comfy Cow.

 

I am very grateful to her and to the owners of The Comfy Cow; I never expected to get the drawing back, especially now that a year has passed.

 

 

Winter croquet

It's been goshawful cold this past week, but just before the current cold spell set in -- and after things had dried out from several days of rain -- we were able to break out the croquet set the girls got for Christmas.

I tried to set up the stakes and wickets at the distance noted on our rules sheet, but our back yard wasn't quite wide enough.  It was only short by a few feet, really. However, I think next time I can make it appreciably smaller just to make things a little less demanding on small-framed croquet beginners. It took quite a lot of poorly aimed whacking to get the balls around the whole circuit.  The unanimous verdict, however, was "Fun!"

January hike

I'd been wanting to for a couple of months, and finally yesterday I was able to get out to explore a rather secluded wooded area here in Jefferson County.  I was hoping to find some old house or building sites for metal detecting, but I also really just wanted to hike in the woods.

The woods are large enough that I had to hurry to get to my goal (a structure I could see in satellite photos, on a ridge far from the road) and back to the car in three hours.  I only saw a fraction of the area.  There was no real danger of getting lost, since I knew from maps what I would run into in any direction, and there's a creek that runs through the middle that leads right back to the road near my car. However, once in the woods, it was hard to figure out exactly where I was or where I was in relation to the structure I was looking for.

I finally found it--I'll probably post a photo of it later--and there wasn't much to it. It looked like an unfinished building foundation, post-1970.  I think there are other very old building foundations or cellar holes nearby, but I didn't spot them; by the time I got to the area, I was getting tired and I knew I had to turn around to head back.

I used trails as much as I could, but I also headed directly though the woods every once in a while. There were ATV trails as well as poorly defined trails that looked like there were made more by deer than humans. The edges of the woodland were a tangle of weeds and thorns that were a little hard to navigate, but once I got a little farther in the understory was open and easy to traverse.  After the heavy rains of last week, the spring-fed stream that ran through the middle was noisy and pretty, but still small enough to hop across (there were a few pools that looked like they might even be big enough to hold catchable fish, although I don't know if the water level stays high enough.

There were deer hoof prints everywhere I looked. A few sandhill cranes flew over while I was out, but I never saw another human.

Foods Mark doesn’t like to eat:

Last year my blog post quantity dropped quite a bit. I’m not sure why. For 2013, I will work harder at writing about more things that don’t matter and no one cares much about, just because, dammit, I have made a commitment. Even though I actually haven’t made a commitment.

There aren’t many foods I don’t have any interest in, and even fewer that I truly dislike. And I’m not talking about things that are actually bad—poorly cooked food, things that aren’t actually food, etc.  I’m talking about foods that are commonly bought or cooked or served around here.

It’s actually hard for me to think of things to put on this list. Here are a few:

Eggplant: I’ve rarely had eggplant, and I can eat it, and I actually don’t mind eating it too much. However, eggplants themselves sort of weird me out.  They are purple and look squishy, and I just don’t trust them for some reason.  I don’t think I would ever intentionally order an eggplant dish, and would only eat an eggplant dish if it ended up being set in front of me and there just weren’t any other polite options.

Semi-wet chicken dishes: I like baked, fried, and grilled chicken. I also like chicken in soups or stews. However, there is a disappointing category of chicken dishes right in between those. I’m talking about baked chicken dishes that have a heavy sauce, in which you have a chicken breast that is all wet and slimy, sort of sitting in a puddle.  In these dishes, the sauce is always flavorful but runny, and the chicken itself has an unpleasant texture and not a lot of flavor.  I can eat this, but I can never figure out why someone would choose to fix chicken like this when there are other methods.

Overly earthy bread: As the years have passed, we’ve moved to increasingly healthy bread, with varied whole grains and less sugar. I’m fine with it, even though I do usually enjoy lighter breads more. A few times, though, we have had some brand of bread (and I can’t remember what brand it was) that I swear had twigs and gravel in it. Too far. Yuck.

Some internal organs and parts: I think I’d be willing to try most of the ones that people often cook and serve, like kidney and liver, and maybe even heart and tongue. I wouldn’t be excited about the chance, but I’d try it just to see if I like it, if the opportunity arose. However, pig brains and pig feet will never be on my list of potential candidates.  There are probably other things like that, but I’m not going to spend time trying to think of them.

I guess that’s about it. Maybe I’ll think of something else later.

Mural section - completed

 Last night I finished this first section of the wall. This is an art & craft area of a children's play room.  The next section will feature a large tree.

More work on the mural

I worked on the glue bottle today, and it is mostly done.

Mural progress

I worked on the mural for a few more hours last night. The Crayola box is pretty much done; I am pleased with it.

Year's end

 I haven't blogged much lately. I've either been too busy, or not had a lot to say--but mostly, too busy.

The girls have been taking music lessons, and the first photo comes from the night of a piano recital. There were some fine refreshments.

Christmas was great. Kim and I spent so much time trying to get stuff done and, like every year, we were up very late wrapping gifts and cleaning. This year we actually got done before 3:00 a.m. (though not by much), which I'm not sure we've managed before. The girls had a lot of fun on Christmas day, and I really enjoyed family coming over. By the time Christmas morning arrived, all the hard work was done, and we mostly hung out all day long. It was very pleasant.

There was a tiny bit of snow Christmas night, but we didn't get anything worthwhile until the 28th. We got just about three inches at our house, enough for some front yard sledding and snowman building. Also, snow penguin building.

Three and two

Mural work in progress

The green "grass" was already there.

Parking lot fog

Yesterday morning

At the game

We had to look down between our feet to watch the game, but at half time we were able to move much closer.