Poppies sketch

So, so very soon, the California poppies will be blooming.

With the aforementioned watercolor brushes, and a few passes of colored pencil, I finished this little bit of play tonight.

I held the pens with their flexible, brush-like points and felt an unaccustomed sense of jealousy; I got watercolor pens for Christmas (and I am grateful and pleased with the gift) but Alex got a graphics tablet for her computer, and she has been arting up a storm with it.

I've borrowed it a couple times, and oh, the things one can do with that beast! The future is unclear ... I may be able to use it while she is at work, and we three will co-exist peacefully, or I will have to get my own.

In the mean time, my daily creation has been either for writing, or cooking, and I've been a negligent blogger about it. It's only with the last two days of amazingly clement weather that Lillian has been yipping at me to work in the studio so that she can safely play out in front of the house. I am the guard dog who watches over her with the garage door open. It is better light for the studio, after all.

Brush Strokes

Alex gifted me with some flexible-tip "watercolor" pens at Christmas, and I only just began to play with them.

The black brush-strokes were first, then a few green. Then I thought of centaurea, and how much I liked them in my wildflower garden of 15 years past. I added blue.

The yellow bits were just for some color balance.

2010

With the New Year, I have been aware of the need to create something every day, and make that a priority.

New Year's Day and yesterday, I worked on writing the next chapter of Transitions, a rather boring soap opera that follows the next stage of life at the Reich estate and Owen Reich-Ambris' transformation from kid to trying on his father's shoes as owner of the estate.

One of the things I've learned over the past traumatic two and some years is that while I do enjoy writing and need to write when I'm ill or emotionally hurt, what comes out of my keyboard is not quality work. No less than four novel-length writings are pretty much all dreck. I've been re-reading them lately and felt my face burn with embarrassment all the way through. I won't delete them, but it's very likely that I will re-write them, or at least gut the hell out of them and just pare them down to a couple short stories.

The Cold Food Day

[This is a cross-post from my regular blog. Both need attention; but this entry is really about creating something new for me. Foods!]

This morning I woke up hungry, not having eaten supper the night before.

I thought of taters and eggs, which I had promised Alex I'd make before she and John had to go to the Bay Area. I thought of the soft and scrumptious loaf of Dutch crust French bread I bought at the store the other day. I thought of what to make for lunch with things on hand.

There was a container of egg whites, left over from making pumpkin custard the day before yesterday, so the taters and eggs made use of that. Delicious. Perfect. Hearty breakfast accompanied by tomato juice. Good start to a freezin' ass cold day.

Around 10 am, I opened the freezer to see what was available for lunch. I spotted a small container of onions and ground beef that I intended to make into some variant of minestrone -- but I knew Bernie wouldn't eat that as it would have too much tomato flavor to it. Aha! A bag of pre-cooked prawns (50 % off sale at the grocers one weekend) and a package of chopped broccoli. Got it, lunch is on the way!

The minestrone fixins I pulled out as well, just because I couldn't stop thinking about them.

Baby portobella mushrooms ... a package of them needed to be used up, so I cut each one into halves or quarters and tossed them into a frying pan with Saffola Margarine (good taste for sizzling) and cut up half a yellow onion into 3/4 inch chunks and began to cook them in extra virgin olive oil. The pot of white basmati rice began to cook.

Prawns thawed in a solution of sea salt and lemon juice and water; some of the mushrooms went into a pot with the minestrone stuff on a back burner, along with a hefty amount of "Italian Seasoning" by McCormick.

A can of chicken broth was mixed with 2 tablespoons of corn starch, some salt, and a heavy shaking of garlic powder, and added to the onion pieces when they were done, to slowly come to a boil. When the rice was nearly done, I put the frozen broccoli on to steam. A few minutes later, most of the mushrooms went into the thickening chicken broth, along with the cut up prawns. (Some of the mushrooms went into the minestrone pot.) When the broccoli was done, so was the rice, and with that, lunch was served. Delicious, nutritious, and satisfying.

The minestrone-to-be slowly thawed on its low setting, seemingly forgotten, but not.

I walked to the school to collect Lillian. We checked the mail, and then, ambling up the street came a man with his Great Dane bitch. She was beautiful, black with a white spot on her chest, and a hint of whitish toes. Maybe a third again bigger than our dog Sebastian, but looking like his auntie. Lil and I stopped to talk with the owner, who assured us that she didn't bite, and we petted the large, lovely lady, comparing her loopy ears to Sebastian's, and the breadth between her eyes, and the gentle eyes themselves. Yeah, I think Sebastian has some Great Dane in his ancestry.

Return to the minestrone variation. I dumped some leftover fried cabbage (don't knock it until you've tried it, cooked with onions in bacon fryings) into the pot, and a cup of tomato sauce. A little later, I tossed in about a quarter cup of nopalitos (cactus strips) and a handful of sliced black olives. I added more oregano, more garlic powder, and a cup of asparagus, cut into half-inch pieces. Dumping in maybe a cup to a cup and a half of Wolfgang Puck's beef broth (no MSG) and about the same amount of the water from the broccoli steaming, and a cup of pasta ...

When the pasta was done, I cut a couple pieces of the French bread, and slathered them with cream cheese. Serving the minestrone in a bowl, I sprinkled it with Parmesan cheese and ooohhh, perfect soup, perfect meal for a cold, cold winter evening.

Tough One

This one was hard on me, both in reading, formatting, and trying to find an image.

Jim Wisneski's sensitive and tragic story, "A Pile of Dinners" is about an Alzheimer's victim and a family member who has had to live with the horrible changes that the disease causes.

I don't think I did the story justice, but my all-too-recent experience with my mother's decline into Alzheimers made it hard to work with.

Almost a Cover Image

Me, not keeping a clear line of communication open, and he, not keeping track of Upcoming Issues, well, Jonathan Scott and I did not know that I was cobbling up a cover image to go with his story, nor did we know in tandem that he already had a graphic to go with it.

"Ever So Slightly Mangled" is a fine representation of a storyteller's art.

I included my illustration in the later part of the text.

Narrative [1]

M.J. Nicholls' cover story, "A Modern Narrative [1]" inspired this bizarre work.

Nicholls' story made me want to run in circles, shout "hahahahahaha" maniacally, whack my head with a stout book, and run into bookstores to risk arrest while madly toppling junk-ass-written best sellers to the floors.

At the same time, I sympathized with the fragility of a writer's ego -- all it takes is one person to hurt that ego so much that it never forgets.

Which is not to say that no one should ever say anything bad about others' writing, not by any means, but ... if you're not supremely confident about your writing (or any other art), mean words do hurt.

Hmm, supremely confident, or ... raking in the big bucks.