How's Robb?

...   What do the cats do on one of the hottest days of the summer?   Pass out on top of a pile of sweaters, in the blazing sun, of course.

We've had a realignment in our thinking on an important topic.

... We continue drawing trees for our current project. The scenic artists do the initial drawing charcoal sticks attached to long bamboo poles, and once they've got the image to their liking, they use large markers to "ink in" the drawing. Bamboo poles are used as an ergonomic back-saving tool. Enjoy this, won't you? (I'm not in this video much, because I'm working on moulding in the other room, and meeting with the designer of the show we'll be building after this one.)

... For the past two months, our chicken Isabella has taken a vacation from egg-laying.  She's apparently in perfect health.  She's not under any particular stress, occupying a middle position in the pecking order.  We think she just couldn't be bothered. And then out of nowhere, she laid the tiniest, greenest egg imaginable.  (Do you see it, in the middle of the plate?)  After that, she was back in business.  She's laid a large pale greeny-blue egg every day since then.  It seems as if the tiny egg had as much pigmentation as her regular eggs.  I imagined it as an egg-balloon, and thought that if I could inflate that egg, it would be the same color as all her other eggs. Both Robb and I concluded that Isabella was on a Fruit Strike, and refused to lay any eggs until the heavens opened up, and started raining plums. She's seriously in Chicken Heaven, right now.  Our back garden is littered with squashed eaten-out plum skins.  For a chicken as crazy for f

... Here's a little glance into a day's work in my studio.  Sadly, the video is not as in-focus as I could have hoped for.  A wonderful team of scenic artists prepare a workspace, assemble huge drawing surfaces, and start drawing the images that will become a painted backdrop for an upcoming show.

... Everyone around here has been remarking on how the plums are ripening so much earlier than usual.  Not being a native Californian, I can't generally comment on what's "normal" in the garden.  When my lilacs bloom at Christmastime,as they did this past winter, I know that's wrong, but I'm inexpert on the subject of plums. I spent a great deal of time this weekend making plum jam.  Our tree was ripening, and the windfall fruit from the other week needed to be dealt with. I pulled out my various recipe books, and was baffled -- as usual -- by the vagueness of the advice offered. Tilt the container, if you can see the contents shift, the jelly is too soft.  This condition can be caused by cooking too long (as when the batch was too big and so boiled beyond the ideal time limit); or by cooking too slowly; or by too much sugar; or by too little sugar or pectin or acid; or by not cooking long enough.  Sometime you can try to salvage such jelly by coo

... Poor Cardigan can't get any peace.

... In an effort to keep myself on-track, I've been photographing the progress on my Kauni cardigan, every morning.  I enjoy seeing the slow growth of the knitting and the gradual changes of the color of the ball of yarn. The above photograph is from my first day of knitting. I am a dedicated swatcher.  I know that many knitters eschew the practice of making sample swatches, but I find it essential. I genuinely enjoy spending the time figuring out what size needle work best with the yarn I'm using.  I love experimenting with stitch patterns.  I reckon that I'm going to spend so many hours on my project, that I'd do well to start methodically.   I think this discipline comes from working as a scenic artists.  We scenic sample extensively, so that we know what works, and what doesn't.  To my way of thinking, it's much wiser to fail on a small scale, and use those failures to figure out how to approach the actual project. Day Two.  I cast on with &

... I've been wanting to shoot some time-lapse movies of the work in my studio, and so Robb (because he is a total sweetheart) figured out what gear we'd need to make this happen. We shot some silly videos, to help us understand the process.  Here's the view from the watering hole.  Crazy Lydia sure stays well-hydrated. This is a typical summer evening at the our place. Linguine serenely watches over everyone else's fidgeting. Smog sure has twitchy ears, doesn't he?

...   I don't suppose you live near Oakland California, and have use for an awful lot of organic oats? The theater where I work used whole oats in a recent show, and I took them home when the show was over.  I figured that my hens would enjoy a bit of oats, from time to time.  But I got more than I bargained for.  We've filled a thirty-one gallon trash can with oats, and haven't begun to make a dent on our granary.  Do you have chickens, or goats?  Do you want to stop by our place in East Oakland, and collect a couple of gallons of free oats?  Just let us know, and we'll fix you right up.

... I've started a new project!  I'm working with some Danish wool that I've owned for longer than I'd care to admit.  It's beautiful stuff, finely spun, and shifting colors ever-so-slowly . I had been saving this yarn until I finished my huge handspun sweater, and since now all I need to do is sew on the buttons, I have my own permission to get started.  I worked up a knitted sample this weekend, when my friend John was visiting. I wanted to knit my sample flat, and struggled with a technique called "knitting back, backwards." I'm sure there are very good reasons to use this approach, but ultimately I realized that plain old purling works just fine for me.  (Sorry non-knitters, I'm sure this is terribly boring.) I was delighted with my swatch, but also rather dreading the task of working up the math for the project.  And then the universe smiled on me.  Something prompted me to wander over to my friend Mary Jane Mucklestone's blo

... Yesterday, we had strong winds all day, and a huge number of unripe plums were blown down from our tree.  It was demoralizing to see these plums drop before they were mature. As I was picking plums off the ground, a memory was rolling around in the back corners of my brain.  Weren't unripe plums particularly rich in pectin?  Couldn't these plums be used to thicken jam?  A quick internet search confirmed my hunch, and so I'll be storing these unripe fruits in the freezer until jam time properly arrives. I suspect that I may have some of last season's ripe plums in the freezer.  There's a certain point when the effort of making homemade jam outweighs the pleasure and production grinds to a halt.  Guess I should go look into those back corners of the our freezer, and see what's rolling around in there.

...   Ever since we bought our little 1920s house, Robb and I have found ourselves at a lot of estate sales.  It seems he and I have the taste of extremely wealthy ninety year olds.   One thing that I always look for are handmade textiles.  I have a visceral response to these things, and feel genuinely sad that nobody wants the beautiful handmade objects that someone once labored over.    Today, I brought home a collection of hand made lace.  The top photograph is a tablecloth that seems to be made of linen, in some kind of netting and embroidery technique.   This lace runner is clearly part of the same pattern of grapes and leaves around a geometric center. Likewise, these all seemed related to the tablecloth and runner.  Same motif of grapes and grape leaves.  I'm not sure what the purpose of these object might have been.  The lower row of lace is puzzling to me.  Where might these have been used? In some ways, these are somewhat primitive fo

... Robb took the Indoor Cats to the vet yesterday, for a routine visit, and it turns out that Linguine has hepatitis.  Our always-awesome vet noticed that the skin inside her ears was oddly yellow, and so we scheduled some follow up tests, which proved positive. Linguine is not exhibiting any symptoms of ill health, but we're medicating her for the next three weeks to help her liver heal. Very strange, all this.  When I got hepatitis a few years ago, I was horribly, horribly sick.  And I also didn't get any medication at all. I was sick as a dog, but that's not possible for our Linguine.

... This morning, I ate the first plum from our tree.  It had fallen some time yesterday, and the chickens had given it a few experimental pecks.  I cut around the damage and savored every bit.  Robb slept through my plum orgy.  I didn't think he'd be all that interested in being woken with an offer of hen-bitten fruit. The cats also had a bit of a harvest, which they kindly shared with me. There's nothing like stepping on a dead mouse, first thing in the morning.  Nothing at all. Thankfully.

... Recently, our hens developed a nasty habit: pecking open their own eggs.  It's bad enough that Isabella is on permanent strike, and refuses to lay at all.  When the hens started destroying eggs, it seemed like they were taunting us.  "Go ahead," they were saying, "build a crazy over-the-top hen-house, feed us all sorts of gourmet chow. We'll reward you with no eggs at all." I glared at the hens, and reminded them how fortunate they were that Robb and I were vegetarians.  "Another flock might not be so lucky, and might have an appointment with the chopping block," I told them. Robb took a less dire and more productive approach to all this.  He followed some advice I'd gotten from an online knitting group (of course) and hung dark curtains around the nest-box.  The thinking was that the hens would not peck what they could not see.  Hens, after all, are pretty deficient in the brains department.  Remarkably, this worked right away.

... The other night, I was dozing and Robb totally confused me with some comment about our having "monkeys in the back yard."  My almost-asleep brain was totally unable to process this phrase, but stored it away for later. When we got back from car-hunting on Sunday, there was a commotion in a neighboring peach tree, as strange loud chattering sound, unlike the usual neighborhood soundtrack.  It took me a moment to process, and then I realized that this was probably Robb's "monkey." I grabbed my camera, and managed only one un-obscured photo of what I believe is a female Hooded Oriole.  She's about the size of an American Robin, and a muddy greeny-yellow.  She was cahttering away the whole time she foraged in the tree. I think I've only ever seen orioles once since we moved to California.  (I never saw them when we lived in Baltimore, at least not on the wing!)  Orioles are fascinating birds, who make pendulous purse-like nests, and I'm d

Robb and I spent the weekend test-driving used cars.  Or more accurately, I drove a lot of cars while asking Robb to repeat the comparative prices and mileages of all the cars we were considering. Robb is a saint. We're trying to buy from no-haggle dealers, because I loathe, detest, freaking ha-a-a-a-ate used car dealers. I hate the whole bogus negotiating.  I honestly don't understand why they bother with the whole charade.  Nobody in their right mind could possibly believe that the buyer has any power to influence the selling price of a car sold by a dealer.  So why do we go through the ridiculous ritual of pretending the arrive at a price?  The dealers are in total control, so why do we pretend otherwise? Lynne turned me on to the Buggy Bank , and we also looked at a lot of cars at Autometrics .  If anyone knows of any other no-haggle options in the greater Bay Area, I'd sure like to hear about it.  We're willing to do a bit of work, to get a decent used car. 

... Proudly purchased in 2002, in Hartford Connecticut I learned to drive later than most Americans. There had been some kind of mix-up in my high-school drivers' ed class, and they (whoever they might have been) never delivered our cars. My instructor was a vile, sexist ghoul who filled our non-driving hours with gory car-crash movies, lengthy discussions about sports, and appalling anti-woman rants.  I resolved never to repeat his class.  My parents we not great driving teachers. My father seemed baffled my lack of instant proficiency, and gave up trying to teach me (see also: skiing and tennis). My volatile mother would throw me out of the car with empty pockets, and if I didn't make it home quickly enough, she'd report me to the police as a runaway.  (This was a fairly regular practice of hers. I have all sorts of horror stories to tell about teenaged hitchhiking.) Robb was the person who finally taught me to drive. We were moving to Dallas, a city that doesn