Rolling On One

I just ran into “an introduction to the fracture mechanics of spaghetti” on the BBC news web site and liked it so much I need to share it here.

There was a postcard advertising a sale at Wild & Woolly, a yarn shop in Lexington (actually, on the street I used to live on. I walked past that spot on my way to junior high school and high school all the time, if I wasn’t bicycling or taking a short cut through the parking lot in back of it), in our mailbox this morning. If I had found a web site from W&W with a picture I’d link it, but I didn’t, so I scanned the card because I’m sure Judy will enjoy seeing it, and also Gina and anyone else from Black Purls who happens along:

I neglected to post a picture of a pileated woodpecker which, very cooperatively, worked on a tree across the driveway in Casco for long enough to let me get my camera, step out onto the front porch, and take a few pictures. Most often these guys are pretty shy, but occasionally they don’t seem to mind humans watching them. That tan spot to the left of the bird’s head? That’s the hole it has dug into the tree trunk. You could stick the end of a 2×6 into it. These are big birds, and when they start pounding on a rotten tree trunk the chips fly!

Starting Christmas weekend and finishing last weekend, I made a bird feeder that I copied from a photo on a web site from the Michigan Upper Peninsula. I just liked the way it looked, and it seemed like a good quick woodworking project. I’ll have to get a post to put it on, and a big sheet metal cone to keep the squirrels off it; but here’s the feeder, ready to mount and fill:

We had several pine siskins at the feeders in Casco this past weekend, both at a monster thistle feeder across the driveway (it was an anniversary present from Arlene’s brother) and at a little thistle feeder on the kitchen window. Siskins are small birds that you might possibly mistake for sparrows, in other words, not spectacular birds at all, but with some bright yellow stripes on the wings and an overall much more delicate look than sparrows — more the size and shape of goldfinch, which they were flocking with, but less colorful and finely streaked with dark brown all over. They’re uncommon in New England, sometimes showing up in the winter. We don’t see them at all often, so they were very welcome additions to our list of birds we’ve seen in Casco and this year.

On Friday we went to Portland first to the art museum at the University of New England to see the show of Alice Spencer’s paintings (that link is to whatever is the current show at that museum, so it won’t be for that show if you’re reading a few weeks after this got posted) inspired by her collection of textiles from around the world. Many of the textiles themselves were included in the exhibit, ranging from a heavy floor covering from Kazakhstan to a delicate batik from Indonesia. I liked some that seemed to show the inside and outside of some clothes at the same time. Ms. Spencer has a printmaking background, and the paintings had a lot of the layered look that Arlene’s prints have.

From there the intention was to go to the curtain store and get more energy-saving drapes. I was following directions on the car GPS. At a corner in Portland I was in the wrong lane to bear left on the street with the same name, but signalled to go that way anyway — traffic was light and it looked safe. Suddenly Arlene said, “No! Go straight anyway!” She had spotted the Artist and Craftsman Supply Company! It’s an art supply company that has a big wonderful store in Central Square, Cambridge, in a basement location across the street from Pearl Paint. We had known their main location was in Portland, but up to that moment we hadn’t known where. I parked in a 15-minute-only spot on the street and we went in, but when we found the main entrance that opened on their own parking lot I moved the car and we settled down to some serious looking. I got mostly a couple of big sheets of decorative paper for bookbinding, and a small sketchbook. Arlene got some pens she likes, handmade Indian paper, and some specialty adhesives. We ordered some brayers that I like for indexing stamps that weren’t in the store’s online catalog but are in the supplier’s catalog.

We did get to the curtain store and found what we wanted very quickly. We headed back up route 302 and had supper at a restaurant called Charley Beigg’s, which is in a former firehouse building in North Windham.

We stopped at Marden’s (”I should’ve bought it when I saw it at Marden’s”) (don’t click that link unless you want to hear their jingle!) in Gray on the way to Casco on New Year’s day. Someone was talking to his kid (or more likely grandkid) about routers, because there were three big boxes, each with a Black and Decker plunge router, there on the bottom shelf, at $59.99. That sounded like an awfully reasonable price — though I have a Craftsman router that I’ve owned since we lived in Watertown. On the other hand … of course I wouldn’t be posting about it if I hadn’t got it.

My first impression, though I haven’t done anything except one trial cut with it, is that it’s wonderful. First, the plunge feature makes it much better suited to use with the lettering template than the old one. “Plunge” means you can set a depth stop, rather than setting the bit to a fixed position below the baseplate, so you position the template bushing in the lettering template, then turn it on and push the bit down into the work, rather than getting the bushing into the template while it’s running. That makes it lots less likely that you’ll ruin the template before cutting with it. Second, it has a gradual startup. The old one goes from 0 to whatever, 3500 rpm, in a split second when you turn it on. The startup torque makes it try to jerk out of your hands — especially troublesome if you’re going to try to get that bushing into the lettering template, but I have marred lots of workpieces because of that. This one doesn’t have that starting jerk, so it stays where you’re trying to hold it. Maybe best of all, this one has a port that takes a vacuum cleaner hose to remove shavings. A router is about the most productive source of sawdust, shavings, and chips of any tool I’ve ever used. They build up around the bit very quickly, making it impossible to see what you’re doing. That’s especially a problem for lettering freehand. I haven’t tried this with the shop-vac, but it it halfway works it should be a big big advantage. One more thing, this has a turret for depth stops that allows you to set three depths of cut at once. In hard wood or for deep cuts, you need to make more than one cut at different depths to get the job done. If you have to move some sort of edge guide to make different cuts (say you need a guide for each joint on the side of a bookcase, and you need to cut at two depths) you are constantly readjusting depth of cut for first pass, finish pass, move the guide, first pass, finish pass, etc. With this one, you can set the turret depth stops for first pass depth, finish depth, and just click to the next depth for the next cut.

So, OK, the old router works perfectly well and has stood me in good stead for decades, but the modern features make me wish I had the new one long ago.

Oh, I found the same model on the internet for $74, and then there would be shipping. So it was a good price at that.

I’m under way on a new sweater, this one for Arlene. It’s inspired by one of the sweaters in Kaffe Fassett & Zoe Hunt’s book Family Album, the brushstrokes sweater. I guess that’s what I should call it, even though I’m not really following the pattern but rather just trying to use what colors of yarn I have, mostly Classic Elite Renaissance that we got at Fabric Place when they were going out of business.

I’m planning to make a V-neck pullover, using a pattern that the people at Creative Warehouse in Needham made for her using a program called Sweater Wizard.

Here’s the picture of Fassett’s design, with the center of what I’ve knitted so far:

… and everything I’ve done so far on it.

Yes, it’s a big tangle. There were 22 strands of yarn hanging down the back on that row. No, it’s not driving my completely crazy, not yet. However, it sure is a lot slower than Fair Isle or the cabled stuff I recently finished.

Back in November, the week before the week of Thanksgiving, we went out to visit my mom in Idaho.

We got up ridiculously early on Saturday and caught a flight that got us to Salt Lake City before noon.

It was a turbulent flight with noisy babies along, but the view out of the window was beautiful once we got past clouds which covered the eastern half of the country. It looked as though a light snow had fallen the night before over most of the high plains. A lot of ground was bare, but you could see where snow had drifted against fences and into low spots of the landscape near streams or gullies.
When we phoned my mom to say we were in SLC, she said, “Well, you have plenty of time to see something along the way. You should stop at the Bear River wildlife sanctuary.” So we did.

There’s a relatively new visitor center, with a beautiful modern museum about birds, a fraction of a mile from the freeway exit. It’s the second visitor center to be built there in the past couple of decades; another one was destroyed by a flood (of that same Bear River, naturally) just a year after it was finished.

The Bear River flows into Great Salt Lake near Brigham City. There are many square miles of wetlands near where it enters the lake. There’s a one-lane dirt road along a causeway which forms a big square around a lot of it, with spectacular views of the Wasatch Mountains over the marsh.

We didn’t see many birds, though the area is a major migration route for ducks and other water birds. Maybe it was a little too late in the season, or maybe the problem was that it was duck hunting season. Almost of the other people and vehicles we saw at parking lots along the way were duck hunters, with boats either painted in camouflage or covered with reeds to look like part of the marsh. At one parking area I spoke with a hunter who said it had been a kind of slow day. The three hunters in his party had just got five ducks for the day, two pintails, two greenheads (I guess he meant mallards) and a Norwegian (and I have no idea what kind of duck that is, but I sure hope it’s a duck.)

We drove to downtown Brigham City to look for a cafe and get a snack. We found a wonderful retro place called somebody’s cafe (maybe Mike’s? I can’t remember at this point) with walls covered with pictures and signs with cheerful slogans. The sign over the main street welcomes you to Brigham City, home of the world’s largest bird refuge.

Monday night we went to a meeting of the association for the blind, again I forget the exact name, at the IHoP. The president of the group referred to us and my mom’s braille teacher, who was sitting with us, as “light-dependent people.” The group had just received a van previously used by the Idaho Falls senior center, thanks to a couple of big donations. Our waiter was new on the job and didn’t have the foggiest idea of how to be a waiter. The food was so slow in getting to us that my mom’s braille teacher asked for hers to go, because she had to be somewhere at the time the meeting should have broken up, but that time turned out to be when the food got to us.

One afternoon Arlene and I drove up to Idaho Falls to visit the Museum of Idaho. We stopped at the highway rest area at the lava flow called “Hell’s Half Acre”, which is really many many acres with self-guided trails, and walked all along them. This is scenery and vegetation we don’t have in New England (although I could find you a few cactus growing wild in New England if you pressed me.)

Of course my mom’s dogs Dixie and Tsu-Ra were major presences –

Thursday evening we went to the university, first to a meeting of Move On which was gathering pictures and petitions to send congress in support of Obama’s campaign promises, and second to a movie “Expiration Date“. It’s a story an old indian tells a young boy who’s thinking of taking the bus off the reservation to the big city, about Charley Silvercloud III, whose grandfather and father were both killed by milk trucks on their 25 birthday. Charley is a week short of 25 as the story opens. If the movie comes to West Newton or the Embassy, or if you get a chance to see it on the Sundance Channel, you’ll enjoy it greatly.

The big wildlife event of the past week was in Newton, although it’s true that we saw two pine siskins in our heritage apple tree, and got a good long look at a pileated woodpecker across the driveway in Casco last weekend.

Driving home from work last Monday (Dec 29 ‘08) I saw a red fox run across Parker Street, halfway down the hill from Dedham Street to Meadowbrook Road. My first impression was of a cat on the left side of the street running into the road, but it was a little too high and much much too long, especially the big wide fox tail! It was moving fast and was far enough away that I didn’t get a good enough look at the head to be sure, but “fox” is my story and I’m sticking to it.

Last weekend when we were shopping for something to cook for supper I said, “pot roast.” When the question arose of what to make with it, rice? I said, “No, kasha.”

When I was a kid (and Hanna can confirm this if she chooses to comment on this post) pot roast and kasha was a single menu item. We never had pot roast without kasha, nor kasha without pot roast.

Kasha is buckwheat groats. It makes a starch dish, like rice or pilaf, but with lots of its own flavor. There’s a dish called “kasha varnishkes”, which is kasha and pasta bowties, but there is no such thing as one kasha varnishke.

I don’t know how to make kasha varnishkes, but I do know how to cook kasha, and as you guessed I’m about to tell you. The recipe on the box, which is preferentially a box of whole groats, just has you mixing kasha and boiling water. You can do that, if you want a mushy gluey mass. If you want kasha with separate grains, here’s what you do:

Break one egg into a small mixing bowl. Beat it with a fork or whisk. Add one cup of dry kasha and mix well. Now heat a couple of tablespoons of oil in a saucepan and saute the kasha until the grains don’t stick together any more (that is, until the egg is all cooked). Then add however much liquid the box said to use for a cup of kasha and follow the directions on the box from there as far as cooking time goes. And there you have your starch dish to go with pot roast.
That’s a lot like my graduate-school landlady Mrs. Saghbazarian’s recipe for pilaf. Pilaf took one hank or skein of vermicelli (in Watertown we used to get noodles that were sort of coiled, not a box of straight ones. If you don’t have a hank of noodles, you want about four times as much weight of rice as of noodles), two cups of rice, one stick of butter, and four cups of chicken. Melt the butter, break up the vermicelli into pieces less than an inch long (with the skeined noodles you just have to give the skein a good squeeze), fry them in the butter until they just start to get a tiny bit brown — if you cook them too long, they’ll be burnt by the time the rice is fried enough–, add rice and fry it until it’s white instead of translucent, add chicken soup, bring to a boil (or if the soup was already boiling, you’re all set there), and make the flame low low and cook until the rice is done. That may strike you as a lot of butter, but it sure makes good pilaf.

Yesterday Arlene went to the (not so new, but we haven’t been there before) new Institute of Contemporary Art with some of her old art teacher friends, and stopped with them at Sofra in Cambridge,  at the border of Watertown and Belmont, for lunch. It’s in a building covered in somewhat garish glazed tiles that used to be a liquor store. We drove past that building all the time when we lived in Watertown, but neither of us had ever been inside it before. Arlene was very enthusiastic about the show at the ICA, but also about Sofra, which turns out to be a middle eastern (in that part of Cambridge/Watertown/Belmont, no surprise) take out place. She brought me home a piece of chocolate hazelnut baklava, which was delicious. But then, I’ve never met a baklava I didn’t like. It even came in a Bio-plus earth recyclable cardboard takeout container.