I was fortunate to attend the last few hours of the annual Bon Odori festival held at the Seattle Buddhist Temple this past weekend. The celebrations consisted of honoring one’s ancestors, shaved ice, yakisoba, and dancing in the streets until the sun went down, which happens pretty late around here.
I have been spying the native flora and fauna in Seattle with wonder and envy since I arrived here. It seems like there is some strange and lovey succulent or flower popping out of every stone nook. I have especially been coveting the moss.
One thing led to another, and so this morning I found myself in a Creative Terrariums Workshop at the RE Store. The RE Store is an great establishment in itself. If you’re ever looking for a vintage ceramic bath tub, topographic map of asia, an all you can grout tile buffeft or jars upon jars of every hook, nail and screw imaginable. Their terrarium workshop with Exterior-Scapes was a totally fun and creative way to spend Saturday morning. They provided all the structures (re-purposed light fixtures of every shape and sort) , gravel, soil, plants, rocks and the best part- teensy tiny dinosaur toys (I went with the blue plesiosaur). All you had to do was show up and get your hands dirty!
After all of Griffin’s gardening posts, I think I have finally found just the right amount of plant life for my own level of ability. I love how sweet and self contained it is, lets just hope I follow their fact sheet correctly on keeping the thing alive.
Well… so, you can forget about what we mentioned yesterday about finding little green patches
and wild chives sprouting up around the yard here. It’s all gone now.
To be honest, these photos look a lot more dramatic than our end of the storm actually turned
out to be. We got off easy compared to our friends in NYC, CT, NH, and beyond. However Asheville,
took it upon themselves to dive into their root cellars and board up all the doors behind them.
It’s seems like a common practice for a southern town to close down during the lightest of snow
storms but they were going for the world record today! Our hopes of wandering around the
cavernous antique warehouses were dashed by quickly scrawled and scotch taped signs on
the doors “CLOSED DUE TO INCLEMENT WEATHER.”
So we are back in the farmhouse. It looks like there are some buds on the trees here.
Hang in there guys! We are waiting for you! Don’t get discouraged…
So, as mentioned previously, we were in new orleans earlier in the week. Our visit
was so brief though, barely there for 48 hours, yet we still managed to partake of the
following traditional and newfangled sandwiches, the lower two from the amazing
“crabby jacks”.
We also were able to take in the following sights…
live oaks in the french quarter…
the famous powdered terrors known as beignets from cafe du monde.
voodoo merch for sale…
including the dolls and artwork at this cool gallery by jamie hayes.
a visit to the historic lafayette cemetary no. 1 in the garden district.
and a quick tour of some of the nearby opulence.
and less than half a block away, some local devistation.
… and we’re back!
sorry that we haven’t been posting lately. we’ve been out of town in new orleans
for the past few days. here is just a little sample of the sights. lots more to come soon.
oh yeah. merry christmas!
You may have noticed a little something different lately with
the website that you are viewing right now. No! its not your
imagination, loveboundtrain.com is looking pretty sexy all of
a sudden, right?
What Changed?
Love bound train, in its brooklyn, nyc, L-Train Lovin’ ways are
here to stay under the projects page, along with several other
new pages of goodies we have cooked up over the last few
years, months, weeks….
For the latest and greatest, what we have been doing in the
last 5 seconds, check out the Daily Dally- updated nearly daily.
For those of you following along, we’re still doing the 700
billion dollar question -call in if you haven’t already! or else!
Oh yeah, and don’t forget to watch the extended criterion
director’s cut of the top navigation bar. Thanks to Griffin’s
keen flash update, we’re sending you to much more lush and
lovely pastures. Or, As our good friend Daniel would say,
we “spiced it up a little”.
Finally, we have re-vamped the store, its more organized and
has tons of stuff for you to spend your allowance on. Even
better, we are expanding its horizons to be more of a collective of
great new artists, rather than just our OWN wares, so you can find
a diverse selection of lovely items, fun for the whole family.
On a final note, you can continue to access the site via,
www.loveboundtrain.com
OR
www.wondersmitten.com
The choice is yours for the choosing.
Contact info? Still the same ole same ole, but do check out
the hello page on your way out see exciting new photos.
p.s. this is actually the 100th blarg post, thank you for sticking with us for
100 posts, and we hope that you’ll be around for hundreds more!
This story was relayed to me by one of NYC’s bravest set of wheels…
Apparently while delivering a package to some modeling agency he was greeted coming out of the elevator by not one, but two men wearing…
SWEATERS AS PANTS.
Yes, that’s what he says.
Were they cable knit? cashmere? CARDIGANS??? (god, i hope not)
I’ve seen some pretty ridiculous “statements” (nonsense) here so far, but this takes the Splenda-cake, FO SHO!
If i find out more details, you’ll be the first to know..
This year i have too many horrible ideas. lucky for me in the
cit-tay there are enough parties and parades to try them all out!
Still have to work on my Leper costume… skeleton for today!
.
What is everyone else being?
OH, and screw being a sexy anything for halloween! let’s all just be funny, and scary,
and disgusting, and horrifying.
You can still mack it with a dead girl/guy.
We drove past Krispy Kreme on Patton Ave. in Asheville this morning
and saw the unexpected! Sure enough, there were folks on a teeter-totter
in the parking lot. Now that is some serious creativity in any marketing
department, hats off to whoever came up with the idea, no one can resist a
teeter-totter, and few people can resist donuts.
Several hours later on our way home this afternoon they were still at
it, despite the rainy weather. So we had to stop in for a donut or two
and see what was up.
Volunteers had been teetering and tottering since 6 a.m to raise money
for Camp We Can Do , a summer camp for children and teens with diabetes
or asthma. We chatted for a few moments with the volunteers and they
were kind enough to let us give the teeter-totter a spin for a few minutes.
They break out the teeter-totter annually, always at Krispy Kreme for
fundraising and fresh donuts. They will be out all day tomorrow 10-25-08,
rain or shine. For more information call 828.213.1020
so first a quick update on the batch of walnuts that we so diligently plucked
from their oily rinds, cleaned with aplomb, and left them out to cure in the sun.
well… they are still curing, on the porch, between two unused silkscreens,
patiently waiting until that undisclosed day that they are at last considered
to be well cured and are ready for a hardy gent to come along for with a large
pair of pliers to extract the nutty goodness (we hope) from within.
what could be more idyllic?
however, on the other end of the spectrum, the collected rinds from the nut extraction process
have been sitting in a bucket of water and have been slowly decaying into horrid sludgy bits
underneath the porch for the past week or so. who knows what sort of insect or quadruped
has been in contact with it, if indeed anything at all would want anything to do with
such a sour sop.
however, it has been doing exactly what i was hoping that it would do, turn the water in which
the rinds have been soaking a dark syrupy brown color.
today is the day for making the fabled walnut ink, so here we go…
What you will need to make walnut ink:
Any source of heat will do, as long as you can bring the contents of the pot to a slow
steady boil. A kitchen stove will serve just fine but today we are going pioneer style with
this process.
Here is what you need to do to do it:
using my latent power of yankee ingenuity , i whipped up this handy little contraption using
found objects from the dilapidated barn across the street, please note, your stove may not
resemble the one in this picture.
five hours later, the concoction was still bubbling away…
after about six hours, the fire was allowed to die down and the mixture was
then covered and set out overnight to cure in it’s own special way.
the following day, the substance has turned into a pitch black muddy substance,
this was a bit disconcerting since it looked like the liquid that was left over from
last night had disappeared but happily, it had filtered down into the bottom of the
pot. The straining process was a bit more difficult than i had anticipated since the
muck had to be pressed to squeeze out most of the ink within.
another bump in the road was the cheesecloth that i had set aside for the straining
purposes, the liquid simply wasn’t straining through the pulp quick enough and the
cloth was absorbing most of the ink. luckily my most trusted old pair of nylon
stockings came to the rescue and the rest of the ink was easily strained through
the toe of the stocking.
and here is the result…
blue skies, and brown gold.
This is important!
Since this is a natural all organic substance, there have been cases of the ink
starting to grow mold. To combat this you must add a bit of denatured alcohol,
which is a bit hard to find but can be purchased online from certain art supply
outlets. Add a small amount of alcohol so it constitutes about 5 percent of
the solution.
Next time, I will post the result of ink usage.
the blarg
