From the photo archives

I connected up my Seagate external hard drive so I could cruise through my older photos (not SO old, 2,3,4 years old). I really enjoy taking photos of all kinds. Kids, scenery, closeups of minutiae. All of it interests me. So here are a few from the archives

Glass tailings from glassblower Bendzunas. I think they are so cute and pretty.

Blue heron relaxing in the pond

Lubec Maine cemetery. It is an old cemetery with gravestones leaning over 

from hundreds of years of frost heaves

An old shed

Blue jay just hanging out

Lubec Maine

Lubec Maine, the US most eastern point. I used to vacation up there. Here is a tour of the far reaches:

The Franklin Delano Roosevelt Bridge, connecting New Brunswick Canada to the mainland United States. it is the only land connection that this location at New Brunswick has, actually Campobello Island. The only other way off the Canadian island is by ferry. There is a small customs house at the foot of the bridge on both sides. It used to be easy to go over the bridge. I'd go grab lunch in Canada or get groceries. I knew the soldier guy in the tiny booth, we'd wave and chat. By a few years after 9/11 there was paperwork and inspections and rigmarole, so I just quit driving over the bridge and stayed in the US.

The old cannery house. Note how high the tide range is, and the barnacles and periwinkles on the pier legs.

Below, a closeup of the candy striped West Quoddy head Lighthouse. Commissioned in 1808. It's got a 3rd order Fresnel lens, and is the only 3rd order and one of only eight Fresnel lenses still in use on the Maine Coast.

OK, here is the whole lighthouse:

Good to know. Time to turn around.

This was taken at a store located in Perry Maine, at the 45th Parallel, and the store is named, what else, 45th Parallel. The Boston Globe did a story about the store.

Maine Lupines

So that is a trip to the easternmost point of Maine. Pretty, isn't it!

Mustard greens

A friend of mine gave me a bunch of mustard greens. She hates mustard greens. Hates them with a passion. So why did she buy mustard greens? She thought they were collard greens.

So I ended up with them. Now, I like all greens, but mustard greens tend to be kind of strong tasting. Hmmm...what to do.

I steamed a bunch of potatoes in my steamer and took them out. I then boiled the mustard greens in the potato water plus a bouillon cube thrown in. I drained the greens and rinsed them in cold water. Meanwhile I sauteed Vidalia onion and when those were soft I added the steamed potato. I added salt and let the flavors blend. Since the potatoes were already cooked I didn't have to let it go long. When the mustard greens cooled I chopped them and added to the onion-potato mix along with some oil, covered and cooked covered on low.

I boiled up some quinoa, and when that was done, threw in three heaping tablespoons of the cooked quinoa to the potato-mustard green mix and squirted some lemon juice over it all. Cover and let simmer & set with the heat turned off.

I usually put too much, too much mustard greens, too much quinoa...my proportions are always off. So this time I paid attention and added only choice amounts of mustard greens or quinoa.

I tasted a bowl of this new mixture I just created, and it is good! I like it a lot. I would not leave out the lemon juice, it brings the dish together if you ask me.

Steamed carrots will later in the week become a cream of carrot soup with chopped mustard greens on top. I also will make a potato salad with the potatoes I didn't use. And the rest of the quinoa will become a salad with raisins. I don't know what else will go in the salad, but I know I want to try quinoa with raisins.

Tonight is the next episode of Design Star, which I enjoy. Being Sunday, the proverbial and much vaunted afternoon nap will likely be taken. Have a restful Sunday everyone.

Yard sales

A friend of mine held a yard sale this morning. Here is some of what I bought:

Hanging from the tree is the cutest ceramic birdhouse and under that stuck in the ground is a small birdbath

Here is another birdhouse nestled in the branches of the same tree

This is one of those self-watering glass globes.

I also got a watering can and a Georgia Gardening encyclopedia, plus a couple of pillows and a couple of small things I'll use in crafting. I hope she makes out well at the yard sale, she deserves it.

On a friend's recommendation, I watched the movie The Big Year last night and I really enjoyed it. It is a decent movie: with no swears, no adult situations, no immorality...just birds, scenery and nice people. Yes, even Bostick. I recommend the movie, as well.

Scrounging

During what history will show was "Prata's Creative Period", I spent a great deal of time in the first decade of the Millennium making things. I took bookbinding classes, I bought how-to books, I tried watercolor painting, I learned how to make paste paper. I and a friend burned out many blenders making various kinds of paper from various kinds of materials, but then went to the dump again and dump-picked another blender. I went to museums, I searched the web for tutorials. I never did master the Coptic binding, I never did learn to layer collages effectively, I poked many a finger while sewing signatures together, and none of it was especially clever or pretty, but all in all I loved making stuff.

I spent a great many years accumulating art supplies. I haunted going out of business sales, yard sales, and the town dump as sources to feed my creative addiction. (The town dump where I used to live is a fabulous place to find stuff. Ask anyone).

In my early professional life I had been a teacher. Lots of people say that teaching is in the genes, and if that's true, then there is a sub-gene that automatically accompanies the Teaching Gene, (Latin name: Educanus Cognosco) called the Scrounging Gene (Latin name Colligo Vilis).

What this gene enables the gene-bearer to do is look at anything, anywhere, and automatically envision it performing an educational function inside a classroom. Example, at a yard sale, one might see a baseball bat priced for 25 cents. No Teacher with Scrounging Gene can resist a sale, and the cheaper the better. So even though the teacher plays no sports, has no progeny who plays sports, and has invoked the Parental Control Blocker to black out every sports channel known to man, she will immediately become consumed with interest in the baseball bat.

"Hmmm, that baseball bat is only a quarter. I could turn that into a wonderful puppet holder/Christmas lantern/rattlesnake..."

To the Professional Scrounger Teacher, everything that's cheap can be turned into something else.

Though I do not have my own classroom anymore, I still have the Scrounging Gene. This came in handy when looking for art supplies, paper, paints, paper ephemera, books, cardboard, ribbon, fabric, tools, magazines, cards,  ... as you can see, anything and anything can be used for an artistic purpose. I mean, last night on Design Star Stanley even turned the couch into a lamp.

Then the Creative Period waned and turned to the Jurassic Period. The creative impulse to make things first dwindled, then fossilized. It went away as suddenly as the dinosaurs. The only creative things I did for these last five years is take photos and write, and I only needed a camera and a laptop for those. The scrounged materials languished.

I should rename the Jurassic Period the Cryogenic Period, because the creative impulse was only frozen, not dead. (:He's only mostly dead...not all dead. There's a difference!"). It has revived and now I need to go forth and scrounge again.

So if you see me poking around yard sales, eyes narrowed and looking emptily into thin air with head cocked to the side, you will know that is my baseball bat pose. I'd spotted something that I am envisioning turning into something else by sheer dint of creative will.

Art is your emotions flowing in a river of imagination. 

~Devin, Los Cerros Middle School, 1999

The phenomenon that is Gordon Ramsay

Last night I watched Hell's Kitchen and Master Chef, two reality restaurant/cooking shows hosted by UK restaurateur and chef Gordon Ramsay.

In Hell's Kitchen, Chef Ramsay winnows down chef hopefuls vying for a head chef position at one of his many restaurants. In Master Chef, Ramsay and two other judges host home cook contestants who compete for a lucrative prize and the title Master Chef. In his other show, Restaurant Nightmares, Ramsay is invited by struggling restaurant owners to come in and point out the issues that are causing the restaurant to sink and turn it around with his tried and true solutions.

I was thinking last night as I watched two hours of Ramsay, with Hell's Kitchen and Master Chef back-to-back episodes, aside from wondering if I will continue to take a steady diet of profanity and adrenaline the Hell's Kitchen episodes are known for, is that it is quite an accomplishment for one person to have three simultaneously or concurrent running television shows. I was not aware that Hell's Kitchen had been on for ten years. (I'm always late to the cultural party). Monday night's opener was season three for Master Chef, and Kitchen Nightmares has been on for five. So who IS this guy, Gordon Ramsay? I knew little about the person I had decided to spend so much time with. I watched this 4-minute biography and was suitably impressed. For a chef to have earned so much television exposure, of course he had to have had the cooking chops and business acumen to back it up. (Insert, "Elizabeth, Duh!" here). Below is a short bio of Gordon Ramsay, if you care to watch. I thought it was really interesting.

Squirrel fills antenna with acorns

A new reality tv show: Squirrel preppers!

1:21 seconds of amazement

Bookmarks

I ran out of bookmarks. So I made some! Tomorrow I'll figure out a way to finish them. Likely I'll use some clear packing tape and pretend laminate them. I may cut a slice at the top on some of them and put in a ribbon. Here they are:

The one on the far left is cardstock with mica flakes and pasted on top of the mica flakes is a page from an old book that was written in Spanish, with more gold mica flakes brushed on top. The second one, I painted bright yellow cardstock (it hurt my eyes!) with blue watercolor before gluing the Celtic thingies.

The one on the far left is white cardstock painted with purple watercolor paint, pasted on that another cutout from a magazine of text that was written in Latin. The two butterflies and the red flower are my favorites.

It's summer and I like to cut and glue and paste. Lovely times!

Book review: "The Darlings"

I mentioned a few days ago that I'd gone to the library and returned with a load of books. One of them with a great cover photo and design (yes, I judge a book by its cover, more on that in a minute), was The Darlings, by Cristina Alger.

Set in post-2008 Wall Street economic and financial crash, Alger, a lawyer and a former NY financial analyst at Goldman Sachs herself, writes realistically of that world which most people don't see, and what they have seen due to the Wall Street crash of 2008, revolted them.

However, she brought each character to life in a way where they were not totally good not totally bad, but just people in a sphere like any other person, trying to make the best professional and family decisions they could. I admired her for painting each of her characters with realistic foibles and heroic impulses, conflicted and human. I also enjoyed the realism she brought to the table regarding the world of high finance. It wasn't overly complicated so it could be understood, but full of enough details to make it realistic and credible.

The pace was fast and page-turning. I could hardly wait to see how it all turned out, and with 50 or so pages to go I did peek at the end, something I never do. And the end was almost the best thing about the book! I still disagree with the jacket's proposal that this is a book 'of epic proportions,' a singularly aggravating thing to say about a debut book out a few mere weeks, but overall the book itself is tremendous. It is interesting to read because the story is good, and it is a pleasure to read because the writing is good. The combination of the two these days is rare enough, and I look forward to more from Ms Alger.

A note on book covers: I've mentioned on this blog and on Facebook that the media is dark these days. The material is often depicting evil, murder, crimes, or terror. As a result, I've noticed that most movie posters are dark, reflecting the main themes of the content. I mean actually dark, colors of black and gray permeate the promotional material these days. It is the same with book covers. If a cover is dark it most likely is of a subject matter I won't want to read. As I was selecting The Darlings, I had noticed moments before that most of the books on the new releases shelf were dark. The beautiful photograph of New York edged in gold, with plenty of white space,  with bright red title, was a refresher for my eyes. On that basis, I picked it up to read the synopsis on the cover. I'm glad I did.

Around the yard with my friends

What a gorgeous day!!! It was perfect! I spent some time in the swing and at the granite picnic table today. If you sit still for a short time, the birds, butterflies and squirrels come back full tilt. And boy were they active today! Here is my apartment--

This guy, I am not sure what but I think he is a jay due to the aggressiveness and raucous cry, would fly from several high perches, squawk, and fly to the next. He did this constantly -- protecting his territory I suppose.

The robins are more calm. Whachoo looking at, little guy?

The plethora of trees with low hanging branches and numerous shed roofs made for a racetrack around which three squirrels ran and screeched. Look, there goes one now!

From way across the yard, I spotted movement. Hey, it's a white butterfly!

I almost lost him as I glanced over there to check the chipmunk racing across the lawn. Oh, there is our white fluttery friend! Look how well he camouflages, despite being white.

Then he got up and flew again. This time I didn't make the mistake of taking my eyes off him. They're small, but fast!

As he hopped a short jump toward the gravel driveway he finally lay down his wings and I got a good snap.

I hope tomorrow is as cool and gorgeous as it was today. If not, that's OK! Today was perfect. I can't expect to have too many days like that in a row!