This heron started as a study in wing anatomy: I’m working through how realistic I can or should make various elements in my carvings. The medium demands thinking like a folk artist but I still want to understand the original forms.
I added purple sweet potato to my sourdough loaf. The flavor is good. The texture is good. And it looks like roast beef.
Merry Christmas &c.!
I wound up with a very large bag of dried mango that is so sticky it threatens to pull out my fillings, so I have been stewing it into cranberry sauce and eating it on oatmeal. Overnight steel-cut oatmeal, this compote, a few pecans and a drizzle of cream is a truly outstanding winter breakfast! A 12-ounce bag of cranberries, a goodly portion of dried mango cut up with kitchen shears, ¾ cup brown sugar, about 1-¾ cup water (maybe a little more if you’re heavy with the dried mango), and a cinnamon stick. Cool until saucy. Orange zest grated in off heat if available.
Just read a 681-word article on the dangers to human health of dry-cleaning chemicals, in which a single sentence mentions the potential harm to workers. The rest says not to worry about it unless you live above a dry-cleaner. Eat healthy. Drink less. It’s all about you, America!
If you’d like some historical perspective on the topic of political violence, I recommend the recent In Our Time episode on The Haymarket Affair. It’s a good listen. (If you’d like to escape to an entirely different time and place, try the episode on wormholes.)
In which the antique table apocalypse is strangely freeing
This morning a card table purportedly from the 1840s revealed itself to be a chimera, and a badly reassembled chimera at that, when it suddenly and violently fell over, sending the Christmas tree tumbling into the manger scene. I had not had the thing upside down since I learned enough about old furniture to recognize what I was looking at. Not only are the cabriole-ish legs attached to the base with splines (well—three are, one was), but the base itself was added later, to replace legs that were sawn off just underneath the tabletop.
First art show! All set up at the Boylan Heights Art Walk in Raleigh this afternoon.
Cleaning out my study—sorry, _studio_— I found a bag of handcrafted items I seem to have purchased in past years as Christmas presents but never distributed, and I cannot now figure out who was supposed to get them. “Keep them!” you might say, but I really don’t need a stuffed-animal purse.
Happy Thanksgiving! If you’re interested in foodways, folkways, and weird alleys of American history, you may be interested in this series I wrote back in 2011 as an offshoot of some research on (mostly) 19th-century food and cooking, which I called “The Thanksgiving Issue.”