Knives and Earthquakes (not together, one hopes)

Whew. What a week. I know I said that on Friday, but I thought I’d elaborate a bit. First up: KNIVES.

A week ago Friday I finally did something that I’ve wanted to do for a long time – I took a knife skills class!  I was super excited. After some persuasion I managed to get Jeff to come as well, because I knew he would be willing to be my sous chef if he knew how to be a pro about. I think we’re both getting new knives.  He wants the Shun you see on the left, and I want the middle knife. I have a chef’s knife already that I’m quite fond of, but I liked the flat edge of that one. I took the class (3+ hours jam packed with info) at Berkeley’s Kitchen on Fire with chef MikeC. I wish I could pass on every last bit of information to you guys, but um … well, he DOES have a DVD, I suppose. Seriously, it was a great class, the guy’s a great teacher, funny and yet very seriously knowledgeable about his subject.

I will say, after learning the techniques, that I don’t think I know anyone who wields a knife properly. Which is sad, because it’s so much faster and safer!

I spent today helping my brother move out of his apartment. He’s experiencing a few major life changes, both positive and negative, and I’m very happy to be able to be nearby so that I can help. I’m super pleased to report that he is going to graduate school next fall at the University of Nevada Reno to earn his master’s degree in environmental planning and policy, specializing in GIS use.  The cherry blossoms in the picture above are from outside his window in Placerville – it’s spring!  I will miss going up there to visit him, but I am really happy he’s going in a positive direction in his life, and I’m sure I’ll make it back up there on my own anyway.

I continue to spend time finishing items for the kitchen/dining area. As you can see above, the benches are nearly done, and I have a lot of commentary on building furniture in my head for another post. We have one coat of paint to apply and they’ll be ready for use. I’m sewing with piping for the first time for the bench cushions, which is giving me palpitations. I’m terrified I’m going to do this terribly wrong, but I’m forging ahead anyway. I have a seam ripper, after all. I don’t know how to build furniture either, and that seems to be going well despite all the many things that could go poorly. I’m definitely ready for these projects to be over, though. I’d like to move onto something else.

I, along with many others, have been watching the news from Japan about the earthquakes and tsunamis with horror and sadness. The news just isn’t getting any better. Like many others, I’ve donated to the Red Cross, and it’s really all that I can think to do. I went to bed Thursday night extremely grateful to be living in an earthquake-safe apartment building and working in a retrofitted earthquake-standard office. It’s not everything, but … when you live less than a mile from the not-insignificant Hayward fault, it’s hard to hear about massive earthquakes and not personalize those thoughts just a wee tiny bit.

Flickr user Dr_Speed (via Berkleyside) caught the photo above of the tsunami rolling through San Francisco Bay on Friday. That’s SF in the background and the Bay Bridge crossing the water. The Alameda docks are on the left and Emeryville (just south of Berkeley) is in the foreground. There’s also a video from the same vantage point. Not so big, right? Kinda slow. Now realize that wave has traveled more than 5,000 miles. Unbelievable.

With the exception of the tsunami photo these pictures are from Instagram – three weeks ago I decided to start a 365 project, and those photos are from that series. For those of you unfamiliar with this phenomenon, I watched several people on Flickr do one of these in various ways. Basically you take a picture every day for a year, often of yourself, and post it. Some people do a 52-week version. I’d wanted to do one, but never thought I’d keep up with it until I started using with Instagram on my iPhone. You take a picture and it applies an effect to it (or not), imitating a lomography camera or a 60s or 70s picture, or various other vintage and color filters. Since I usually have my phone with me, it’s simple to remember to find something worth looking at from my daily life and photograph it.

I’m hoping that this project reminds me to keep a sharp eye on what’s amazing and noteworthy around me in my daily life, instead of just letting the increasingly familiar landscape fade into sameness. Moving to a new place opens your eyes in so many ways, and I’d like to keep the magic of that viewpoint with me as long as I can.

Off to bed! I’m sure with the time change the morning is going to see unbearably early for this night owl.

Trying my hand at wall art

I finished three projects last Sunday. This would be impressive except that I’d been working on them for some time, it was really just that day that I could slap all the pieces together and make the end result look intentional. Projects are like that. You figure out your idea or bang, it smacks you in the head. Gather the materials, do the prep, work on the pieces and finally, put it together.

I did a lot fewer projects when I was younger because I didn’t have the patience to work through the process all the way. These days I really am about 50/50 on process/result. Sometimes I get impatient and just want it done–instant gratification is a hallmark of growing up in suburban consumer culture, doncha know! But I’m finding more and more that even if things turn out like crap, sometimes it’s the doing and the learning that really makes it worthwhile.

But I don’t think this turned out like crap. I mentioned this one a few days ago, it’s called a piacere because literally it’s letters that spell out a piacere. I’m still a musician at heart, and so it was really only appropriate that I chose this musical term.

It means that the player can perform the music at her/his discretion with regard to tempo in particular, but more in general to just play the piece according to their own inclination. If you follow the link you’ll see the definition and the various related words (rubato, ad libitum).

I chose the term as a nod to the way I think I like to do things – in my own way. Of course, we can’t in general do the things we want to do how we want whenever (darn!).  But I try.  So the materials I chose were from things I found around my house that I had kept as memories of things.  The A’s were music: the one on the left contains pieces from a postcard of a page in a medieval antiphonal, then I imitated the painting style for the rest.  I have pieces of medieval music and chant on the sides.  Medieval music and manuscripts were my favorite part of graduate school.

So about the pictures – Jeff dislikes picture frames sitting about everywhere, so I have to get creative in the ways that I have pictures in the house.  Since the whole thing is really about life, and the fun you can have living it, why not?  The P is a picture from the Central Park exhibit The Gates with a picture of Jeff and I looking out at the statue of Libery.  The I is for my brother, though bamboo is just fun to paint.  The nonprofit Pandas International has been sending me updates on the damage from the earthquake in China – the whole area is still not doing so well – that’s been a really sad story to hear.

The C is pictures of the Cloisters Museum, an entirely medieval-oriented museum in far north Manhattan. The E is from the Maker Faire last year (the picture below from SXSW interactive – nerd-E!!), the R is about all my hiking, and the E … well, I just love flowers.  And I love New Orleans, and there I am at Cafe du Monde.  I was pretty worried about New Orleans this past week. I grew up in Houston, so there were always hurricanes, and bad ones are always a real struggle and worry.

OK, now to stop with the reminiscences. I thought that was a fun project – got to try out some new paints, it was meaningful to me as well as autobiographical, and it’s nice to see in my front hallway. 

The weather, and other unpleasant facts

It’s 10:44 pm, and it’s still 86 degrees outside. No kidding. Ugh. The weather people tell me it is supposed to be 98 tomorrow. Now that it’s June, I know the weather isn’t going to do anything but be gross until October. All I can do is hope for a lot of rain to block the sun and try to balance my air conditioning bill against personal discomfort. You’d think I hadn’t grown up in the subtropics with all my complaining about the heat, but I just can’t seem to reconcile myself to being baked.

<–That’s my most recent painting. I’m experimenting with shapes and painting the negative spaces instead of the object itself. This is a technique exercise, just to try to see objects differently, to understand better how things are shaped. I like how it turned out, and I’m going to try more like it.

Summer calls for several things, craft-wise. I’ve put away all the blankets I’m making, and switched to things that aren’t hot to sit under. I have a couple of big crochet projects I’m planning (one left from last year) and a bunch of experimentation with fabric.

But first I have to put my house back together.

One thing I had to do for summer was move my sewing machine downstairs. Heat rises, and this apartment has craptastic insulation. No force on earth is powerful enough to make me stay upstairs during the day in a Tejas summer. Migrating my space has been this weekend’s production, and in fact we dragged the rest of the house into the evil reorganization vortex. I think Jeff and I moved all but 3 pieces of furniture over the last couple of days, a painful process.

Fact is that I feel as though I’m supposed to be moving right now. For the last 8 years I have moved every two years for school purposes. Big, go-to-a-different-city moves. Plus the natural upheaval of 5 years of thrice-yearly college semester changes. I wonder if I’m not having withdrawal, if the furnishings aren’t my way of making up for not being able to make a big change this year. After so much constant, regular change for so many years, I’m actually finding it more difficult than I imagined to continue in the same city, same house, and same job for a third year. I know people do this staying-in-one-place thing all the time, but I’m just not feeling it.

Anyway, another result of the shuffling-furniture project is that I have some new colors in my abode. The way I decorate takes my frequent redecorating into account – I have a primary color in here (brown) and then I use lots of colorful accents. This is a much less expensive way to make sweeping changes quickly. The red in my main space has given way to bright green. My front room has moved on to include orange and blue. I have three new sets of curtains to make and some pillows. And I have Plans for a couple of tables involving a combination of lacquer, paint and paper.

Thus begins summer. Jeff, of course, says I’m causing too much trouble for myself, but what would be the fun if I didn’t?