jaeleslie

Out of town for the weekend. The drive down to Naperville on Saturday was lovely, sun shining, mist rising from the fields. Took my favorite route south from town on Hwy 14, which turns into a big highway shortly after I take a left straight from our house. This skips beltline traffic and interstate, very fast, then east on Hwy 59 for another straight and deserted two-lane U.S. highway, the glory of our infrastructure such as it is, through spring farmland and old tobacco warehouse town of Edgerton, where I joined interstate highway system already in progress. Construction around Janesville presents no obstacle southbound, remember the northbound looks bad for trip back. But then at Rockford I missed the exit to continue straight south toward DeKalb, and found myself on the way to Chicago. It was because I was switching tapes in the player, putting in the next two sides of Cosi Fan Tutte. ( Read more... )

Don't tell everybody about my secret back roads, okay?

Wednesday evenings the Arboretum offers these little walking tours of whatever is in bloom. This week it was the crabapples with Prof Hasselkus (Emeritus) who has the most encyclopedic knowledge of every cultivated variety of landscape plant, and crabapples are one of his specialties. Several dozen people showed up to follow him around, at one of the major horticultural collections in the world. It was a lovely evening again for a little walk, and I learned more than I need to know about different flowering crabs, white and pink and red, Japanese and native, rootstock and habits and new varieties. Also ornamental pears and birch and redbud. The lilac collection will be coming along next week.

On a pure text basis, because it is such a cute name, I am lobbying for the Blue-Footed Booby to be awarded the prize for World's Cutest Animal. Against Penguin? Polar bear? See? you don't even have to see the pictures to know which is cutest! But those webbed feet sure are blue! and that's everyone's favorite color, so there's another point in its favor.

http://www.worldwildlife.org/cutest/

I sure hope the prize includes food, sex, and habitat.

Friday evening we went to a retirement party. It is a little known fact that besides the seasonal duties of Santa there are 365 days in the year during which Santa keeps pretty busy. He has just retired from his position with the City Parks Division. ( Read more... )

Now that I've finally ordered some frames that I've been thinking about for oh six weeks now, it is nearly time to take it easy for the evening. It's been one of those weeks when I feel like I'm running as fast as I can, but at least I am kind of keeping up. Last summer I had a class with a teacher who advised Don't Think, Just Do It, and that seems to be working to some degree. I've been reading quite a bit, and writing in response, which is how it oughtta be.

Tuesday (which is as far back as I can remember) my ceramics class was busy, because I had half a dozen things out of the bisque kiln that had to be glazed, and I hadn't completely thought out what to do with them. Found myself devising a method of brush lettering with this very gloppy stuff that I am not very good at yet, How can I keep from singing. Then next week is our last class, we'll scrub some of the mud off the walls and shelves, and that's it for the semester. After that I had a little trip to the library, then sprang into action as chauffeur service to get Number One Son from rugby practice to gaming club and fed as well, which I finessed by finding a new Subway's right on the way.

Yesterday I was reading, and then organizing some work I have been kind of thinking about, pulling out the necessary parts so that I will remember to work on them, which doesn't look like much accomplished, and then I had some errands that I finally got to kind of late, visited a friend I hadn't seen in forever along the way, came home and fixed dinner. That's all horribly vague. Okay, I got to pull out one of my big folders of decorated paper and look at everything in it and work out which ones might go through a printer for a collage technique I want to try.

Then in the evening I had a walk around the Arboretum with Julie Z, on a guided tour that they apparently have every Wednesday. Who knew? I had saved my walk energy so I'd be up for it. I learned about magnolias and redbuds and pears and saskatoon, all in bloom now, and it was a glorious evening. The weather being unseasonably warm and windy actually makes me swell up something terrible, but who can complain? The peach tree and all the tulips are in bloom.

Papers are moving across my various worktables with glacial speed. After just a bit more gluing I am very nearly done with last year's studio journal, and ready to sew it together. So today I did something I have been contemplating and looking forward to for quite some time.

A couple years ago I got some big sheets of dinged-up watercolor paper from a friend. So I put one down on the worktable like a blotter, because over the years I am always finding some of the nicest paintings are the ones left over on the table around the edges of what I've been working on. When the calligraphy study group was here in December I got Marcia and Chris to help put some of their leftover colors and gilded bits on it. I gessoed a bunch of stuff on top of it, and painted papers, and practiced a little lettering, and watched all the patterns build up. Then I turned it over and did the same but completely different on the other side. Last night I eyeballed the dimensions and worked out how many pages in which direction to cut it down.

Today I folded and tore (very carefully! with professional tools!) this large heavy sheet down into folio, then quarto, then octavo pages. It is going to be a book! Thirty-two pages, including eight two-page spreads, still incomplete! The fun has only begun!

As is my custom I have been reading all the Hugo-nominated short fiction, and I just wanted to remark that Charles Stross is a fucking genius. I seem to recall he had another story in the same narrative series nominated last year.

But I am mentioning it specially because he is a Guest of Honor at Ploktacon this weekend I think, and it is another reason to feel (choose one) sad/ left out/ grumpy/ poor/ that I am not there.

Shall I go look up whether his story won. Shall I summarize and/or critique the work (a linked series of stories). Shall I check whether this is really the right date for Ploktacon. No, I shall not do any of those things, I shall post this comment and go finish reading another short story.

In a fit of family togetherness on a rainy Sunday, we have made the final push to finish the hellish Van Gogh puzzle. Number One Son wishes me to report that it is Impressionist Bullshit. Mr S thinks it is pretty realistic. It is hard to explain how wild this style of painting was considered a hundred years ago. I look at the irisses coming up across the street and see the range of color and form he was trying to get at. After close study I can see... it is post-impressionist.

One interesting phenomenon during the process of working it was how my powers of assembly were totally blocked by the flowerheads of the irises, which in the finished painting are the most easily recognized realistic element. So we got everything done right up to there and then big empty spaces in the middle for the masses of bloom. Then I had to struggle along trying to identify the necessary shapes of the puzzle pieces, not my strength. Fortunately the boys developed a method of categorizing the shapes although some of their categories don't make much sense to me. Closely matching the various colors and qualities of line was my strong point. Toward the end my latest superpower manifested: I can take one puzzle piece, and instantly match it to the corresponding tiny portion of the picture on the puzzle box. It should go... there! This is not much help until there is something to hook it onto.

Next we have a 1000-piece photograph of a bunch of umbrellas. They want realism, take that! Next week they will be begging for the Cezanne.

Last time I looked, it was Secretaries' Week. That was back in the day (oh dearly beloved) when the bosses could take the office girls out for lunch and buy them drinks!

When I worked at the cemetery, that terminology was already out of date when the last office girl before me retired in her sixties. (The one before her had worked into her eighties, sitting there minding the phone and knitting.) The civil service position was Clerk Typist but we were still called the Office Girl. Now I guess they have a Professional Administrative Assistant there, you better believe it. Oh brave new world.

There was an office once where the boss actually stayed in to answer the phones, instead of avoiding calls, and smiled from the front desk while the whole clerical and reception staff went out for a long lunch. The world turned upside down! I had a lot of respect for him.

Some months ago I did some test cooking for a Sri Lankan cookbook by Mary Anne Mohanraj. Considering I had to tone down the hotness in this very hot cuisine for the Norwegian bachelor farmers at my house, it is still very tasty stuff. We are particularly partial to the Spicy Chicken Curry, the Golden Rice Pilaf and the Ginger-Garlic Chicken. The Mango Chutney is wonderful made with apples too, although it mysteriously gets less hot as it sits in the jar. Now that I finally have laid hands on properly printed copies it is still easier to cook off of my marked-up galley pages, but I am very proud of my minuscule part in the production. The explanatory essays are the finest kind of food writing, personal, evocative and friendly, and the recipes and directions are very clear. And Number One Son has learned to chop and saute the onions just as Mary Anne describes.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1590211006/qid=1082739387/sr=2-1/ref=sr_2_1/002-9603263-4807212