i swear, i'm going to move this off of my desk, take it downstairs and clean it out. i keep reaching for it like it's a beverage because it's sitting in a glass i might drink out of, and it's in the place on my desk where i often keep a tertiary beverage. to my mind it looks a little like prune juice, which i like.
but yesterday i was working on a piece, something that required pens with actual ink and i tried out a couple of nibs and that glass is where i dropped nibs i wasn't particularly using. you know, as a prelimiary to cleaning them and putting them away.
i keep picking it up, distracted by other things, and i keep putting it down without drinking it. i wonder how close i will get before i take it down and wash it out?
in january 1998 (and for some time after that) i was a music teacher. i had a big concert, a complicated one, scheduled in the second week of that month.
and on january 8th we had that ice storm. the really big one. and it canceled four days of school just before my concert, four days of rehearsal that i NEEDED. unlike a lot of people around here, i lived in a pocket of rain instead of ice, and therefore had no damage to my home, and my electricity barely even flickered.
but fifty feet higher up and fifty feet lower down it was all ice, so there was no going in or out even if the roads hadn't been closed by order of the state police.
and all i could do was sit and watch, waiting each day for the call that came to tell me to stay home another day. watching all my rehearsal time slip away, hour by hour.
it was an ambitious program, one that required skill and attention. and even though i was given every possible minute in which to practice and every flexibility, i was not happy with the way things looked on that day going into the concert. i was just going to slink off and never be heard from again rather than face the humiliation of it.
but when i got home i found floating in my downstairs toilet (and don't ask me what i was doing in that bathroom; i never use it) a tiny little mouse, shivering and on the brink of death. it appeared to me that she'd been trapped in there for days, treading water.
i have no idea how she got in there.
but i fished her out, the poor thing, dried her off and put her under a lamp to warm up. i put a dish of water near her, a block of rat chow, and some peanut butter. and i watched her. and in a couple of hours she had dragged her tiny little form over and had begun eating.
what a little miracle she was!
and i decided that if she was going to make a recovery against those odds, so was i. and back at school i had just about released the horde of kids into the ramp leading down to the hall and i got up on a chair in the middle of that crowd and told the story of the mouse.
and the kids were so whipped up, they charged down the chute and somehow pulled off the performance i'd intended for it to be.
when i got home, i put the little mouse in a cage i had handy, with food and water and fresh bedding, and although i did not name her (a wild creature), i called her "miss mouse".
...until a few days later -did i mention that the mouse was teeny?- his one testicle descended and i started calling him "mister". i kept him for a while, having decided to nurse him to full health and then release him on the first warm day but when that day arrived and i left his cage outside with the door open, i watched from a window as he poked his head out, put his little paws onto the cold ground, and quickly retreated to the warmth of his nest, pulling the bedding down over himself as if to declare emphatically that he did not wish to go.
twice more, on warmer days, he declined to leave my house and although he never was a tame pet, he was a perfectly acceptable mouseguest and he stayed with me until he died.
well, thanks for asking. it's hard to know exactly how to answer this question when it's being asked anonymously. it's ok; it's just a little weird and i'm not quite used to it.
i'm having kind of a hard day; i've had a lot of mood swings and last night i felt a crash coming on, and probably a bad one, too, and it arrived this morning shortly after oh-four-hundred, and that's a bad way to wake up.
but i got myself to church and things are going about as good as they can be, i guess.
i'm feeling bad, but not as bad as i could be feeling, and that's something to be grateful for.
so the candle project is going slower than i might have thought, but still progressing. i'll have some pretty little pieces to show for it.
of course, even though you know that i'm making them, i'm still pretending that it's a secret because i won't claim authorship on easter morning when they get given away to random people.
i like random gifts, random prizes.
i've always thought the world would be a nicer place if there were random gifts; things of beauty or usefulness or humor given to people just because they happened to show up.
i guess if you want to live in a world like that, you have to create it.
a friend of mine asked if i was really going to give these things away to unknown people.
yes. i did, and i will. when you do it in this way, they become gifts of place rather than gifts of person. and it isn't about me, funny little artist; it's about an environment of surprise and delight, a place of generosity.
so.
i'm posting the gallery of the candles over here where i keep such things, and i'll update those photos as i have more candles finished.
the january thaw destroyed my snowcave but then when we got all that snow a couple of weeks ago i thought i'd rebuild it and that would have worked, too, except for the three days' rain.
there was more snow (never enough if you ask me, or even if you don't), so i decided to try an alternate construction style: instead of digging the cave out of a mound, i am now building upward with snow blocks held together with ig-glue.
sorry. i know you deserved better than that, but i am a weak, weak woman and i couldn't resist.
later on there will be more pictures over where i keep my photo galleries, but for now here's what it looked like when i started to rebuild, and a picture from yesterday just before i started zipping the front together.
it's amazing to see the wall go up,and really gratifying to get to the point where i have to use the stepladder, but the really cool moment is the one in which the walls join and all of a sudden you've got ROOF.
at its highest point, the interior is about seven feet tall.
i have company coming for lunch today. it's a casual affair; just sandwiches but last week when i was feeling pretty out of sorts the one thing that i thought would make me feel better was one really fine and ripe tomato on a sandwich, and maybe a friend to share it with.
when your fantasy life is tame like that, you get to live all your wildest dreams.
but anyway, since i was in the mood for it, yesterday i baked custard. you can't do it on a whim 'coz it has to set up, but it's easy to do.
this one's a little caramel number, which in this case means a plain honey-sweetened custard with caramelized sugar in the bottom of the dish. once the custard sets in, the caramel turns to sauce and you can either eat it out of the cup or you can plate it and let the sauce run down. either way it's lovely.
the custard mix can be beaten by hand, or you can just toss it into the blender.
be sure to put the cups in a water bath before you put them in the oven to bake.
and when it comes out, let it set to cool. you can do it a day or two in advance and it will be perfect.
so for no particular reason i decided to inventory and photograph my shoes. i like shoes. yes, i know it's a very typically girly thing to say, and if you know me you know i'm not exactly the fairy princess type, but it's there all the same.
so i made a little slideshow of them, which you can find here, and while i was at it, i dredged up an old song of mine called, appropriately, shoes.
it occurs to me while i'm writing this that i have one more pair of shoes out in the garage, with my drysuit: a fetching little blue neoprene cold water bootie, but i am not going out there to get them.
maybe some things should be left to the imagination.
my lenten project is to make some nice candles for people to take home from church at easter.
it's a meditation, to sit and carve the designs into the candles and to patiently fill the holes with colored wax, and it's also an act of faith: you never know what the design is really going to look like until you scrape off the extra wax when you're done.
every year i have to learn the medium; what you can do with the wax is largely dependent on how crumbly the candle is, or how sticky it is, and what kind of coating is on it. places where two colors touch are tricky because you have to be very precise with the cutting.
the good news is that because you're going to scrape off the top layer anyway, you can go crazy with the sharpie making your reference marks and the general sketch. the sharpie is also handy for marking out any area you're going to want to be white later. to me it's easier to see that solid black area and carve around it than it is to carve around an outline. it also shows up better when you start to lay in wax around it.
so. loosely sketch the design. carefully, carefully cut out a section or a few sections that will have the same color. welt the wax just enough to fill the holes, and then run over it with a hot knife to set the wax in.
scrape away enough of the excess wax so that you can see where to make the new cuts for the new color and repeat this cutting, filling, sealing, and scraping until the whole thing is filled in.
now comes the nervous part.
carefully, gently, patiently scrape away the extra surface wax until the design is revealed.
well, the skiing is very nice, so i'm spending less time here at my desk than i otherwise might.
i have half of the month of february photographed (but not yet clocked) for the "13" project, but i'm not showing it here.
yet.
yesterday at bolton they had the #1 chair running, which is my favorite chair and it's not running all that often. i still take a picture up on the elbow of peggy dow's, even though i'm not going back to re-do the video.
speaking of which, why don't i just post it again here, so you can see it? it's my love song to a ski trail.
every thirteen hours, wherever i am, i take a picture. even if the rules allowed me to go do something more interesting or more flattering for the picture, it'd get pretty tired in just a few days.
and around the clock i go. this is what my life looks like in thrirteen hour snapshots.
sometimes dinner at my house is a simple affair; sometimes not.
this time not. i thought i'd "whip up a little something", which in this case means a batch of crêpes marie-patrice, an herbed saffron crêpe stuffed with asparagus spears, roasted red pepper, and palm hearts, served under a sauce almost but not completely unlike hollandaise.
here's the crêpe batter; you have to let it rest a while in order to let the saffron develop in it.
it helps if you roast the asparagus a day ahead of time.
vegetables on the cutting board; peppers and palm hearts.
some of each in the crêpe...
...and you roll them right up!
meanwhile, on the other side of the kitchen, bread dough is in for a second rise. this one is called "short stack"; instead of vegetable oil i have used butter, and instead of sugar, i have used grade b maple syrup. i made most of it into loaves, but split-layered these and made them rolls.
this is just an insalata caprese variation, with smoked salmon instead of cheese on half the tomatoes.
the last thing to be done, of course, is to make the almost-but-not-entirely-unlike-hollandaise sauce.
i have a friend coming for dinner for the first time in a long time, so i thought i'd whip a little something up.
so i decided to make a little thing with choux paste. have you ever worked with choux paste? i don't own an electric mixer (i'm very retro), so i have to do all that work by hand.
here's the dough in the double boiler.
on the sheet
in the oven
on the rack; handsome little devils.
what's going to go in them is a nice crème patisserie, with a center of spiced raisins slow simmered in maple syrup.
spiced raisins simmering
i don't know about how you do things, but i separate eggs by hand.
the milk gets scalded
and the eggs and sugar and such get cooked in the double-boiler
everything gets put together and stirred
and then set to cool.
the tops get cut off
and carefully, gently, you take the extra stuff out of the middles.
i go right ahead and eat it.
and then a bottom layer of pastry cream goes in
followed by a few of those raisins.
see how nice and sticky they are?
and then some more of the pudding, almost to the top.
i wear hats, year round. they're black, they're round.
this group is representative of my collection. they come in fleece, knit, microfleece. some are lined, some not. one has a tassel. some are hats for sleeping in, some for going outside in, some to wear around the house, and a couple are for church.
so i keep going out to play in my snow cave, and i keep being tired when i come inside. aside from all the belly crawling and hand digging, the mined snow has to be moved from the driveway and carried in.
a fully loaded sled weighs about forty pounds, and today i moved twenty-eight sledloads. do the math; that's a half ton. i'm building a second dome out on the raised walkway, and it doesn't look very impressive, but it represents a LOT of pounds of snow carried in. each new horizontal foot of the raised walkway requires on average seven sledloads of snow to build.
this whole project is now large enough that my neighbors notice with some interest. or rather, the neighborhood children and men notice; the children stare and the men ask if they can come see it. the women seem to be aggressively disinterested.
i tell my neighbors when they ask that i'm thinking of putting in a barbecue pit and bocce court. they tell me i should string lights.
in terms of a workout, i am now taking "playing in the snow" more seriously.
the slideshow still updates after each construction day.
day five was a HUGE day in the cave. there is now enough room to sit up all the way, to work on my hands and knees, and -this is the big news- there's room to turn around and exit forward-facing instead of having to creep backward up out of the hole.
i've moved hundreds of sledloads of mined snow, but because it's spread out when i get it to the structure, you don't notice it getting all that much taller.
building the elevated walkway is slow going, because each foot of it eats hundreds of pounds of snow as its foundation, four feet high and several feet wide.
this morning the sun is out, which is striking because for a lot of the winter the sun doesn't really rise here until after ten because i live so close to the mountain, but also this is where the mountain scrapes the weather off of the sky and the clouds have been hanging low enough that i can't see across the street let alone the top of the ridge, so i am totally distracted by the sun shining full on through my window.
sweet.
yesterday, friday, was day four in snow cave construction, kind of a big day for me. on thursday, day three, i'd dug in far enough so that i could no longer pull the snow out with my shovel and so had to face the horrid prospect of going full in that hole and bringing the sled with me to load it up and empty it outside.
i think i mentioned claustrophobia.
while other things scare me, i have only the two really extreme phobias: closed spaces and vomit. the second one only matters here because when i am in a closed space, i feel sufficiently nauseated as to be very much afraid that i WILL vomit, and in a closed space. the two fears, therefore, interlock and amplify each other until they are overwhelming.
but i'm nothing if not stubborn. i think it would be really nifty to have made a cool snow cave, so i'm going to find a way to cope. crashco always says that we should not so much face our fears as run up and kiss them on the lips, and this is kind of like that.
there are a lot of little tasks that go along with the digging, though. i've come to call them mining, farming, and building.
while the plow leaves huge piles of snow for me to work with, they're more wide than they are tall, and i'm working on a HUGE structure here. so i go out into the driveway and mine the plow piles from there, which has the added benefit of widening the driveway and these days all that snow kind of cramps it in.
then i carry the hundreds and hundreds of pounds of packed snow in on the sled, and dump it over the top of the structure. in order to fill in the low places, the valleys between the plow piles, i have to use a LONG handled scraper to push the new loose snow out over the top before it sets, which i have come to think of as farming.
building is what i'm doing with the external details; the alcove that will eventually have tool storage and seating, the stairs, the raised walkway.
so there's a lot to do besides going down into the hole. but when the time comes, or at least when it came on thursday, there were a few minutes of paralyzed terror at the mouth of it.
"into the hole.", i would tell myself. and my rule was that once i'd said it, i was going in.
if i got in there and had to roll over or reposition myself to dig and bumped up against ceiling, i felt sick and panicked. i had just enough space that i needed to use the sled to bring out the snow, but that meant the sled would be taking up some of the usable space.
it was agony.
my first order of business was to dig enough room so that i could take it there in with me, load it up, and still have space to move around.
starting work yesterday, then, was, uh, uncomfortable. when you build a snow cave, periodically the ceiling settles. and mine had; the ceiling at the start of day four was lower than it had been before, and the entrance smaller. since i am very careful about how much to dig away at the entrance, a matter of structural integrity of some importance, it took a while to make the adjustments.
but then i'd made enough room to move around in there with the sled, so it wasn't so bad anymore. creeping in was still pretty scary, though. and then i got a brilliant idea: ride the sled in. the terrain under the cave slopes downward as you go in, and i'm taking advantage of all the available space i have, so you don't just do in, you go down a little.
not quite a toboggan run, but it beats creeping in on your belly and having time to think about the scariness of it.
the building is going pretty well, too. yesterday i started cutting the alcove outside the front door where there's going to be seating and tool storage, and my stairs are taking shape nicely. i have four fully functional steps and have started to pack the platform for the raised walkway.
they're not pretty yet, but they're functional.
and why do i need functional steps?
hello! farming! i have to be able to get up there to spread the mined snow around. i need altitude. the raised walkway is, so far, only cosmetic, but the steps are utilitarian.
it snowed overninght, so i have a layer of material i didn't have to schlepp in. today after lunch i'll go out and dig more, and work on the shape of the staircase, to make it pretty. when you move snow, you have to let it set. and then you usually have to compact it more, put in a little more, and let it set before you can work with it, especially edges of things.
it's slow work.
the slideshow, which is found here, updates after each day's work, whether i write about it or not.
but yesterday i was working on a piece, something that required pens with actual ink and i tried out a couple of nibs and that glass is where i dropped nibs i wasn't particularly using. you know, as a prelimiary to cleaning them and putting them away.
i've always thought the world would be a nicer place if there were random gifts; things of beauty or usefulness or humor given to people just because they happened to show up.
there was more snow (never enough if you ask me, or even if you don't), so i decided to try an alternate construction style: instead of digging the cave out of a mound, i am now building upward with snow blocks held together with ig-glue.
but anyway, since i was in the mood for it, yesterday i baked custard. you can't do it on a whim 'coz it has to set up, but it's easy to do.
this one's a little caramel number, which in this case means a plain honey-sweetened custard with caramelized sugar in the bottom of the dish. once the custard sets in, the caramel turns to sauce and you can either eat it out of the cup or you can plate it and let the sauce run down. either way it's lovely.
be sure to put the cups in a water bath before you put them in the oven to bake.
and when it comes out, let it set to cool. you can do it a day or two in advance and it will be perfect.
so for no particular reason i decided to inventory and photograph my shoes. i like shoes. yes, i know it's a very typically girly thing to say, and if you know me you know i'm not exactly the fairy princess type, but it's there all the same.
the good news is that because you're going to scrape off the top layer anyway, you can go crazy with the sharpie making your reference marks and the general sketch. the sharpie is also handy for marking out any area you're going to want to be white later. to me it's easier to see that solid black area and carve around it than it is to carve around an outline. it also shows up better when you start to lay in wax around it.
scrape away enough of the excess wax so that you can see where to make the new cuts for the new color and repeat this cutting, filling, sealing, and scraping until the whole thing is filled in.
carefully, gently, patiently scrape away the extra surface wax until the design is revealed.
some of each in the crêpe...
the last thing to be done, of course, is to make the almost-but-not-entirely-unlike-hollandaise sauce. 
i have a friend coming for dinner for the first time in a long time, so i thought i'd whip a little something up.
on the rack; handsome little devils.
a fully loaded sled weighs about forty pounds, and today i moved twenty-eight sledloads. do the math; that's a half ton. i'm building a second dome out on the raised walkway, and it doesn't look very impressive, but it represents a LOT of pounds of snow carried in. each new horizontal foot of the raised walkway requires on average seven sledloads of snow to build.
