I had the good fortune to meet and talk with the man who put one of their donuts in space! I was familiar with the story from reading their website. They have a looped video that shows the story. A customer close to the display told me the man who did it was right there beside us, and introduced me. We had a nice chat. They thought the weather balloon would go up and come down within 10 miles of the launch site and they'd be done within an hour. Wrong! The weather balloon with the donuts and camera and GPS transceiver went to 97000 feet. The flight lasted three hours 47 minutes, and landed 273 miles away in another State. The jet stream had fun with it. The GPS froze up and didn't thaw out until it landed. Quite a story. I'll be back.
I've had a quiet spell as far as sketching goes. I finally took the time to sketch a black walnut shell that I've been keeping since Thanksgiving. This will represent the holidays for me. I was the favorite uncle for this holiday visit and took my great niece and nephew to the park a few times to play and walk around. We collected some black walnuts we found and I showed them how to take the husk off and break them open and pick out the nut meat. They had now idea you could eat something you found on the ground. We spend time coloring, too. We don't get to see them more that once a year, so at their young age every meeting is a big new experience. That broken nut shell represents a lot of family time.
A web search tells me of a coffeeshop called Decade. It intrigues me. One review bashed it because, even though the coffee is great, they don't have WiFi and predicted they won't be able to compete with the other shops. Well, the owner said he doesn't allow WiFi because you come to a local coffeeshop to talk with your neighbors, not stick you head in your digital device and surf the web. I like him.
For the first day's lunch break I stole away and discovered this American Banjo Museum. What a jewel! They covered the four string banjo the best (it started as a 4-string collection) but had a nice selection of bluegrass banjos, too. They had early banjos or mock-ups thereof, and four long necks from the '60s (Kingston Trio and Pete Seeger style). They did not cover the open-back flailing banjo, though. All the displays were museum quality. They've spend $5 M on it so far.
I had the bottle caper from my old beer brewing days, but needed some caps. We have only one store that sells brewing supplies, and it's a guy running a business from a home. I drove up to get the caps and found out he, too, is brewing kombucha. He showed me his gallon jug of fermenting tea, with a smile. We are both cautious with our expectations, since we don't buy into all this alternate health stuff blindly. It's worth a try, though. We both see the similarities to brewing beer or wine. Fermented food is hardly a new concept. Plus there is the fun factor.
I've sketched my pack rats before. They are a bother and can cause costly damage to any vehicle parked outside. When they show up I use a catch-alive trap to catch them, and relocate them down the road. We live in a rural area with few houses. It's easy to drive them to a large field with great habitat for them and set them free. In the big picture, these rodents proliferate well and I could just kill him and cause no damage to the ecosystem. However, he's so darn cute I can't do it. When they make it into the garage I do, but when they're outside, their crime doesn't warrant death. However, a coworker had one eat a hose on her automatic transmission that she didn't notice until the transmission was totaled out. I may change my protocol if that were to happen to me. |
Well, here's the primary driving motive for our recent rash of canning jam this year. It's been a great activity for the three of us, for the teamwork needed to pull it off. The canning continues, too, even though we've met our goal number of 150 4-oz. jars of jam. One of our campgrounds (good ol' Clinton Lake, land of criminals singing into the Quiet Hours and felony banjo) has crab apple trees. The're ripe! So, we are trying some crab apple jelly. I think we're going to have a bit of excess inventory. We haven't hit regular apple season yet, either.
Fruit time! We have plenty of blackberries now. And two trees of peaches. Kansas peaches. Doesn't have the rich sound of Georgia peaches, but they are ours. These are dwarf fruit trees. We didn't need big ones, just smaller ones to give us some fruit to play with. Right now it seems more like work than play. The blackberry bushes are taking over the world. They sprawl a little more every year. Every three days I go out to pick more. It's been over a week of that, and with the red fruit on the vines it looks like another week of picking. Time to start canning and freezing.
the rest of the world already knows what this stuff is . . . but I just found it. Always heard the name. My recent readings on food and health point to the benefits of whole foods, and cooking from scratch. One author of a cook book mentions balsamic vinegar on her short list of base ingredients to have around the kitchen, so I bought some. Now that I have a bottle of good stuff I recognize the taste from foods at our Italian fare restaurants. It seems related to other things I like: malt vinegar for fish (thanks, Great Britain), brewed soy sauce (Kikkimon), and burgandy wine served at room temperature. All these are old foods that pre-date our industrialized food industry, too, which is something author Micheal Pollan advocates. Hmm, maybe there's something to this whole food thing.
Decided to take a night off my homework for Kate's Watercolor Pencil class and do a regular journal entry here. This started as a challenge in another journal group I'm in (LoveThisJournal) but I wanted to share it with my bloodline, some of whom follow my blog. I was a teenager before I learned that everyone doesn't eat this sandwich. I thought it was a standard. Then I was perplexed that most people, when learning what's in the sandwich, actually found it disgusting. Go figure!
