Ideas for sketching

Do you like nature journaling? The image at left is by NYC artist Tommy Kane. (I hope he won't mind my reproducing it here as a bit of free publicity.) It's from a website called Urban Sketchers, which I only just discovered yesterday.

Another interesting artist on the site is John Wooley. Wooley just happens to be ten years old, but that's not the point. I am utterly impressed with his free sense of line, composition, and sheer inventiveness. I could draw realistically when I was ten, but I couldn't invent like he does. I wonder if I could even do it now, with an extensive art background and many years' worth of images in my head. Looking at these drawings makes me want to try.

Most of these sketchers seem to make their living in the advertising world. And Kane is unfortunately the same man who did those Steve Madden ads a few years ago that looked like Bratz dolls. Makes me wonder how we can open up better opportunities for artists to make a living.

Meanwhile, I think this website makes great inspiration for nature journaling! I know it's urban journaling, but I posted it even so for two reasons: 1) The drawing styles are more creative than on most nature journaling sites I've seen, and 2) urban journaling looks like fun, too! Enjoy!

Sketch by John Wooley, from Urban Sketchers

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I haven't had a whole lot of time lately to sketch medieval manuscripts, but I have done a three or four. I hope to do more sketching as time permits, perhaps even post a few eventually. For that, though, I'll need a scanner.

Riding for Hope for New York

Updated photo: Here's Bob finishing the bike ride today (Saturday the 26th). He enjoyed himself immensely and now I think he's looking forward to a nice nap and then some dinner!

As you may know, my husband Bob is just a little bit goal-oriented. This summer when he sustained a minor calf injury and took up cycling to make up for miles lost running, he really got on the band--um, bike. Now, as part of his goal of becoming more involved at Redeemer Presbyterian Church here in NYC, he's signed up for the Hope for New York (HFNY) Cycling Team for this Saturday's Escape New York bike ride.

Bob plans to do the full 100 mile route. He's created a sponsor page for himself so that anyone who’s interested can donate to HFNY through this event. To make things more interesting, an anonymous donor has agreed to make a $500 matching gift for the first 40 riders who raise $500. (We’ve made sure that the threshold amount has already been donated so that we’ll receive one of these $500 anonymous donor donations.) In addition, Bob is matching each additional dollar donated through his site, up to $1000. You can also click the logo at the top of the page for more information on the Bike-a-Thon.

Hope for New York is a Christian organization which donates time and money to the poor in New York City. If you've ever been to Redeemer, you’re undoubtedly familiar with HFNY. It's a good cause, and a good opportunity to make your donation dollar go farther. This is Bob's first time to try fundraising for a charity, so he just wants to spread the news. But please do not donate if the time or event, or the whole idea of donating through a blog, is not right for you.

Juggling tomatoes

Crispy, fried tomato skins--They're not so pretty, but they're yummy!

I don't know about the rest of the country, but in our corner of the world, the tomatoes came late and they came with a vengeance. For the past month, my CSA has included at least three kinds of tomatoes in each share, sometimes four. And the farmers' market is simply blooming with all shapes, colors, and sizes of tomatoes. They look like colorful baroque pearls on a late summer morning.

Sounds florid, perhaps, but my emotions about tomatoes run even higher in early spring, when the first hothouse specimens seem like hope itself. But this over-abundance has turned almost slapstick, like an I Love Lucy episode. What can three people do with pounds and pounds of tomatoes each week? I guess I could can them or make chutney preserves, but my skills and equipment aren't there yet, and Laurel doubts whether it's even worthwhile. So I've just been using them up as fast as I can.

How fast can I juggle? Well, I've made cold sungold tomato soup, beef/vegetable tomato soup, regular vegetable tomato soup, cold gazpacho, roasted tomatoes and peppers (in soup or with eggplant and olives on spaghetti), tomato sauce for pizza, slow-roasted tomatoes with coriander seeds, tomatoes in bruschetta, and of course, tomatoes in salads (but fewer of these since my own Sweet One Hundreds vines dried up). I've long since mastered the technique of making a small X in the bottom of a fresh tomato and plunging it into boiling water for ten seconds, so that it will be easy to peel. And this summer, I've mastered the food mill. But I confess that I've also dropped a tomato or two, overripe, into the trash can.

But not to be found overly wasteful, I've found a nice use for not only the tomatoes themselves, but the tomato skins. This technique is from Deborah Madison's Local Flavors* (p. 183, in the eggplant/tomato/pepper section, naturally), and goes along with the tomato/vegetable soup shown below. I won't include the whole soup recipe, since it's long, but I simply spread the loose skins out in hot oil in an iron skillet, fry until crisp, and sprinkle with salt (I like that big, flaky Maldon salt for this). Wow!

Now that I know how delicious fried tomato skins are, I've been using them for other things. Last night I had a bunch of skins left over from making tomato sauce for pizza, so I just placed a few in with the other pizza toppings, and they were a really nice addition.

Of course, now that I post this, fall is almost here and the tomatoes will soon be gone. So, try it this week, or try it next summer, or, if you live down South, you've probably still got a while to enjoy tomatoes--lucky you!

Next year, I vow to find more good uses for basil.

Late-season Tomato-Vegetable Soup (from Deborah Madison's Local Flavors),

before adding the tomatoes

*My only caveat about this otherwise extremely useful cookbook is that the pages fall out. So get a used hardback version if you can find it.

A post about a little pink pig

The pig game has been going on for about two months now. I don't really remember when it started, but somehow C.Z.'s tiny pink plastic pig that lives on my nightstand (who knows who long it's been there?) started having adventures. I'd find it balancing on the picture frame above my bed, poised by the light switch where I'd see it when I turned off the light, reading the title of my book through my reading glasses, observing the time on my clock, trying to climb up into my water glass, swathed in Kleenex (after it fell into the water glass) and doing various other things.

With time (and desperation, I suppose) the adventures grew more elaborate. One day I came in to find a Post-It Note on my night stand instructing the pig to climb to the top of my bed post and retrieve some basil. I looked up, and there was the pig, tied to a dental floss rope and taped securely to the side of the bed post, as though it were scaling a cliff. At the top was a film canister full of basil.

A few days later came the pig seamstress, complete with a dress pattern. That's when I started taking pictures:

And soon after that came a note instructing the pig to measure and cut five inches of dental floss. I still had no idea where the pig itself was, though, until I opened the drawer:

Last week when C.Z. and I got on the 1 train to go do our Jamaica Bay heron survey, she suddenly got the giggles and pointed over my shoulder. I turned around to see a pink pig, very similar to hers, in a NY Lottery Ad. "Oh, dear, it's following us!" I commented in mock alarm. We transferred to the A train. Another pink pig ad. But we didn't see a single pig ad on the way home. "I think the pig must have stayed behind in the North Muck," mused C.Z., referring to a mudflat we had explored on the East Pond.

I thought nothing of it until I sat down to read in bed that night. At some point I realized that the pink pig was missing, and a search of its usual haunts turned up nothing. "I told you I saw it in the North Muck," C.Z. replied. I went along with the joke, nodding, and said nothing more. But the pig didn't turn up the next night, or the next, until I eventually forgot to look for it.

Today we went back to the bay for our second September survey day, stopping off first at the East Pond. I sat down on a rock, pulled out my binoculars, scanned for herons and located two. I asked C.Z. to bring the clipboard and start timing, then I refocused on the first heron. Suddenly she exclaimed in a loud voice, "Look!" I turned around, expecting to see her pointing at some bird. But instead she was pointing at the ground beside me. And there in the mud, was...the pink pig, of course.

Busy fall post

Little Blue Heron

Things are really picking up this week, with a bike ride across the Brooklyn Bridge for pizza, another heron day at Jamaica Bay, the beginning of co-op, Bob's birthday (today), and music school starting up this Saturday.

We've really enjoyed the heron survey, and if the weather is decent and we have an ounce of energy left over at the end of the day, we usually walk around to see what other birds we can spot. Fall migration has definitely begun, because we saw lots of warblers in semi-fall plumage on Tuesday. We had our Peterson "Confusing Fall Warbler" page bookmarked for easy access, and I was pleased when I spotted a juvenile Chestnut-sided Warbler, which looks quite different from the distinctive adult male of spring.

But our favorite new (for us) finds were a Little Blue Heron and a Wilson's Phalarope. They look a lot like other shorebirds, except that they spend more time floating in the water to look for food rather than walking along in shallow water. Phalaropes are known for spinning around in the water to draw prey to the surface. The one we saw kept flying around in circles above the pond, chasing a larger Lesser Yellowlegs.

I particularly enjoy walking gingerly along the tiny plants of a quiet mudflat in the late afternoon, with Least Sandpipers scattering in front of my feet almost like little crabs. It feels almost like an open, though extremely scaled-down, tundra, flat and deserted. I can just hear someone saying, "What do you mean, tundra? This spit is about 30 feet long, smells like low tide, is surrounded by marsh grass, and besides, it's 80 degrees out!" I don't know; it just does! I don't even mind my shoes getting muddy.

This Wilson's Phalarope is in non-breeding plumage, like the one we saw

***

This morning was the first fallish weather day of the year. I walked up to the Columbia Farmer's Market, as I hear it might be raining too hard tomorrow to make the trip down to the one at 97th St. And besides, I was on a birthday cake mission--I needed beets. Beets and ice cream.

The wind was whipping up bits of leaves and swirling them in circles. No colorful, whole leaves yet, of course. I think this wind is from a storm offshore. Still, it was all I could do not to buy pumpkins and butternut squash. I need to see what turns up in my vegetable share first. But beets are fallish enough for now.

This afternoon we've been baking the cake. During our time in the kitchen, we've been listening to the American Quartet and the Cello Concerto, and C.Z. does a running commentary. "The violins don't even play here for six whole minutes...Ooh, listen to that trill. Don't you like that part? I would never have thought of putting a trill there...Oh, don't worry about trying to heroically scrape all the batter into the pan before the end of the movement. This cadence material lasts forever. He tacked it on at the end of composing...You like that part? That's an oboe. See, don't you want to rent me an oboe? I promise I'll learn that part for you!...And this part is really hard! Dvorak isn't always fun for strings to play, but he's so perky you don't care." During breaks, C.Z. sight reads Dvorak. I guess she's trying to get all this extra sight-reading energy out of her system because she has her first regular lesson this afternoon, and she knows she has to whip her old pieces back into shape for her make-up jury.

The cake is in the oven. Spaghetti prep time, and then the lesson!

***

If I'm not back for a while, it's because we're starting school. I do have more to say. I always do!

(All images from Wikipedia Commons.)

Reading on the train

Today's NY Times published an article about what people read while riding on the subway. You might even recognize one of the people interviewed, though the reporter didn't quite get the reasoning right, or the quote. Maybe she was subtly influenced by those Rosetta Stone ads.

(Update: I guess I was a little too mysterious here. The reason I posted this article is that Bob is quoted in the article because he was studying Rosetta Stone on the subway. The writer imagined that he might be studying Italian in order to go meet a fiance's parents in Tuscany. The truth of the matter is that he didn't want to be the only person in New York City who didn't speak two languages!)

I really liked the journal idea in the article.

I like watching others read on the train. Many people read the free subway paper or a tabloid, play video games, listen to music I can hear too well on their iPods, or compose text messages, but you'd be surprised at the variety. This week I saw a young man trying stand astride and read while balancing Infinite Jest. It would never had worked except that he was somewhere in the middle of the book. I saw a woman with a book that started on the right, mouthing prayers in another language. No head scarf, black hose, black skirt--Hebrew, I think. Another trip to Jamaica Bay yielded a teenager in a beach coverup, absorbed in Laura Ingalls Wilder's The Long Winter. (A clever psychological tactic, perhaps?) Some older Hispanic women read tracts, in Spanish, of course. Sometimes the books are so esoteric that I'm surprised the reader can concentrate. Lots of people study on their way to class, including a young man who was obviously cramming algebra II on the way to his Regents Exam last June. I've seen teachers grading papers, and C.Z. always gets curious when she notices someone with an orchestral score. (If you peek over someone's shoulder, you are supposed to at least be discreet.) I see lots of Michael Pollan, books about Obama, Eat, Pray, Love, or whatever is popular. When the movies come out, sometimes I see Narnia or Harry Potter.

I didn't read at all on the train until recently, because I had a non-reading child in tow (C.Z. claimed she couldn't concentrate on a crowded train). But during last week's leisurely hour-and-a-half commute to Jamaica Bay, I ploughed through the end of Tarjei Vesaas' The Birds, while C.Z. read the first several chapters of Pride and Prejudice. And a couple of weeks before, a woman asked me if I liked Kristin Lavransdatter. Perhaps a new era has begun.

Do you speak English?

Yesterday, on the SW corner of 79th and Broadway: I'm about to cross to the east side of the street, and there's a three or four-year-old girl in a stroller about to cross going north. She's got a big popsicle that looks like a face, and she's licking it with her tongue hanging out. As the light turns green and they start to cross, she suddenly looks back at her nanny and squeaks, "Am I speakin' English?"

On a related note, Bob has been watching this video a lot lately. I like the way Bob laughs at the same comedy sketches time and time again:

If you read French, note what the sign says at the beginning. And if you speak German, could you let me know what they're saying at the end?