Resistance today, and Textiles and Tea

Here's how you can help the resistance: if you have a blog, please show these pictures to your readers. This is your mission, if you choose to accept it.

There were massive protests all over the country on Presidents Day, NO coverage from mainstream media. We have to do it ourselves, modern-day samizdat.

Here's just one

And here's the ad that the Washington Post first agreed to run, then chickened out on. Trigger alert, picture of M**k.

Thank you. This is a valuable cute winter boots work you can do,  all set up for you. 

And here's a chance at a bit of fun while flooding an inbox

Then there's art, another form of powerful being and making. Today's Textiles and Tea featured an amazing young artist, Crystal Gregory.

She creates enormous installations, using cotton fiber and industrial materials such as concrete, molten pewter, drywall, ballchain. 

She's considering the contrasts and comparisons of hard and soft, rigid and flowing, transparency and solidity, in modern life and society.

Just look.

This was a museum presentation, with dancers climbing and interacting with the weaving. She also moved the concrete tubes regularly, like inanimate dancers.

Knitted work here, embedded in concrete 

Left,  Anni Albers, groundbreaking artist of the Bauhaus, who came to Black Mountain to work and teach away from Nazi Germany. Right is Crystal Gregory, showing Albers influence on her work.

This is an artist to follow. Upcoming shows in Tribeca, Asheville, Vermont and other places, which she's going to put up on her website. Check her out!

Happy day everyone. Breathe, resist, find a bit of fun, too.

High winds, warm kitchen, important information

The house is harder to keep warm in high winds, drafty, so this was a good day to cook and get a warm kitchen.

And I seem to have got into a frenzy of cooking, what with deciding on Spain on a Fork potato croquettes, to use potatoes, then remembering I had the halibut defrosted in the fridge. 

Then I thought why not both. Lifelong mantra: when in doubt, do everything.

So I had a bunch of things going at once. Nuking potatoes to mash them, frying onions and garlic, grating cheese, mixing spices, panko,  that's the potato things, and grinding almonds, finding the oats, panko again, drying fish, that's the halibut pieces, oiling glass pan likewise. Cooking for one and I need a sous chef, and a dishwasher.

Originally I planned on walnuts, not almonds, for this breading, and found I'd used them up, so I had to use what I had.

And here's lunch. A beautiful piece of halibut with crisp breading, 20 minutes at 400f, in case you wondered. This time and temp cooks the fish and the breading nicely.

The other things are Alberto's recipe, more or less, mashed potatoes (!), grated cheese, egg, scallions, fried onions and garlic, seasoned with cayenne, smoked paprika, turmeric, seasalt, cumin, fried in the onion pan but I didn't wipe out the pan between, because flavor.

This frenzy has yielded several meals, and will mix and match with the soup and bean bread things.

It occurs to me that when I need an afternoon nap, it's after a morning like this.

Elsewhere Meetch (!) discussed names and how they're pronounced. My sister Irene,  EYEreen in the UK became  eyeREEN in Canada, never eyeREENee, despite the name police. She adapted to Canadian ways, Missy. Considering her temperament, it's ironic that her name means peace. Maybe my mom was being aspirational.

Nephew Gerard,  GERud in the UK,  became GerAHRD in Canada. You could tell whether a brit or a Canadian was calling him by how he pronounced his name when he answered!

Me, I'm often addressed as Lisa, don't ask me why. It's a mystery. I occasionally also have a little discussion with people who insist they want to use the full version of Liz, despite my preference.  The long version was my mother, not moi.

We had a lovely neighbor long ago who said she'd never met a PhD before (Handsome Partner) and she really couldn't call him by his first name, nor me by a nickname, not respectful.

She resolved it by referring to us as Betty and Doc! Like an oldtime comic strip. We loved her and everyone knew who she meant, so no harm done.

Today is about keeping warm, after a brisk interlude outside in my bathrobe earlier. I'd stepped out into a high wind, to put out the Freecycle bag and found the steps covered in earth and debris. Probably squirrels digging furiously as they do. 

I couldn't ask my nice Freecycler to step over that mess, so I swept it clean and more or less righted the lavender container plant knocked on its side, wind tearing at me. 

Now I'm up for knitting and reading. Hamish is still on my schedule. I wonder what I'll do after I've read all the Hamish books. 

My days have devolved into:

up early, morning care, breakfast, QiGong, email, blogs, Hamish, cooking, lunch, Hamish, knitting, Downton Abbey YT shorts, afternoon tea, Hamish etc.

On the other hand, it could be worse. And the fish will keep my brain working, at least that's the hope.

And, since gender and ignorance about it keep appearing in our news, here's the Talmud's take on it

Happy day everyone, eat fish. Or something.

This flag display is getting like my sock mending -- more darn than sock. Any more rights threatened and I'll end up with more flags than blog.

Bean bread or something, Presidents' Day and Freecycle

 I found a recipe for chickpea flatbread and thought I'd try it. Went to assemble the ingredients and found there were no chickpeas. Then I remembered they're in next week's order,not here yet.

So I thought why not use those cannellini beans, similar food group. 

And found they have a different texture, too thin a dough. So I added cornstarch and chickpea flour, had to get chickpeas in there somehow, and we'll see.

I didn't have the baking dishes the YouTube lady had, so I improvised. Small glass dish, and crumpet rings.

Needs to bake a bit longer maybe.

I baked longer, and the bigger one needed yet more time, so here are the small ones 

The one on the plate will join my soup lunch, and I think the others would be good finished on top of the stove in a cast iron pan.  

This was more of an interesting experiment than a wild success, though it's edible anyway. The seeds on top are cumin, very good for digestion when you're eating beans.

So here's one in the pan. 

I think it will toast well, too. 

It turned out very tasty with the carrot potato soup. It was too fragile to pick up, but I broke off pieces and that worked.

Endless rain here, heavy varied with light, but here's the good part: too warm for ice! Also my car's getting rain washed.

Monday is a holiday. Well, all my days are, really. It means no mail, mainly. Next week I'll see if my social security arrives. And I'll celebrate Joe Biden, one of the best Presidents of my lifetime, for the four halcyon years he gave us.

Thank you, Joe.

Happy day, everyone, try something new. Successful or not, you'll know more than you do now! Speaking of which, an excited Freecycler is picking up all the art materials tomorrow.  

She's wanting to weave something for her daughter's wedding, that little box contains handmade cardweaving cards, to go with the warping thread, and she plans to learn linocut which she's never done. Cool.

Memento Mori and other wise words

 Saturday evening brought this on YouTube 

Brilliant movie of the Muriel Spark novel, all world-class actors, Cyril Cusack, Maggie  Smith, Zoe Wanamaker, on and on.  It's well worth watching. 

Elsewhere in Blogland I read about a domestic standoff between a perfectionist spouse and a more realistic one, in the matter of laying wood flooring.

I think it's parallel to the ultimate test of a union, papering a room together. Handsome Partner and I did this back in the seventies. 

The date is important because it explains why we were papering the kitchen with a  sort of busy sunflowery prepasted paper. Think Bob Newhart show. Bob and Emily had our wallpaper. We also had an orange shag rug in the living room. Don't judge, it was the seventies and we were young!

The kitchen was very complicated, three doors to work around and cabinets, not a single solid wall. So we started out on opposite sides, working around to meet in the middle.

This was an old house, not a right angle in the place. So HP, the scientist, measured, drew diagrams, transferred the measurements to the paper, cut then papered. Took hours. It looked perfect.

I, the more freeform artist, gave him a long head start, had a pot of tea, then laid the paper on, cut and pasted where it hit, no measuring, matching as I went. I have a good eye. It looked perfect.

Where we met, I razored around flower motifs, tip  I remembered from a professional paper hanger, to create an invisible join. It looked perfect.

He insisted that was cheating, wallpaper was supposed to have a straight edge. Also that no matter how good my section was, I should have measured, not done it by eye.  I pointed out that I was tired, we'd done a fine job and never again. Also that I was still holding a box cutter. 

Discretion ensued on his part. But he never gave up the idea that working by eye instead of a diagram was somehow suspect! 

It seems to be a cosmic joke that diametrically different people find each other. Maybe each completes the other. Or maybe each drives the other off the edge. Or both.

Happy day everyone, be careful who you partner for paperhanging.. or anything, really.

Today's the 62nd anniversary of our wedding. One of us checked out a while back, but is still very much alive in memories.

Oh, Canada, go, Canada!

Celebrate our Canadian sisters and brothers today, on the birthday of the maple leaf flag, replacing the old ensign one, colonial relic.

Closer to home, you know you live in a small town when the local police issue this alert 

On the apple front, there are containers of sliced apples in the freezer, ready for when the mood strikes.  And delicious roasted potato dice again today. Also potato, carrot and red lentil soup. Are you seeing a trend?

My current escapist reading continues to be Hamish Macbeth, good thing MC Beaton wrote a lot of them. 

The picture is from the TV series, which was good but only vaguely based on the characters, not the books. This is the TV dog, westie Jock. Also the real Hamish has flaming red hair.

The book animals are Towser, who died old, Lugs, named for his ears, and Sonsie, a wildcat who moved in and coexists happily in the police station/home of Hamish, with his sheep and chickens. 

There was briefly a poodle, after Sonsie went away for a while, but she, the poodle, moved away with a constable who got married, it's all a bit soap opera, you need to read it for a bit of complicated light escape.

At this point I could try my hand at writing it, too. Fan fiction.

Yesterday was a day of many parts. Art exhibit, house clean, laundry done, bills paid, bed all changed, reading, qi gong, great food, a very good day. 

Also my first sighting on the patio this year of a Carolina wren. I'm hoping they'll nest close by. They're great for repelling squirrels once they've got young. Won't be long before the mourning doves start mating on my high fence, too, favorite love nest every spring.

All in all, there are good things to be glad about. That's first. First be joyful. Then we can resume our resistance.

I just thought: people who are worried about eggs, safety, price, there's a great chocolate cake that doesn't need them. It's been around for ages, originally an eggless cake in some other era. 

Look for it under eggless cake, crazy chocolate cake, wacky cake, something like that, you'll find it. It's the recipe I always use, no complaints so far. And a nice slice of chocolate cake  (buy cocoa powder while you can) helps with a lot of problems.

And winnowing continues, with these materials for weaving and linocut, hoping for a good Freecycle home. 

It's a winter holiday weekend, Presidents' Day, maybe good for Freecycling.

Happy day everyone, and here's a nice couple of thoughts to be considering. Beauty is still happening in Fils et Aiguilles, a blog about traditional embroidery, here hardanger. The blog is bilingual in French and English, easy to follow.

And here's a great reminder, like the shakuhachi effect

Cleaners and other heroes

Today I went to the library to hang out while the cleaners were at work. While I was there I remembered the wild weather forecast for the weekend, so I picked a puzzle as weather prep.

The exhibit in the library gallery,  very appropriate for lunar new year was

Half oil paintings in Western style, half Chinese brush painting. I liked the brush painting more than the oils,  not a fan of oils, and I loved the table with the artist's book and visitor signatures, to which I added mine. 

I think I like the concept here better than the execution, but I'm glad she did it. The weird angles are to avoid the reflections.

Then I thought you'd like a surprise. While I was roasting potato dice to go with an egg, upscale Brit egg 'n chips, I did this 

Would you look at that? Labeled cannellini beans, and in fact, vye-ola, cannellini beans. Now in containers in the freezer. 

Meanwhile there's heartening news on the cute winter boots and sand front. Turns out E***n's Doggy website, flung together, is full of flaws and has been joyfully hacked with rude messages. 

They're also finding that the third graders he's brought in can't read the gov website language, the old COBOL.  Before their time and they're floundering. Can't find their way around the Treasury site.

Remember Y2K, when gov agencies all set up with COBOL since the ark, frantically recruited retirees to come back and help, same problem?

Here we seem to have user error sand.

Also, federal attorneys in New York Southern District are resigning rather than agree to withdraw charges against the corrupt ny Mayor Eric Adams (no relation!).  

Danielle Sassoon, a T***p appointee in his first term,  went first, it's always a brave woman, followed by others. Here's a great email from another civic hero 

They are certified conservatives, right wingers,  who still know business from law and follow the law.

Latest is an attempt to pressure other attorneys to sign. We'll see how that goes.

My own resistance step today, after I had a hilarious run-in with a charter boat company using the new name for that Gulf, which I think I won on points, was to ditch Goo*** as a search engine,  and replace it with Duck duck go. No tracking, better information, and a fun option. 

Happy day everyone, try to get a bit of fun out of the grimness, you may as well.