paperback rider

paperback rider
Originally uploaded by normanack.

From a pattern in Knitter's Magazine, summer 2006. It calls for a self-striping yarn, which I don't have. I do have lots of Brown Sheep Lamb's Pride worsted, so that's what I used.I followed the pattern except for adding three rows of single crochet around the top for stability. This is the bag before felting. It measures 16" x 11" x 4".

Emily and the lake

Emily and the lake
Originally uploaded by normanack.

The dog who fears water decides it isn't so bad after all.

Bite

DSC06188
Originally uploaded by Lee and Robbin.

My cousin caught a lizard and is, I think, keeping it as a pet. He's the kind of guy (my cousin, not the lizard) who doesn't mind being bitten. Look how gently he's holding this little animal. What a guy, huh?

Wish We Were There

DSC04029
Originally uploaded by Jozef Andrzej Bossowski.

From a re-enacted battle captured in Jozef Andrzej Bossowski's photostream on flickr. I love computers. I love flickr. I love Jozef Andrzej Bossowski.

A Bit of Russian

You'd never know that I took four years of Russian language classes at university by the way I speak or read it now. I was never good enough to read a book or converse easily, but I could negotiate menus and signs and make myself understood on basic topics.

No more. But even lacking the most rudimentary Russian skills, I could enjoy this movie poster for The Matrix. Fun stuff!
(via Inner Bitch)

Knitting Fads, in a Good Way

Funny how, of the crafts I've tried, knitting is the one where we find fads sweeping across knittingdom. It can be a pattern, like the French market bag above, or the Clapotis shawl, both from knitty.com. Or how about Jaywalker socks, developed on a knitting blog and published in magknits.com? The Birch shawl also seemed to be on everyone's needles awhile ago. Some knitting books take on a life of their own: look at Mason Dixon Knitting. MDK is like a bag of potato chips -- you can't make just one project from that book. It has a thriving knit-a-long, and I'm betting that the makers of inexpensive cotton yarn are feeling an upsurge in sales.

I've been involved in quilting longer than knitting, and sure, I saw some fads there, too. Stack 'n Whack comes to mind. And crochet? I don't know the crochet world well enough, although Debbie Stoller's Stitch 'n Bitch: The Happy Hooker seems to have made a splash. It did have her previous books to give it a push (Stitch 'n Bitch, Stitch 'n Bitch Nation).

Are knitters more fad-conscious? Do they form a tighter community, simply more aware of what others are knitting? Or is the whole fad concept just my skewed perception?

On a different level, and without any market analysis to back me up, I'd claim that quilting was (and remains) a big craft phenomenon, growing throughout the 90s and continuing in the 00s. Knitting seems to have taken a bit of the excitement from quilting, and I hear that crochet is poised to take over in turn. But I haven't seen that happen. At my local stores, I see lots more knitting books than crochet. And the magazine market? Tons of quilt titles. A good handful of knits. And only a couple on crochet, and their projects often strike me as poorly thought out.

I'm glad that craft in general has found a renewed popularity. The process of making something both beautiful and useful (broad definitions on both those words) is so deeply satisfying, particularly when the object embodies a bit of our souls. I don't mean originality, exactly, although that's a part of any craft or art. The repetition of what so many others before us have done, the history of the action, also holds meaning. Your grandmother may have crocheted, or maybe Dad's old quilt is hiding in the closet. (Ooh! I should post a picture of my husband's childhood quilt. It rocks.) I love this aspect of craft.

Lake

Sand, water, a little bit of wind. These things keep the kids busy all day. My children are relative computer sophisticates, working with photoshop and powerpoint like seasoned pros. World of Warcraft (it's Jason Fox's fault, I swear) glues them to the screen for hours until I pry their hands from the keyboards with a crowbar. But sand, water, and wind win over all.

How About a Craft?

The urge to create is strong, almost as strong as the urge to eat. I don't have a lot of self-knowledge, but know that I am happiest when creating something with my hands. It started with quilting, then expanded to knitting and recently to crocheting.

There's just something about fiber that appeals to me. It is tactile. While one can touch a painting, that's not what the painting is all about. (Surely there are painters who are all about the touch, but I don't know them.)

Quilting has an obvious visual element, yet remains very tactile in the making. I love running chains of fabric patches through the sewing machine, then blocks, then rows, then sections of the quilt. Maneuvering a large quilt through the sewing machine is nothing if not tactile .

Yet the visual element is huge, much more central to quilting than to knitting or crocheting. I love that about quilts. It reminds me of my favorite part of gardening: taking pictures of the plants that have bloomed for me. The picture makes the garden permanent, taking away the sorrow of time passing and flowers dying.

(My mom has a rather fatalistic attitude about the garden: when the daylilies bloom, summer is basically shot, and goldenrods are the nails in summer's coffin. I try not to view the succession of bloom this way, but don't you think it's scary that my very favorite time of year is just before the crocuses bloom? Then all the flowers are yet ahead of me. Pathetic, I know.)

Oh. The quilt. This is my favorite of the quilts I've made. I designed it for a sunny baby named Molly, whose mother loves brightly colored flowers. To me, this quilt sparkles with the little triangles of flower fabrics splintering off the main blocks. It matches the sparkle of little Molly's spirit and intellect.

Fun Stuff for Friday

Klaus Kinski
Actor Klaus Kinski had this to say about director Werner Herzog:

Herzog is a miserable, hateful, malevolent, avaricious, money-hungry, nasty, sadistic, treacherous, cowardly creep...he should be thrown alive to the crocodiles! An anaconda should strangle him slowly! A poisonous spider should sting him and paralyze his lungs! The most venomous serpent should bite him and make his brain explode! No panther claws should rip open his throat--that would be much too good for him! Huge red ants should piss into his lying eyes and gobble up his balls and his guts! He should catch the plague! Syphilis! Yellow fever! Leprosy! It's no use; the more I wish him the most gruesome deaths, the more he haunts me.

from a David Jennings web page, David Herzog Quotes
via futuregirl's craft blog

Independence Day

declaration_of_independence
Originally uploaded by
Keven OShaughnessy.

Yesterday I had the privilege of celebrating Independence Day with an extraordinary group of people. The retired Episcopalian minister (and former bishop) down the street invited some neighbors over along with a handful of friends from his church. Among the gathering were a beekeeper, a retired nurse, an accountant, a web site operator, a Canadian (I know, not an occupation, but I forget what he did for a living) and a stay-at-home mother (me). I struggled to keep up with the conversation, which ranged, naturally, over political issues and the state of our union, as well as its history.
We read the Declaration of Independence and mused over George Washington's character. Immigration was a central topic, and since the entire group had a strong left-leaning bias, the talk was not of halting, but of understanding it. Clearly, the United States promises a better living for the poor who come here illegally, and whose wages sent home (speaking of Mexico here) comprise a major part of their country's economy. Physically stopping them from entering the U.S. is likely impossible, and anyway, it doesn't address the issue of why they come. We agreed that spending our war money on helping Mexico solve its problems might be a better use of our resources, but how we, as individuals, could help brought a silence over the table.
It wasn't until long after the fireworks were over and I lay sleepless in bed that I realized that the answer was, quite literally, at that table. The beekeeper spends his winters on the Arizona-Mexico border picking up litter left by the stream of illegal immigrants. (It's not a small task: the culture of poverty these people live in has little regard for proper trash disposal. Literally tons of it is strewn across the landscape, and it is difficult work to remove it.) The web site run by one of the dinner guests is a clearing house for political action. The retired minister himself worked for years as a mediator, helping local people to solve stubborn disputes too expensive to pursue in court for those involved. The accountant works for an organization that resolves difficult Medicaid coverage cases too expensive for hospitals to pursue themselves.
These people left me humbled. What am I doing to address the problems Americans have with each other and with their world neighbors?
What are you doing?

Fake Flans

Since tasting and loving the flan at Cancun, the local Mexican restaurant, my kids and I have been making it at home.

At bat was a boxed mix from Mexico, about a dollar at the local supermarket:

It was very stiff and yet somehow slimy, and the caramel sauce tasted burnt. We gave it three thumbs down.

On deck was Royal's take on the same thing:

It was smooth and slippery, rather like a pared-down custard. The caramel was dark but sweet, toasty but not burnt. Two thumbs up (my daughter was put off by the texture). I didn't think it was quite rich enough to qualify as flan.

In the hole was a recipe based on eggs and sweetened condensed milk. It was easy to prepare and used ingredients I already had at home (which is why I didn't try the more authentic cream-based recipes -- no cream). I found the recipe at allrecipes.com, where it was submitted by Jessica Dezendorf. She says it's a Mexican recipe from the late Iris Perez, and suggests substituting 8 ounces of cream cheese for two of the original 8 eggs, which I did, like this:

Put 6 eggs, 8 ounces cream cheese, 1 can sweetened condensed milk, and 1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract in a blender. Blend until smooth.


Melt 1 1/2 cups of sugar in a saucepan. I'd never done this before, and my kids and I were amazed by the transformation. It went from this

to this


Pour the melted sugar in a 9-inch round pan, then pour the egg mixture over it.


Bake in a water bath at 300 degrees Fahrenheit for 70 minutes. How do you know when it's done? My most trusted source is the folks at Cook's Illustrated. In The America's Test Kitchen Family Cookbook, they state that "if a paring knife halfway between the center and edge . . . comes out clean," the flan is done.
We loved it. It was dense and creamy, nearly like cheesecake. In fact, it was so close to cheesecake that my daughter said, "It's really good. But it's not flan." Out of the mouths of babes, eh?

Next we'll try a cream-based recipe, if I can still get into my jeans.

little leopard

I've been reading Christine Feehan's Dark Challenge, which is full of leopards of both the natural and shapeshifter varieties. So what should appear in my yard than a leopard moth? This was exciting, as we found leopard moth caterpillars last year. What a cool wee beastie.

(By the way, enjoying but not loving the Feehan. Full of Everests and Death Valleys with not a lot of level terrain to even things out. Still and all, a really fun read.)

Reminder to Self: Slow Down on the Caffeine

Reminder to Self: Slow Down on the Caffeine
Originally uploaded by Flipped Out.

This picture makes me laugh every time I look at it. From flickr, taken by Ken Ilio.

Fewer Calories, Less Taste

review continued from previous post
Micah, Hamilton's latest offering, promises the story of Blake's wereleopard partner. In a previous novel, Micah appeared more or less out of the blue and was instantly recognized by Blake as her soulmate. Micah is short, standing eye-to-eye with the petite necromancer. Notable for his size (short he ain't, if you catch my drift) and eyes (permanently in shape-shifted leopard form), Micah manages to insert himself into Blake's life and bed without greatly upsetting her other partners, a considerable feat. He has a mysterious past, hinted at but not explored until now.

But Micah's life story turns out not to be the mystery explored here, or at least not primarily. We get his past, which is interesting but not particularly noteworthy. Instead, the focus is on the pair's current relationship, put to the test by their first trip together without any of the other weres or vampires around. Micah makes the event into a luxurious honeymoon, with Blake having conniption fits over what this means about their relationship. We've come to expect this sort of introspection from Blake, but here, without any complications from other characters, there's not a lot to explore. Her discomfort with the situation quickly becomes old. Get over it, Anita. Micah means a lot to you. Quit throwing hissy fits and sleep with him!

Meanwhile, the central plot about a zombie-raising gone wrong is simple, again lacking the marvelous personal and political convolutions that make the other novels so messy and wonderful. And Blake herself is oddly powerless, finding the zombie too strong to control. I guess this is what bothers me the most. Throughout the novel, Blake seems adrift, along for the ride. Her "damn the torpedoes" attitude, so much a part of her person, is strangely missing here. In bed, she is tentative. (Will he fit? Yikes!) In power, she is bereft. C'mon, Anita, take control! Pull out that gun and blast that zombie into scummy little necrotic blobs!

The underlying problem seems to be Micah. As a character, he lacks the complexity to stand up to Blake. His psychological issues aren't as richly explored as those of Richard, the werewolf king, and his power can't stand up to Jean Claude's, the master vampire. His length and breadth, while greater, can't make up for his smaller stature overall. He is, in the end, just a little guy.

school project

mobile another view
Originally uploaded by normanack.

The boy's school is famous for assigning huge projects. They are imaginative (create an African newspaper), sometimes traditional (make a poster about a current world event), forward thinking (make a power point presentation on a country's inventions) and always involve as much time on the presentation as on content. Here is the boy's take on a mobile representing the taiga biome. He did all the research. I helped print the pictures and his dad helped him construct the physical object. Even his sister helped with the drawing of a food web attached to the bottom. William chose pictures from flickr, where I directed him to the creative-commons licensed ones whenever possible. Phew -- it takes me right back to middle school, every night, in my dreams.

The Girl picked a bouquet of tulips to take to the Montessori spaghetti dinner. I had no idea that there were so many kinds of tulips in our gardens. The Shirleys (white with purple edges) are scattered and mostly petering out, but the plain red and yellow ones are going strong. The deep wine-red bloom is amazing in person but didn't reproduce well here.

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