Summer Drink :: Gentle Lemon Saketini

Even though it hasn't been much of a summer –mostly just cool rain– there's still a strong pull in me to drown in sake. Ice cold sake. One year, it was moscato , another gin and tonic. This year, sake! 

To make this drink:

1. fill your glass with ice

2. use that smaller glass to measure 1 glassful each of tonic water and lemonade to pour over ice

3. fill the rest of your glass with sake

4. use a butter knife to stir

There's a poem I found in Lapham's Quarterly all about sake, but I can't find that magazine right now. When I do, I'll share it with you. For now, I recommend you try this simple drink. The lemonade and tonic water make the sake so smooth. Not too tart, not too sweet. Just gentle.

Little House, Little Girl, Little Dress

One day last week, I got a wild hair and went up in the attic. I got down all my fabric scraps and found that they entertained the kids for HOURS. While they were thus occupied, did I catch up on chores? Did I do something pressing and necessary? Nope.

I made Bea a dress and pinafore.

Kids need play clothes afterall and she's pretty much outgrown last year's shorts, omg they're tiny! I prefer to avoid normal kids clothes as they are covered with characters and logos. Ugh. So I can go to Buy Buy Baby where they sell adorable gender neutral clothes (see Bea model them here, here and here) for really not that much dollars. But still a lot compared to yard sale prices which are pretty much my speed.

Or, or. Or I can make them Fraulein Maria style from old drapes and bedsheets and requisitioned garments. As I do occasionally for myownself.

So I made the pattern for the bodice out of muslin and fitted it to her with room to grow. A dress and pinafore are perfect for a little kid like Bea. She can play hard and not worry about messing anything up because the pinafore protects the dress and said pinafore is of a patterned fabric. Try getting a stain to show up on it! It's a lot cuter than standard kids' clothes and relates to the book characters she's grown up with from those of Beatrix Potter to Laura Ingalls Wilder to more recently George MacDonald.

Back In The Game

Until now my summer has been about being a mom, getting my house in order, growing food, vacation bible school, preschool, etc. All great things and important and worthwhile. But I had no time –or was giving no time– to my own creative pursuits.

Until now.

I made a map of the rest of my summer and it includes four (4) projects. They are all art/design related and will all go toward my senior seminar portfolio. They all address various gaps therein as well as things I've just wanted to tackle. When I'm done, I will have no products or market-related items in my portfolio. (*goal*)

Drawing, designing, printing, painting, vectoring, photographing. Four projects. Four weeks.

I'm so freaking excited!

True Confessions

1. I don't sort the laundry. 

I don't have time, for one thing. And also, we don't have whites to keep white or brights to keep bright or reds that haven't had a million opportunities to bleed. Our clothes are old. Maybe the previous owners sorted them, but by now they are well broken in. I have to keep laundry as simple as possible... or I simply won't do it.

2. While we are on the laundry thing, I don't fold all the clothes. 

If something of mine is in danger of getting wrinkled, I'll usually just hang it up. Bea's clothes don't get folded because she removes them from her drawers to spread around the room anyway, so that would be a waste of my time. James has his own way of folding and organizing his things so I dont' fold them.  Amby's the only one when gets his clothes folded just because they are so little and cute and they stay in neat stacks in his chest of drawers.

3. I throw away my kids' stuff.

Like, constantly. If you ask me one too many times to fix something? It's disappearing. If I step on it and hurt my foot? Gone. If it makes any kind of annoying sound whatsoever? Well, you get the idea.

4. I delete phone messages without listening to them. 

Most of the time, I avoid the phone. Ignoring calls, opting to facebook people instead of call them. We have a really basic phone without caller ID, so if someone calls and leaves a message, I go into voice mail just long enough to hear what number called. Then I delete it. If I know the number, I might call back. Like if it was James or Mama. That's about it. And here is why: I have small children. It's like some kind of switch that gets flipped in them whenever I am on the phone. They have to interrupt, pull each others' hair, fall from high places, break things. The household dissolves into a pit of tormented screams every time I am on the phone, without fail. It is both infuriating and embarrassing.


Ok, I think I'll stop while I'm ahead. But this was fun, I should do it again sometime. But now it's your turn. :)

Something is Not Right

When the chair of the Art Department and all the Graphic Design professors (3) resign within a couple months of each other, you know something ain't right.

via

At this point, none of us knows what is going on and we have to just hope that by the time we get back to school in a few weeks, there will still be a graphic design program. I am set to graduate in Spring and I only have three classes in my field left to take.

It looks like I will spend my Senior year under the tutelage of complete strangers rather than the professors who guided me and know my style and how I work. It's kinda scary.

What Is Going On?

Fairytales

I love telling Beatrice dreadful stories at bedtime about young girls in harrowing situations who save themselves by being "quiet as a mouse and still as stone." She is always the girl and she always falls asleep in no time.

One is about Goldilocks and the Three Bears at Night. The bears are still hungry that night after Goldilocks meddled with their porridge. Goldilocks is in bed (with her door shut and locked, her closet light off because she refused to hush!) when she hears a low, angry growl (1) under the bed, (2) in the closet and (3) outside her window. Soon her room is swarming with hangry bears and the only way she might go undetected is to play dead, er, pretend to be asleep. This story has worked for nights and nights on end. I leave her looking asleep and within a few minutes she really is!

Now we have a July in Berea edition. (Or do people all over the place continue shooting fireworks all month.) This story is called The Firecracker Witch. It is about a witch who cannot stand bright children and seeks to destroy them. She invents a kind of firecracker that is so loud the children jump out of bed screaming. The magic part is that the firework can find the children, smashing right through their windows and into their beds, exploding into a nightmare of fire and lava that consumes them. But only if they are moving and/or making noise.

I fill these stories with a lot of detail and suspense, enjoying the way her eyes grow wide along the way, our faces close. She is so earnest and innocent. But she is smart, too. She knows they are stories, not real. But it's a fun game to close the day and Beatrice likes to suspend disbelief as much as her mama does.

All these images are illustrations by Jessie Willcox Smith.

Foundation

this is rad

I started reading Prelude to Foundation by Isaac Asshole Asimov and found it to be totally unbelievable. (Supposedly genius characters putting complete trust in total strangers.) I read the first 50 pages and put it down. I'm used to sci-fi being both gripping from the start and believable given the constraints of the (D)universe.

Instead, I am reading Foundation by the same. (It is the one that was written first in the series, although Prelude is the first chronologically.) This one makes a lot more sense to start with as it does a fairly good job of setting up the universe. (It's kinda like reading The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe first rather than The Magician's Nephew even though the events in the latter happened first. It seems rarer to have this problem so much these days as series are planned at conception, like Harry Potter as well as that unfortunate series.)

I'm already pretty into it. And really, with the weather so gray and dreadful (as it's been and threatens always to be), what could be better than a good sci-fi story?




Note: I considered titling this post An Exercise in the Overuse of the Parentheses.