Category Archives: My own damned opinion.

My own damned opinion., Painting & Drawing, Watercolor painting

My second painting

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I’ve done my second painting of the 100 Painting project. This one is based on a photo from the road trip I took with two of my sisters in 2023. It’s a view of the Devil’s Tower. It’t not a great painting. I need tinier brushes. And a steadier hand.

Devils Tower, WY 2023

I’d like to make another trip out there to take more time to walk around. Since I wasn’t in charge of the trip, I didn’t get a chance to hike around it. I really wanted to see where the aliens landed – that’s a joke folks. The area around the other side of the rock isn’t large enough for the facility they showed in the movie.

It’s not that I don’t believe there’s life out there. There has to be. However, once we start exploring the galaxy in ships, I think we’ll only find remnants of life if we find habitable planets. Just as any species who travels here will probably find our dead cities and dry oceans.

A galactic federation sounds like something to strive for, but humans can’t seem to get over their petty differences and there’s no real reason to believe any other civilization would either. It would be nice to learn there are others, but I don’t think humanity, or at least the corner of where I live, would not be able to accept that other beings exist. Some – far too many – believe the earth is flat, that vaccines don’t work, that the ugly bits of history don’t need to be taught, that our government is the best, and the rest of the world doesn’t have anything like what we have.

In some respects, we’re right. Many parts of the world don’t have citizens who work for wages, who can’t afford food or housing. Most other countries’ citizens don’t go bankrupt when they need life-saving surgery or a ride in an ambulance. Other countries don’t have to worry about their children getting shot during their school day unless it’s a war zone.

It is my belief that out beyond the Oort cloud, there are beacons warning other civilizations not to stop to visit Earth because it’s too deadly an environment for civilized folks. And for all they know, the crazy might be contagious. Periodically, a science vessel may stop by to collect data and to update and upgrade the warning beacons invisibility shielding.

My own damned opinion., Stuff

The weather and other stuff

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This winter is weird. The South got all of our snow. I think the combined total snowfall for up here in the north so far equals less than 4 inches. I saw a snowflake a couple of days ago. This is not good.

Not that I want to be slipping and sliding all over the place or falling down and hurting myself, but the lack of significant snowfall will result in low groundwater which means low crop yields, fire hazards, and bans on campfires and fire pits. In the summer, I like to throw some twigs and a log into my fire pit for a small fire that lasts long enough for a drink and a marshmallow or two. Can’t do that with a burn ban.

I was planning a good sized garden this year, but may have to limit myself to only a few types of plants – a couple of tomato plants, some onions, and kale, mustard, and turnip greens. I’m a big greens eater —greens and rice with a little ham or sausage and some chopped onions can make a filling meal cheaply.

I have both a freezer and a dehydrator so I can preserve my harvest. Plus there are several local farmers’ markets all over, held on different days in different locations around the city and county. The biggest ones are on the weekends, but there are smaller ones during the week.

I don’t think I’ll get too many plums this year. The weather has been too warm, relatively speaking, and buds are already appearing on the trees including my plum tree. In March, we’ll probably get a bout of freezing weather, and the blossoms will freeze, so I won’t have a good harvest.

Last year’s harvest was phenomenal. I have several bags of frozen plums and quite a few dehydrated plums are still in the cabinet. I should be good until apple harvest time. I do still have several pounds of frozen apples in the freezer so I’m good there as well. I can make applesauce and pie filling. I only need to buy oranges and bananas until they get too pricey or disappear due to lack of harvesters or outright shipping bans. My frozen fruit stash will do otherwise.

My tiny freezer is full and I should get through the rough times. I might be able to get a couple of friends to go in on a side of some dead animal. Not really. I prefer my meat already processed by someone, not that I don’t know how to cut up a side of beef.

Give me access to the back room of a butcher shop, and I’m fairly certain I remember my cuts from my class in commercial cooking. We got to practice on deer during hunting season. It was a learning experience for us and a lot cheaper for the hunters.

Now that you’re all grossed out, I’ll take my leave and get back to book binding. I had to reformat the last few pages and reprint them. Oh well. The wasted paper will be recycled as pulp at my next paper-making class this summer.

As Snagglepuss used to say, TTFN. Tata for now.

My own damned opinion., Stuff

Sir Farts-a-Lot

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Sadly, I must report that the dog I watch has crossed the Rainbow Bridge. He was a Good Boy. But old age and health problems got him. It’s still tragic because we weren’t expecting him to go this soon.

While the scent of doggy farts will no longer fill the air as it did after certain treats, he will be missed. There won’t be the walks around the neighborhood to sniff the markings of other dogs and the ones he left for them will wash away.

I won’t have my twice a week cuddle buddy on the couch. And the rapid wagging of his tail when I mentioned treats will be missed with his doggy smile. I think the cat will miss him too. It will be interesting to see if she goes to the door in the morning. She knew when he was coming and looked forward to attempting her escape when the door was opened.

I hope he was met by his owner’s previous pets and by my much loved and missed cats when he showed up at the end of the Rainbow Bridge. Goodbye Toby. Be young and frisky again in the afterlife.

Bookbinding, Crafting, My own damned opinion.

I never thought I’d be living in a real life American Horror Story.

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This will not end well. It’s been three weeks and the entire world is aflame, metaphorically speaking. Or maybe it’s hyperbole. At any rate, I have to stop doom-scrolling. I’m making myself sick.

So to change the subject…

I’ve done the final print of the book I’m working on. I have a cover design. The next step is to sew the signatures. After that, comes pressing the signatures and preparing the text block for casing in, trimming the edges, and creating the covers and spine. And then the final assembly. After all that, I will apply silver foil to the cover design. A final couple of hours in the press and the book will be done.

I’m also working on some simple notebooks in case the Maker Space decides to participate in any sort of artsy sale this year. Whenever we have have one of these events, I do well. Well in a relative sense. I sell handmade junk journals, blank books, zines, and book related items such as book cloth, bookmarks, and repurposed books.

I make way more money than I put into the items with regard to cost of materials. I really don’t factor in my time because I make things to use up the myriad supplies and equipment I have purchased over the years and to keep myself from just lying around on the couch scrolling through Pinterest and Youtube or re-watching Supernatural, Buffy, or Star Trek/Wars for the umpty-hundreth time.

Not that I actually watch any of those. Yes, one or another is playing in the background to provide voices so I don’t have to listen to the noise in my head. I discovered that there is an actual name for the music I hear in my head – Musical Ear Syndrome. So instead of just the incessant buzzes, mumbly sounds, and dings of tinnitus, hearing what sounds like the 1930’s and 1940’s style big band music and carnival calliopes is a real thing.

Chalk it up to my black and white youth. I watched old movies from that time period. And most of the television shows were black and white or if they weren’t, I watched them in black and white. My family didn’t get a color television until just after I started college in the late ‘60s. I watched the first season of original Star Trek in black and white. I didn’t know there were red shirts until I finally saw it in color. It was just that certain people seemed to be targets. I thought that maybe the aliens thought those guys were important and they were going for the leaders.

Silly me.

Mostly me, My own damned opinion.

I am wavering between terrified and not terrified

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I’m the sort of person who looks like I can be from all sorts of countries. I have been asked if I’m Sicilian, Israeli, Spanish, Native American, Indian, Arabic, Black, and several other nationalities. I am the sum of my ancestors going back centuries. The earliest occurrence of my last name in this country appears in 1725. The newest will probably arrive in the next few days or months.

I have no desire to have to prove I belong here when my family goes back generations before most of our current politicians ever showed up. Particularly that person who looks like a giant cheese puff and acts like a toddler. I am totally disgusted with the current political situation. Pandering to an egomaniac starts wars. Wars end badly for all concerned except the dead. They’re past caring about who was right and who was wrong. No one really wins.

I have no desire to encounter those to whom I look like I don’t belong here. I’ve gotten those funny looks my whole life. I confuse people. They don’t know where I fit on their ethnicity scale. I can look and act like an upper class twit or just your average passer-by. I’ve lived in all kinds of neighborhoods. I’ve been poor and I’ve been better off. Right now I’m just middlin’.

I am concerned about my Social Security. Losing it would mean a few set-backs. My house, food, and utilities are more or less covered. It might get cold without Canada’s electricity and oil. I have ways to keep warm and cook food. I might have to give up my car, but I have alternative transportation. I would still have my basic necessities. I wouldn’t be able to afford craft supplies or new books. I might have to give up the internet. The public library is walking distance and so is the grocery store, relatively speaking. I can walk the two miles.

I live in a tiny former farmhouse in a neighborhood that used to house families that worked in the fertilizer plant or at the meat packing plant. The area was built up after the last big war. I say “last big” war because we’ve been in a constant state of war, either a shooting one or a political one, that seems like forever.

In the last 60 or 70 years or so, we been involved in almost every war, small or large in other countries, because we want the world to be like us. And actually a good portion of it is turning into us —- mean-spirited, aggressively attacking other countries, destroying cities, killing for religious reasons, political differences, skin colors, resources, and any other stupid reason the war-mongers can come up with.

I’m not saying I wouldn’t fight, although what damage a tiny woman armed with a cast iron skillet can do, I can’t say. Maybe they’d die because they laughed too hard. I can tell you there’s some guys out there that probably used to get together and and go, “hey, remember that time we tried to get that woman out of that house and she stood in the door swinging a skillet on a rope at us until the cops showed up?

Public speaking intimidates me, unarmed bullies, not so much.

My own damned opinion., Stuff

Food math – rotisserie chicken style

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Is it worth driving 8.3 miles and paying $65 a year to buy a $5 chicken twice a month? Or is it better to drive 2.7 miles and pay $8 a chicken unless I buy 2 at $6 each? Or is it better to drive 5.1 miles for a $5.99 chicken that’s the size of anemic parrot that gets eaten in two meals by a single person and makes slightly strange tasting soup? It’s the seasonings, not the freshness.

So I’m talking about three different stores here, Costco and two other multi-location stores that are also in town but don’t offer the same foods at all of their stores due to size differences.

The Costco chicken was huge compared to what I usually buy. I have a square container that can hold one of the brick shaped two quart cartons of ice cream. Every rotisserie chicken I have bought before the Costco chicken fit snuggly in that container and I could press the lid shut.

I had to put foil over the top of the container because I couldn’t use the lid for that chicken. I ate a leg or a thick slice of breast or thigh every day for an entire week. I finally tossed what was left at the end of the week into my giant soup pot with water and seasonings, carrots, celery and onions and simmered it until the carcass fell apart.

My original intention was to put it in the slow cooker, but it didn’t fit. So it cooked in the big pot and after picking the meat off the bones, I added noodles, and ate thick, meaty, chicken noodle soup for a week. So I’m debating in these perilous times, (bird flu reducing the chicken population, you know) where I should go for the best chicken value. Ultimately, they all become soup. What matters is the flavor and how much chicken winds up in the bowl with the noodles and veggie bits.

I saw large white free range eggs on sale for $9.99 a dozen at one of the local stores. I don’t eat that many eggs and lucked out with some local eggs at $3.49 a dozen. There were empty spots where some other egg suppliers were not able to supply eggs.

For baking, I have powdered eggs. For eating, I usually throw 10 eggs into my rice cooker for hard boiled eggs. I have some from a previous dozen to boil and by the time I finish eating those, the ones I bought last Sunday will be ready for boiling.

I should check with my son as to whether his friend will be able to supply us with eggs. Or maybe, I’ll use some of the lumber odds and ends and wire fencing that I’ve got in the garage to make a chicken coop and a run. A license costs $10/year to keep 4 chickens. I could build a winter shelter in the back end of the garage with hay and a heat lamp or some sort of heating set-up for them. I think the math works out to around $4.75 per egg, factoring in the food, shelter, and the chickens themselves. Quite the bargain, right?

Something to think about.

Crafting, My own damned opinion.

All is not well

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Rumors abound about raids last evening. Homes and manufacturing places invaded; restaurants and bars visited. I haven’t found anything on the news, just purported eye-witness accounts. Is this the new reality? That we are not safe in our homes and no one reports that we are missing? Oh sure, most people don’t have to worry. Except law enforcement frequently makes mistakes.

Are we going back to children in cages who are never returned to their parents? Who die of callous neglect in flimsy shelters, cold and hungry, and forgotten? Cruelty and callousness are not a good look for “The Greatest Nation On Earth.” As it is, we as a country no longer have too many friends left and the new regime has been in charge less that a week.

I used to read a lot of classic dystopian fiction when I was younger. I never expected any of it to become reality. They were just exercises in what could be if certain theories were played out in real time. It seems like Animal Farm, Fahrenheit 451, Brave New World, and 1984 were not the images of the worst we could be. We will soon have the Hunger Games, The Handmaid’s Tale, and Lord of the Flies in real time.

We barely missed The Andromeda Strain and The Stand with the pandemic. But give us more time. There are too many undereducated people out there who will follow the latest tabloid exposé on health and well-being, and will continue to refuse inoculations for preventable diseases.

“My ignorance is just as valid as your knowledge,” seems to be the trend. And how did I wander away from what is supposed to be about making things to a political diatribe? Just fate I guess, and a lack of any crafting content. Which tells me I need to get off my hiney, take my meds, and get crafting.

Later, folks.

My own damned opinion.

I ATE’NT DEAD, JUST DISAPPOINTED

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Just like Esme Weatherwax, a character created by Sir Terry Pratchett, I ate’nt dead. Just missing from posting regularly on the blog. Unlike Granny Weatherwax, I can’t go borrowing the mind of flying creatures to view the world. I can only open YouTube, pull up my favorite independent news people and go “he’s not dead yet.” I’m talking about my least favorite politiical entity.

I’m not going to mention any names, but I am finding as I get older, I have less patience with political foolishness. If I had a time machine, I would go back to the founding fathers and tell them while the Constitution is a great document, they need to add a maximum age limit on politicians in all three arms of the government of 70 years, a maximum of 4 terms in total for Congress, and that no member of congress should be paid more than 4 times the minimum prevailing wage per year. Members of the Supreme Court should have term limits of 10 years maximum so they can keep up with the changing societal norms.

Radical, I know, but I’m tired of old men trying to turn back social, educational, and economic progress and return us to the good old 19th century. I’m tired of dealing with under-educated people who can barely read and have little understanding of what they read unless it’s in the form of a 200 character, more or less, message of the most extreme rumor, innuendo, and mis-information.

The major problem as I see it is the destruction of the education system, whereby your ignorance is as valid as my knowledge because you were passed along every year, because no one wanted to make you feel bad. No one did any favors to those kids who needed remedial classes by passing them down the line.

And then there’s the poverty aspect. Corporations were allowed to offshore manufacturing to countries with lower wage standards. The next result is the currently impoverished and the not quite impoverished populations that we have now. The minimum wage was supposed to guarantee a minimum standard of living that included the ability to afford a family with a decent place to live, food on the table, and clothing for the seasons.

It should have worked. It did almost work for a time. You could say the 1950s and early part of the ‘60s were the epitome of the “live on the minimum wage” times. The Depression was over, the World War had ended, there was that bit of a war that ultimately divided Korea. Soon to come was that utter crap shoot of a land war in Asia.

And sex, drugs, and rock and roll came along with the dystopian feeling that things weren’t quite right because it was a new decade and a new war. And we’ve been at war ever since and putting less money into people and more money into weapons and wars. And here we are. I’m celebrating the holiday that this day is, and not the other thing that’s happening today. It’s a day of mourning for what we could have been.

It’s my opinion— that is all.

My own damned opinion.

Oh, my.

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A group of Catholic fundies put a bulletin board next to the highway in response to the Freedom From Religion Foundation putting an exhibit in with the annual holiday decorations at our Capitol. The thing looks like it was designed by a high schooler who was barely passing graphic arts. Actually, it looks like something I might have designed in the days when AOL was the internet. It’s not that attention grabbing.

Picture stolen from The Friendly Atheist YouTube channel because I’m too lazy to drive across town to take my own photo.

Gosh darn! Religious people are so uptight. I have my own standards of morality – to do no harm, to donate generously to food banks, to be as honest as possible. I have no objection to finding something positive to say about someone I loathe so as not to be cruel.

There’s no point in hurting a person’s feeling because I don’t like them. I once worked with a person who was ugly as a carp, but I found something nice to say when asked about them. Probably the only person I can’t say anything nice about, is a crooked politician. Pick one. Any one. Or perhaps, my ex-husband since I don’t know any politicians personally.

I have never intentionally hurt anyone and have helped persons I genuinely loathed, when asked to do so. There’s no point in being rude and callous. I worked with a woman a university library who would not hire foreign or minority students. Her reasons were always that their schedules didn’t fit her vacancies.

She’d send them to me because I’ll hire anyone (not true) and I would hire them if their schedules fit. Most of them were great workers and got chances to improve their spoken English. I learned a lot about them by talking to them and their English improved. Well, most of them.

I had one who liked shelving books so they didn’t have to speak. They were very shy and not confident with spoken English. No problem, I just listened very hard. Their English improved a little because we talked together.

Anyway, back the subject – the holiday season is for everyone. Almost every religion and culture has a fall/winter festival. It’s a time to celebrate a successful harvest and petition the god/s for a prosperous coming year. The food is still fresh and plentiful because the harvest is done. The food animals have been sold so they don’t need to fed over the winter. The winter season can be spent preparing for spring.

Have a good holiday season, however you celebrate.

My own damned opinion., Stuff

Indifferent Turkey Day!

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Just can’t get in the spirit of over-eating. I bought a tiny turkey breast, expecting my son to show up, but he had Friendsgiving with a former roommate. The guy’s only living relative, his mom, died recently, so he had nowhere to go.

The usual holiday meal didn’t take place because my youngest granddaughter’s mom and sister have whopping cough. So the big dinner at her Oma’s was cancelled. That’s where we usually get together, but I really don’t think anyone was in the mood.

In crafting news, I’ve been writing up class offerings for next year. I’m going to offer my introductory bookbinding class again, as well as another binding class for binding single sheets into a bound volume. That will include a Japanese stab stitch type book, an accordion spine album, and a glue bound book using a glue gun, glue sicks and an iron. Other bookbinding classes will focus making mini books, junk journals, and zines.

I’ll also be offering a class or two for those who sew on how to read a sewing pattern, including explaining what the symbols mean, fabric selection, fabric grain, as well as thread selection, and how to adjust a pattern to fit. I’ve also had members ask for sewing lessons so I will consider a class or two for whomever is interested.

Soap making and paper making will also be offered again. I plan to ask other members if they have something to teach as well. In the past, there has been a class in paper marbling, a session on gelatin printing, and various sessions of origami, fabric flower making, and card making. These were all offered by members of the maker space.

The classes listed here are just the ones offered in the Craft Area which is the area of the space I am in charge of. Other areas of the space offer classes in various aspects of ceramics, laser cutter use, welding, wood turning, decorative wood burning, jewelry making, stained glass, fused glass, and many more.

As an organization, we offer many of our classes and workshops to members of the public and work with a couple of area schools to offer classes to their students as part of their curriculum. We are completely volunteer run. We’ve been in existence for ten years and have grown from two people sitting in the library talking about making things to over 680 members.