Well nothing really happening till Friday, and that includes putting the pieces in the art show, but the hotel reservations start tomorrow because that makes everything so much simpler for the next morning.

And signing up for the art show worked: I couldn't face a half-empty table and panel so pieces really did get done (*cough*with only a little more finishing*/cough*). Fewer masks and more jewelry than last year, because that's the way it worked out, but some of the jewelry counts as concept art and not just as pretty shinies (shiny pretties?). I'm also bringing back a couple of pieces from Arisia 2010 that didn't sell and giving them lower prices, so we'll see if I can get rid of them now.

Photos, right. Must remember to take photos beforehand! Last year I didn't remember till they were already in the show and then I was too rushed and frazzled and so some of the pieces only have photos that are very blurry, bleah. I'll post photos when I have them.

Happy New Year! somewhat belated but there's still plenty of the year left?

Wrapping up the old year, there was lots of unwrapping of very nice presents at Christmas. Awesome books on basketry and Alexander McQueen, wonderful CDs of various groups, some 20-year-old port, and a new Keurig coffee-maker with many, many flavours of K-cups to try out.

Culinary explorations for Christmas dinner: brussels sprouts on the stalk! I found them at Trader Joe's and couldn't resist trying them. There was one minor setback in following the directions because it started out saying "microwave for 5 minutes first". The stalk was about 2-1/2 feet long? *Sigh*. I cut it in half and that worked, and worked easier in fitting it in a pan (drizzled it with olive oil and sprinkled with sea salt, covered lightly with foil) on the same rack as the sliced apples and sweet potatoes in maple syrup & cider. These were served with roast goose and a mixture of wild rice & mushrooms with roasted garlic.

New Year's Eve dinner was a fesitively colored mix of chorico, linquica, corn, tomatoes, onion, garlic, and red & green peppers, served over pilaf because my daughter vetoed the plain brown rice. New Year's Day dinner was multi-peppered multi-ingredient chili (tomatoes, onions, garlic, two types of ground meat, three types of beans, three types of chili powder, plus roasted red peppers and diced green chilies and chipotle peppers), with an apple pie for dessert. Tonight will be steak tips and mushrooms and more wild rice, with a savory tart of pears and Roquefort with a touch of balsamic vinegar. And then work starts again and we live on leftovers. :-)

For viewing, we were slow and didn't get to the NYC Times Square countdown in time, but we did watch the amazing fireworks display from Sydney, Australia online. Oh, and we discovered "Better Off Ted" through Netflix! Fantastic twisted show. We don't remember hearing much about it when it was on the air in 2009-10 (on ABC of all places), but we went through five episodes last night. Looking forward to more!

An updated article in Reuters today on the Russian social media based reaction to Sunday's election:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/12/07/russia-protests-socialmedia-idUSL5E7N62N20111207

"Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks - attempts to make a computer or network unavailable - have in the last few days shut down a large number of media websites. Russia's most popular blogging site, LiveJournal, was hobbled."

LJ eems to be running okay now, just a little slow, but there's a big anti-government protest being planned for this coming Saturday so be prepared for possibly worse problems.

This morning I saw a black squirrel and a flying tree. And was unable to get photos of either *sigh*.

The squirrel was on the railing outside our kitchen door as a I was about to leave for work and it hopped off and disappeared in the way-too-growthy undergrowth of "volunteer" plants nearby. It looked like this. Though we're not in western Massachusetts, it's apparently known for grey squirrels to have black offspring.

The flying tree was down in Woburn along Rt. 38 and not far before 128. What I'd first noticed was the enormous crane sticking up behind the Mobil station. Then a pine tree flew up out of the neighboring yard, straight up, and then swung around nearly over the road I was travelling on. I did not stop driving, but I'll admit I ducked. Utterly reflex action. And the flying pine tree looked almost exactly like the photo on this page.

And those were the highlights of my day. :-)

Hotel reservations opened today, a little earlier than I'd expected but I stlll snagged a double bed room in the quiet section.

Next step, making the art show reservations.

Oh, and yeah, making the art to go in the show. :-) But I have lots of ideas, just have to find the time to execute them. Some ideas for jewelry (a spider necklace, a mermaid necklace, a garden of Eden necklace, and at least a couple steampunk themed) and some for masks (template already sketched out and cut for a stag mask, horned, with a moon between the horns) and some for other pieces (leather hands cupped into a.. er.. "hand" basket, and another idea of a dryad form made of leather and bark).

Head's up. A new not-quite-accurate news story is hitting the media.

A teacher is in trouble and people across the country are upset because he docked students' grades for saying "Bless you!" when someone sneezed. Obviously a case of church/school separation going way too far, right? and all the political bloggers are weighing in on the matter.

The real problem seems to be that the teacher made it clear he thought saying "Bless you!" was nonsense anyway. "Do you think she has an evil spirit?" Instead of sticking to the real reason he wanted to punish them: "The teacher believed that students were dramatically sneezing and responding in repetitive fashion...". High school health class. Faking sneezes and then everyone saying "Bless you!" and the student then was thanking each and every "blesser", so the teacher started marking points off for anyone who said the blessing as a way to stop the game.

The principal says the teacher will find another method of discipline.

Oh, and one student's complaint about the grade-docking was that the prohibiition against saying "Bless you!" wasn't in the class syllabus.

Reuters: particles found travelling faster than the speed of light

My goodness. O_o
Laws of physics may get shattered.

There are mushroom groupings at the base of our oak tree stump. They look very much like the edible "Hen of the Woods", the Sheepshead, the Maitake. But... do we take the chance? (I haven't dared yet.)



For dinner last night, I made a pork and red cabbage stew that turned out pretty well. It's a bit duller visually than in the taste:



Pork with Red Cabbage

1 large onion or 2 medium, quartered and sliced
2 Tablespoons bacon fat or goose fat or oil, or combination
3 lbs. lean pork, sliced into small pieces (not chunks)
1 to 1-1/2 lb. fresh kielbasa or other non-Italian sausage removed from casing
1 medium red cabbage, cored and shredded and soaked in cold water
6 apples, cored and cut into chunks but not peeled
1 cup orange juice
1/2 cup brandy
salt and black pepper to taste

Serves many, so feel free to halve the recipe. Also, you can substitute less lean pork but then reduce or remove the sausage if you want to keep it healthier, or you can use all sausage and leave out the pork if yo9u don't care about the fat. Saute onions in fat/oil over medium high heat till starting to brown. Add sausage and brown. Add pork and cook till the outside colors, then add cabbage (removed from water), apples, orange juice and brandy. Add salt and pepper to taste. If you're not using any sausage, add a bit of thyme and sage. Cover and simmer on top of the stove or put in the oven at 350 degrees Fahrenheit for 45 minutes to 1 hour. Serve as is, or over egg noodles or rice.

While it's cooking, take time to appreciate the marvelous spiral of the red cabbage core:

Long time, no post. Too busy? Too... something.

This. Ouch.

Rango is a much different movie than I'd been expecting. There were moments of surreal beauty.

Quidam... d'uh, it's Cirque du Soleil. Of COURSE there were moments of surreal beauty, and a stunning array of talent. It was heavier on atmosphere than the last two productions we've seen (Ovo and Dralion) but I liked that. Ovo had a more direct story, but the story seemed a way of linking the acts. Quidam made me feel as though the acts were interludes in the story, but they came together beautifully in the "Statue" act.

Son and daughter have been delivered to their respective colleges. No significant problems from earthquake or tropical storm. The new Vietnamese/Chinese restaurant near us, Pho 'n Roll, has some interesting items on the menu, though their "crispy fried quail" appetizer was derided by my son as an exercise in futility: "Here, let me try to get some meat off this leg. Yep, yep, I'm totally full now." He was much more appreciative of the Groupon deal I got for the Brazilian Steakhouse in Woburn.

New baskets were made and sometime I'll get around to posting photos. One was seagrass (commercially braided) coiled with silk perle. I used that to make a base basket for the three raffia shells and that went to the deCordova student/faculty salon show "Art and Nature" that opens this Saturday. Salon show = not judged. Any student gets to put one piece in, and so I did. Still moving forward on this course, and we'll see where it takes me.

Triangle Walks from Fever Ray on Vimeo.

I remembered something else about the NBO biennial. I wasn't taking a class, but it was loose enough that people could and would drop in just to see what other people were doing and so Friday afternoon I stopped by Lissa Hunter's class. I don't remember the title, but it was more about process than production, no one was going to leave with any sort of real basket. When I came, they were going over the one actual thing they had made: a set of large (8"-12"?) "beads" strung on a rope across one wall of the classroom. Each person had brought a meaningful token from home, and had written down both physical terms (soft, round, blue-green, shiny...) and emotional connotations (grandfather, sailing, winter,...) for it. Then the descriptions were given to someone else who created a "bead" based off what they'd read. At the point I came in, each person was showing off what they'd made and what words they'd used and what they'd used in their interpretation, and at the end the other person would come up and show them the original token. And then that person would talk about their own work.

It was an exercise off Lissa's very sound description of how sometimes you might start with the ideas (or in this case, another person's ideas) and sometimes you might start with the materials (or even just a technique you want to try) and how you merge them.

But she also told a story that stuck in my head. Her father was a stage magician (? at least knew the magic) and often used the skills elsewhere, the sort of "pulling the coin out of the waitress's ear" that utterly embarrassed her when she was a teenager. When she was little, she kept asking to learn the tricks, but he said her fingers weren't able to handle them. She kept asking each year and when she was about 11 or 12, he taught her a basic trick. She did it, she did it well, but was disappointed. "This is just an illusion. Where's the magic?"

Of course she was old enough not to believe in real magic. But there's still that difference, that understanding exactly how something came to be takes away the "magic" of it. That's what we do as artists, she said now. We're making illusions for others, so they can see magic.

I already knew it's hard to critique my own work. I see too much of where I had to compromise, where something went a little bit off, where I could have spent more time and effort and maybe made it better. But now I can put it more succinctly why even the works I'm most pleased with will never quite have the "oh wow" factor I see in other people's works. They made magic. I only made an illusion.