Thursday, April 24, 2008
I made grilled seitan skewers tonight--the first of the season--and they were fantastic. I have perfected the recipe! It was extremely similar to how I made them last time (September 12th) but I used Stew's freshly squeezed tangerine juice, and real agave nectar. Whatever proportions I used for everything were just right. We also had grilled purple asparagus, from Big W. It was actually purple! (It got a lot less purple when I cooked it, though.) And it was the best asparagus I have ever tasted. The claims on the sign about it being yummier than regular asparagus were not a lie. Oh yeah, also I tried Pike Place Roast today, and I actually liked it, quite a bit. (I hate Starbucks' other drip coffees.) All that. A Dong doesn't sell Melona pops, though. Alas. No new fish drawings today either. But I finished my map of New England!
Posted at 12:15:00 AM by Laura W. Petix.
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
I applied my little red hibiscus car sticker to the back of my car (centered right below the horizontal brake light, above the VW symbol) and got a full-fledged blister rubbing it in. What the heck. How can you get a blister from rubbing a sticker? My finger is freakish.
Posted at 2:45:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.
Blisters feel weird. Numb. The sticker looks good.
The trees are changing unbelievably fast this week. This is their week! From bare brown branches to leaves, in the blink of an eye. (I thought, "I wouldn't miss this week in April for anything.") I stuck my nose in some parking lot Bradford pear blossoms and the scent immediately flashed me back to Maryland when I was little. I don't even know why. The sense-memories of smells are so cool.
I went to the Rocky SBUX today. Hadn't been there for over two months. Marshmallow Guy was there, and he asked me where I'd been. When I told him I was in Hawaii for about a month and a half, he observed, "You didn't send us a postcard this time!" and I just said, "No..." It's obvious why, and I'm sure he knows it. It was nice to see Marsh, though. Rocky was okay. It's still the best, despite how far it's fallen.
Then in the evening we flew to Provincetown (!) (the photo is kind of hazy, but that's exactly how it looked). It's a lot closer from our new airport than when we flew there last time (two years ago, the only time we've gone). Last time was summer and the P-town airport was jumping; today, it was dead, the town still in sleepy insular off-season mode. It was very warm here today, but the Cape was more than ten degrees cooler, then cold when the sun went down. But Napi's was full of people, and delicious. Very very good food, even though I couldn't order the Russian Oysters (tease!). There was a beautiful low orange moonrise flying home. Tower even commented on it. I'm really tired.
Oh, I drew a humuhumunukunukuapua`a just now. They're a lot harder than drawing shad! I didn't have the right color pen for the blue stripes, so I used the Mark-B-Gone end of my fabric marker. Good thing humus don't have purple stripes, or I would've had to use the Disappearing Ink end, and it would have disappeared! (Actually, I should've used disappearing ink for the top and bottom fins, because on a real humu they're sort of invisible.)
Zero shad have reached the fish counters at the fish lift in Holyoke Massachusets so far, but the New England Shad Association site reports "few" shad from the mouth of the Connecticut River to most of the way up CT, so they're on their way. Maybe I'm a little overeager; still, it feels like it's time to draw shad again.
Posted at 3:11:00 AM by Laura W. Petix.
(All those scales took a long time, but they were very fun and absorbing!)
Monday, April 21, 2008
It's so beautiful here right now. Fluffy white Bradford pears, dogwoods, and, today in Rocky Hill, pink magnolias! It's too much. Every year spring amazes me.
Posted at 7:43:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.
I made my first zippy pouch from my Marimekko fabric yesterday, and it looks super-cute but when I finished it I found out that the zipper constantly got stuck! Aaagh. It would be better if it looked crummy, because it looks almost perfect (and there were a million other minor things that could have gone wrong) so a non-working zipper is like a bad joke. (It's the first part you sew, so there's nothing I can do to fix it at this point.) I'll have to be really careful about the sticking-outness of the lining fabric next time.
I did manage to rig it before I went to bed... by scrunching down the offending fabric and spreading Tacky Glue on it with a toothpick, so it's stiffer and stands away from the zipper. Good old Tacky Glue. I'm not 100% sure yet, but it might actually be Good Enough For Government Work, as my dad would say. I.e., fine to keep for myself, but there's no way I'd give it away as a gift.
We had pink and yellow beets for supper, and they were good.
[Edit: Oh wow, I found this photo of Hartford on the camera when I slurped in the photo of my little bag. I thought it would be all reflectiony, but it's good! I quickly snapped it on Thursday when we were flying away from Brainard.]
[Edit #2: I showed Dean the rigged bag and he zipped and unzipped it about a million times in a row, so I guess it's a keeper!]
Sunday, April 20, 2008
Posted at 6:22:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.
We went to New York City yesterday! Just for the day. Viennese coffee and trout crepes at Cafe Sabarsky (perfect, as always), then tried a Rooster truffle at the Vosges boutique on Madison Avenue. I was surprised by how tiny the store was! I was curious about the Rooster (dark chocolate + Taleggio cheese) from the catalog so it was cool to be able to sample one without having to order a box. When I asked the store lady about it, I said, "It's the pointy one, right?" and she seemed to find that funny. It is pointy! It didn't really taste like cheese, though. I also got a tiny box of some of those wonderful exotic caramels Dean got me as a surprise for Valentine's day two years ago. :-)
We also visited the Marimekko concept store and I got 1/4 yard of fabric (it's insanely expensive, but 1/4 yard wasn't too bad). I got oilcloth and I'm going to make some tiny zippy bags out of it. And we went to Ito En in a doomed (as usual) attempt to get matcha almonds (my fav treat ever, pretty much) but the store lady told us they don't sell them anymore!! Waaaah! The only way to get them is to eat at Kai and have a couple doled out to you as part of dessert. What a complete tease! I also got a nifty Blomus teastick at the MOMA design store for my sinkme collection, and we had dinner at Candle 69. Seitan and more seitan. Also, the best sake mojito ever. They had ramps and morels and spargle, but no rhubarb yet. I guess rhubarb doesn't start until May. I spotted a shad sign in a shop window, though!
All in all it was a highly successful trip, although I made the risky move of wearing my brand new birthday shoes (Kohala model) (yeah, my birthday's in January, but it was too cold to wear them until now), and although I walked around Manhattan all day and the bottoms of my feet didn't hurt at all (very impressive!), the tops of my feet did get rubbed raw, so that was a bit painful. I think when they get broken in and smushed down a bit they will be super-comfortable, though.
Oh yeah, almost forgot: we saw ten zillion hovering helicopters (almost the whole time we were walking around), and the Pope motorcade driving down Park Avenue, which was all blocked off. The Pope motorcade consisted of lots of cops on motorcycles, more cops in cars, secret service guys peering out the windows of big black darkened-windowed cars, a couple of black limousines (I guess the Pope was in one), a series of successively bigger and blacker and more-armored vehicles containing many many large guns, and then more police cars and motorcycles. It was quite the spectacle. The weirdest part was how quiet Park Avenue was before the procession. No traffic at all--no cars and squawking buses and taxis honking--just people waiting to cross the street standing hushed behind the barricades (manned by tons of cops). Helicopters thrumming, and that was it. It didn't sound like New York at all! Anyway, shouldn't the Pope have a white limousine?
