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September 7, 2008

This year's harvest

This year, since we were away during much of the summer, we didn't put
in any summer vegetables. Fortunately, one of our tomato plants
decided that it wasn't dead after all, and the chile de arbol plant,
although it looks pretty sad, came up with a few good peppers.

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September 5, 2008

More lunch at Dosa Place

I ate lunch again at Dosa Place to confirm the good opinion I got during my first visit. Well, actually it was to spend time with my friend Tony, but he also eats regular human food, so I thought we could do so together. 

Dosa Place is still really good, and today I had the biggest meal I've ever eaten. I mean structurally the largest. This is listed on the menu as a paper dosa, and it is to a regular dosa what the Gossamer Albatross is to a hang glider. Tony said, "hey, your meal is bigger than your torso!" 

The menu at Dosa Place helpfully observes that you cannot get the paper dosa for carry-out. Essentially, it is the thinnest possible sheet of dosa batter, crisped in sufficient ghee, and rolled into an attractive and very fragile cylinder while still hot and pliable (and possible to remove from the griddle). 





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September 3, 2008

Medieval interlude

The monastery at Grottaferrata has more things written in Greek around it than you'll find in an Athens tobacconist's. Even the trimmed hedge is in Greek. 

   

Click here to download:
Medieval_interlude.zip (57 KB)

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September 2, 2008

Emandal brings out instruments

I am certain that humans make musical instruments because they are inclined to, where inclined means 'liable to do so whether you like it or not'; see polka or REO Speedwagon, depending on your inclination. I am also certain that they don't get enough custom when they do, because every time we come to Emandal, someone spends the weekend getting much better at an ibsteumwny that they have just picked up, haven't playwbib a long time, or kist happen to like.

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September 2, 2008

Emandal

Each year, we go to visit Emandal over the Labor Day weekend. I think we've been doing so for five years, but it might have been six. The time is so delightfully uneventful and the food has none of those hallmarks that make you say "oh, yes; that was the season that gelatinized bacon foam came into fashion and was in all the magazines."


Instead, there are welded steel dragonflies that rotate. 

Emandal has been renting out cabins on a farm for a century. The cabins are just cabins, but comfortable enough. The Eel River is just a river, but swimmable and nicely supplied with garter snakes and turtles. The food is farm food and at least as fresh as an investigative reporter's dialog in one of those chatty 1940s newspaper movies. 

This year I made a quick slideshow for the families who came to visit. 





 

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September 1, 2008

Mosaicism

Alaina has spent part of the last year becoming quite proficient as a mosaicist. She and Felix put together this gift for me (still, a few months later, awaiting a bath in sealant at her workstation), and she and Felix made a fine pebble mosaic on a sand bed along the pathway to our house. Felix did almost all of the left side of the heart.



This summer, while she was on an internship to help repair the wayward catalog at the Ujiveraity of Qashingtpn's Rome Xentet, she passed quite a number of evenings weilding a hammer in the mpsai ayudion obonw of the city's premier restorers of ancient mosaics. As a result, she came home with a lovely pattern of marble.

[I am leaving the typographical funnies here to remind people that I posted this blog entry from my Iphone. I know I can correct them now, but they are one of my favorite things about the Iphone: you get ideas reminiscent of the T9 lips/kiss pun.] 

Then last weekend Alaina and I were off to the mosaic studio in Oakland, not to make mosaics but rather to learn how to weld. Welding is dramatic and satisfying. The equipment is slightly high-tech -- in particular, welders currently use a helmet with a self-darkening shutter that takes less than a 1000th of a second to go from the opacity of sunglasses to really, really dark. 

 

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August 28, 2008

Amber can't come

Were packing today for our annual trip to the farm on the Eel. Amber isn't coming, but not for want of trying. She gets to spend the weekend keeping Connie company.

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August 28, 2008

Refract me

To mark my first decade at my current employer, the company gave me a large, heavy crystal prism. I set it on my office windowsill, and at the right time on a sunny day, the real gift comes.

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August 28, 2008

Avenue of the 100 fountains

One of the primary attractions of the Villa d'Este in Tivoli, Lazio, is the structure called the Avenue of 100 fountains. (It's called the same in Italian, and this is a case of using the word hundred to mean 'many'. As you know, the word has historically been flexible, and the Old Norse hundrað and Anglo-Saxon hundred both could mean '120'.)

Here are a few of the faces on the 100 fountains. They come very close to repeating, but there are differences among them. 


                                                                                                                                                                                                     

Click here to download:
100Fontane.zip (7083 KB)

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August 27, 2008

Sometimes the price is just too high

I don't understand this cartoon. It might be funny, but I can't figure out how. Is it a misunderstanding about the meaning of the word demand? Is it an interesting comment that the price of a hamburger should be a fundamental unit of currency?
 

 

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