40 lbs. marrow bones post-roasting, pre-simmering. current status: STOCK!

Today he’ll be caramelizing 10 pounds of onions for the french onion soup, and chopping god knows how many pounds of cabbage (20, I learned!) for the cabbage soup. I don’t know if you can tell how giant that stock pot is, on the left, but we have three pots about that size now, filled with a very light, rich beef stock.  YUM. One thing is for sure, my house is going to smell great this afternoon.

In addition to relaxing and eating a really luscious meal yesterday, I got some knitting done. I don’t have a good hat, and my ears get very cold very quickly, and then I get a terrible earache. Kelly gifted me a hat pattern for my birthday, so I cast on yesterday and nearly finished — will do so today. It’s A Hat for Eudora, but I call it Berry Welty.

Berry Welty -- my birthday hat! That's a peek of madelinetosh DK in iris, for the hem. Sometimes you just need a hat, you know?

Yesterday we also took a nice walk — where else, Riverside Park. I noticed something kind of weird, but it’s just the schizo aspect of this part of autumn:

leaves ahead of me.....

no leaves behind me.

So happy fragmented Friday to you; I hope you are enjoying this late autumn day, whatever you’re doing. Here’s a Thanksgiving poem that’s really not about Thanksgiving:

Home For Thanksgiving

The gathering family
throws shadows around us,
it is the late afternoon
Of the family.

There is still enough light
to see all the way back,
but at the windows
that light is wasting away.

Soon we will be nothing
but silhouettes: the sons’
as harsh
as the fathers’.

Soon the daughters
will take off their aprons
as trees take off their leaves
for winter.

Let us eat quickly—
let us fill ourselves up.
the covers of the album are closing
behind us.

-Linda Pastan

From the photographer: This was filmed between 4th and 11th April 2011. I had the pleasure of visiting El Teide. Spain´s highest mountain @(3718m) is one of the best places in the world to photograph the stars and is also the location of Teide Observatories, considered to be one of the world´s best observatories.

The goal was to capture the beautiful Milky Way galaxy along with one of the most amazing mountains I know El Teide. I have to say this was one of the most exhausting trips I have done. A large sandstorm hit the Sahara Desert on the 9th April and at approx 3am in the night the sandstorm hit me, making it nearly impossible to see the sky with my own eyes.

Interestingly enough my camera was set for a 5 hour sequence of the milky way during this time and I was sure my whole scene was ruined. To my surprise, my camera had managed to capture the sandstorm which was backlit by Grand Canary Island making it look like golden clouds. The Milky Way was shining through the clouds, making the stars sparkle in an interesting way. So if you ever wondered how the Milky Way would look through a Sahara sandstorm, look at 00:32.

Music by my friend: Ludovico Einaudi – “Nuvole bianche” with permission.

• Twitter. I have it, my posts go out on my Twitter feed, every day I get notifications of new complete-strangers following me (why?!). I just don’t really get it. When I worked in midtown, it was fantastic for letting me know exactly where the cupcake trucks were parked at any given moment, but beyond that I just don’t get it.

• iPad. I can’t believe I’m saying that — I’m a devoted lover of all things new and technological, usually an early adopter. I have 5 computers in my tiny home, and there are 2 of us here. I have a laptop and my Droid, and I did have a Kindle but I gave it to my son. I can get a new Kindle for $139, or I can get an iPad (or something like it)….but why?! Why would I get that? I know people who have an iPhone and an iPad (and one person also has an iPod). So much redundancy! I just don’t get it. With my droid and my laptop, why do i need an iPad, besides the coolness of it?

• Why I cannot capture the green in my Saroyan. No matter how I photograph it, in what light, and do how much post-processing, it looks brown. It’s not brown, it’s green. It has streaks of gold and brown in it, but the thing is green. I just tried again, thinking that maybe, perhaps, mysteriously, it would photograph correctly now that it’s finished blocking, but no.

this is pre-blocking, but it doesn't matter. it took so much fiddling to get it to turn out at all green. this color is NOT right. WHY???

Really. Why. It’s not like it’s some extreme color, or in an extreme setting in terms of light, with one color blowing out everything else. I do not understand this one little bit.

I am finishing our taxes today, and I’m going to do some housework, laundry, all that jazz, and figure out my next knitting project. I’m thinking of making the mothed sweather (rav here, knitty here), in a very pretty espresso-brown wool (with a bit of cashmere in it). I’ve done a couple quick projects recently (saroyan, obviously, and my killer red shawl) so I think it’s time to get a bigger thing underway. Happy Saturday y’all, whatever you’re doing!

Chinatown is not what it seems. Nothing and no one in Chinatown is what it seems. There’s a lot of subterfuge being played out and you don’t even know it, unless you’re there to look for it. I wasn’t — I was just there to enjoy the gorgeous blue skies we had yesterday, and to watch all the goings-on. As always, we bought some fish and veggies, and we stopped for a bit of Vietnamese lunch. It was a nice day out. To minimize the length of the post in case you’re not interested in the photos, they’re here as a gallery – but you can click any image to see it full-size:

And now it’s March 6, the brightest day of the year! Thanks for bearing with me. Today I’m doing some housecleaning and baking some bread, then I’m going to spread out my knitting and cast on something red. I have no business casting on a new project, but I find that I need something red, and you know how that goes.

winner of the best mullet prize

What a genius idea.

the magazine - read from back to front! That's how I do it anyway!

The cover photo kind of freaked me out, and I was wondering what the hell, man. What the hell is THIS about? Why am I getting this magazine? Who do I know in Tel Aviv anyway?

So I opened it and started thumbing through, with an extremely vague memory of someone asking if they could publish one of my photos in some magazine. Was this it? The whole dang thing is in Hebrew, so I just looked at the pictures. And here’s what I found:

I took the picture in Zagreb, at the market - and there's my name above it, almost the only English word on the page

the page, for context - see how tiny my photo is?

Isn’t that wild??

.

I passed one of the many playground areas and I was struck by the kids. There were 4 little girls, all unrelated to each other, black brown and white, and they were all wearing pink. Two little boys, neither of whom were wearing pink.

Anyway. Take a walk with me.

Now I’m making three loaves of ciabatta, working on my website, and getting ready to knit. Saturdays are awesome.

.

high school graduation, 1977

Ivory is pale skin, skin that is lit from the inside, skin that is soft and beautiful. I have ivory skin; I always have.

me and my camera

Ivory skin is one ideal, peaches and cream, pale and beautiful. There are other ideals, too – tan and bronze and cafe au lait and olive and honey. But those beautiful colors do not make ivory their opposite, ugly – ivory is another beautiful way of being in this world.

Ivory  is cream.

Ivory is precious.

I am ivory.

My hands are ivory. My hands are MY hands, they resemble the hands of my father, and my grandmother, but these are my hands.

my hands

Throughout my life, other people have commented on my skin – my lovely complexion – and I insisted on belittling it. I can’t tan, I’m pale and ugly, your skin is honey but mine is putty. But I was wrong, every time. I am beautiful ivory.

by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting–
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

I haven’t uploaded any new photos in a couple of years; the ones that are in my current gallery were taken before I knew very much about taking pictures. I’d delete some of them now. There’s nothing spectacular about them, but what’s so confusing to me is that 91 people have paid for this image:

It’s a fine picture of red leaves, but (1) photos of red leaves are a dime a dozen and extremely easy to find, (2) for free. I don’t know why 91 people paid for this.

I use stockphoto sites when I’m trying to find images to use on jackets of the books I am publishing, so maybe it’s just people like me, people doing their work and needing a quick and simple resource.

Anyway, I guess this makes me a photographer. After my excessive rumination below, I guess this nagging issue is taken care of.

This morning I was reading through a ravelry forum about photography. One woman said something like “I am a photographer blah blah” and she gave a link to her work. I really love photography; I have favorite photographers, books about the philosophy of photography and how-to books; I have a folder of photos of favorite photographs. And I enjoy taking photographs. So I clicked the link to see her work and it was really not good at all. Very poor lighting, trite, poor quality of the images themselves, etc. And she is a

me and my camera

photographer. My photographs aren’t anything special, but they are considerably better than hers.

So my point is not to boast about my photographs, because I’m not doing that, but rather to think about the identity issue. I don’t know why it’s so hard for me to make those kinds of claims – it’s not as if it matters! I could walk around saying “I’m a writer,” “I’m a photographer,” “I’m a baker,” etc., and it would not make one bit of difference to the world or to anyone. But I can’t do it. I like to write, I like to take pictures, I like to make bread.  I see other people making the claim, and I’m always in a bit of awe at their self-confidence.

I can imagine possible reasons for my hesitation: it feels like bragging; it feels like I’m saying “I am a professional X” when I’m not, and if anyone looked at my ‘work’ that’s exactly what they’d think, that I’m full of myself, or lying in some way.  I think another aspect relates to my thoughts about writing and photography; books have always been extremely important to me, and I hold writers in very high esteem. They have a kind of exalted place in the world, to my mind. Photographers less so, but good photographers can transform people, understandings, even policy. To say “I am a writer” just feels impossible. Salman Rushdie is a writer. Cormac McCarthy is a writer. Victor Hugo is a writer. Jose Saramago is a writer. I am not Rushdie, or any of those.

I also think that saying “I am a” invites people to ask if they’ve seen/read your work. It implies public or professional acceptance and reward. At a party: “I’m a writer.” “Really, have I read anything of yours?” “No, I just like to write.” Clunk.

But that’s not what people mean when they casually claim these identities (I think). The ravelry woman is a photographer because she takes pictures. Maybe I just need to get over myself and quit over-thinking everything. I do have a tendency to do that. In psychology, there is a construct called “need for cognition,” the meaning of which is pretty obvious. People vary along a continuum in their need for cognition, and I’m way way way at the top of the scale. 99th percentile, I’d guess.