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I am at work tonight, and that's not so great. But I had a potato, egg, and brisket taco for dinner that was the best taco of my life.
I feel exhilarated but sad and a bit hollow too--if that was the apex of my taco-eating experience, well, I have a just a little less to look forward to now.
It's ok. Kind of a mixed bag.
Soon it will be very early Thursday, Then I can pet my dog and drink a beer.
It's been about five weeks since coworker Louisa and I embarked on our beet odyssey, and I have to say so far the results have not been encouraging, Lil Wayne's endorsement notwithstanding. Our resident master naturalist and the office pessimist both told us one of the reasons we were having trouble was that we did not have enough soil depth for our little guys to stretch their taproots into.
So I made some beet boxes by caulking 12-inch-tall 4" PVC pipes to sealed toilet flanges with holes drilled in the bottom for drainage. That ought to give them a little more room.
Beet seedlings just before the move. Hey, check out Pointy back there!
There was also some concern that the soil wasn't rich enough for the beets, so I mixed some potting soil with a little compost and Lady Bug fertilizer for energy and some builder's sand for drainage and ease of root growth. That, coupled with more diligent use of light, just may do the trick. And if it doesn't, we planted container-friendly cilantro in the old pots, so at least we'll have something to munch on come May.
St. Murse shook his virtual fist at Zachary Taylor in a comment on last year's Presidents' Day post, so I thought that would be a good starting point for this year's celebration. But what I found was a mixed bag: "Old Rough and Ready" was a blunt, near-illiterate mess who owned slaves and would not commit to many of the issues of the day.
Still, even though he himself owned slaves, he held a moderate stance on the issue, and his handling of the statehood petitions for California and New Mexico caused those states to be admitted to the union as non-slaveholding states.
My extremely shallow research on the matter seems indicates that Taylor's maneuverings were more a politically practical attempt to avoid exacerbating tensions between the North and South than some great moral stance, but still, he did it, and he also showed military skill and great bravery in the War of 1812 and the Mexican-American War (the arrogance and evil inherent in the pursuit of Manifest Destiny notwithstanding).
Oh, hell. Perhaps after eight Presidents' Days I am running out of truly crappy presidents--well, there's still Nixon and a few others, I'm sure--or maybe in my advancing age I am less prone to see things in black and white.
But! Nuance schmuance, the dude owned slaves and only served for 16 months before succumbing to an undoubtedly undignified bout with gastroenteritis. So, hey, President Taylor, congratulations on being the eighth president in our series of lame, crappy, or boring presidents!
Previous years' honorees:
A new carving. This one isn't wood; I did it with a softer Speedball block. This shit is fun again! The new tools are making me want to carve everything lately. Although the fun is tinged with anxiety because the blades are starting to lose their perfect edges. I am terrified I'll ruin them when I start sharpening.
Eric and I went to see the Flatbed Press exhibit at AMOA on Saturday. I had mixed feelings about it, but one thing I took away is that I want to try things on a larger scale. I may be hitting up Home Depot for some big boards soon and putting the Dremel tool to use.
Valentine's Day was swell, as far as those things go. I had to work Monday night so we cooked scallops and drank fancy beer Sunday night, and Monday night Eric brought a half a rack of freshly smoked ribs up to the office for my dinner. Goddamn, they were good. He's ready to try a whole brisket next.
Speaking of saying it with meat, I've been getting a ton of hits on a picture I posted to flickr last spring, mostly via Google searches for "meat bouquet." The page views ticked up steadily over last week and peaked on Sunday and Monday.
I hope whoever got a meat bouquet this Valentine's Day is the kind of person who would actually *want* to get a meat bouquet on Valentine's Day. I could see vegans and romantics being...well, I was going to say "cheesed off," but that's just kind of stupid.
The last time I posted, the new tools were working out pretty well, so well that I decided my first real woodcut (Poley doesn't count) should also be my first attempt at a suicide print.
Suicide prints are multi-color prints that are printed off a single block that gets carved away a little more to print each successive color. Since you destroy the previous color's printable area with each step, you can't go back and print more--it's a forced limited edition. (They are also called reduction prints because you're reducing the block with each color, but that doesn't sound nearly as badass.)
Two colors were plenty for my inexperienced ass; no point in getting too fancy (the prints at the link are really cool and illustrate the process clearly--go look!).
I cut away the wood to reveal a flower-shaped blob, inked it, and made my prints. (The dark lines here are not relief cuts--they were drawn on with a Sharpie so I could see where to cut for the next color.)
I used a particularly nice okra bloom from last summer as my model. Hello, beautiful!
Here are some of the red blobs I printed with the block.
While the red ink dried, I cut away everything else on the block that was not outlined in Sharpie. This is what was left.
Then I rolled black ink over the block and applied it to the red prints at right, taking care to align the edges of the paper with the edges of the block. I have a terrible time with registration, but this seemed to work pretty well.
Here are all the prints drying. That's all there are, and all there will ever be. Although I still have the black outline, so I will probably do something else with it eventually.
Here's a closeup of one of the prints. I wish I had made the lines thinner so it would look more graceful, and I wish I had taken the time to clean up the block more on the red. As it is, it looks a little clumsy and forbidding. Still, for a first attempt, I'm happy.
And that is how you make a suicide aka reduction print. You were wondering, weren't you?
I splurged this week on a really nice set of Swiss block cutting tools that clear out the wood cleanly and easily. I had been using a flimsy beginner set that would not stay sharp for more than a few strokes. Using the new ones feels like going from a go-kart to, well, not a Ferrari, but a Toyota Corolla at least.
I am hoping to be able to finish a print tonight, but if it snows I will probably be out jumping around in the backyard like a bozo instead. I hope it does because I want to watch the puppy flip out.
