little black journal

One of my goals for 2011 was to stop considering cereal as typical and acceptable dinner fare.  Sure, in a pinch, a bowl of Honey Bunches of Oats is better than say…a wedge of cheese with a side of potato chips (not that I’ve done that), but still, I’m a believer that dinner should be hearty, flavorful, and nutritious.  Shane and I have made great strides in our meal preparation this month, since it is indeed frugal month for us, and we cannot trade in our Cheerios for a yellow curry from our local Thai place, or burritos from our favorite taco stand.  The crock pot we bought the day after Christmas has proved invaluable in helping us prepare simple, delicious, multiple-serving meals.  Today I threw a whole mess of stuff into the crock pot, flipped it on, took care of a bunch of Sunday to-do’s, and come dinner-time, voila!  Vegetable beef stew.  Fabulous.

A couple of crock-pot tips and tricks, based on our limited experience:

–  If you are crock-potting on a weekday and plan on your dinner cooking while you are at work, make sure the crock pot is actually on when you leave the house.  Otherwise, you are due to come home to a pot of raw, devastatingly wasted pork loin.  Lesson learned the hard way.

–  I pulled ingredients from a few different stew recipes today, and threw in a couple of strips of orange zest on a whim.  The subtle tang was a nice addition.

–  Serve stews with a slice a crusty bread, and follow up with a piece of home-made carrot cake.  Your spouse will adore you.

Switchin’ it up – some plain old pencil on paper, since I recently rediscovered how much I like the tone and ‘smudginess’ of graphite.  Also loving sticky-back printable transparencies – my new favorite way to incorporate my photos into my drawings.

cabin in the woods (2010.12.05):

section in winter (2011.01.02):

jardin des plantes (2011.01.06):

When my mom bought a couple of picture frames last May and asked me to draw something to put inside of them for her Mother’s Day gift, I gladly obliged.  I love the thought of my art hanging in my parents house – makes it feel like a special little piece of me is gracing their walls. I started on the project right away.  Then I was asked to put together a show for the Q Cafe, so the drawing project took a temporary back seat.  Then we went to Canada for a week.  Then I read some books, took some photos, did some sketches, and earned myself an A+ in the art in procrastination.  Felt like I was in college again…  But finally, after pulling my ideas together, buckling down, and putting pen to paper, I finished up these two pieces, just in time to tie them up with a red and green bow and try to pass them off as Christmas presents (my mom wasn’t fooled for a second).  But I think (hope) they were worth the wait – I’m pretty happy with how they turned out.  The first drawing is of a building in Seattle’s Pioneer Square and the second is of a street in Portland’s Pearl District.  I realized as I was working on these that it’s been a really long time since I’ve worked on a well-crafted drawing, and I really like the crispness of a series of perspectival lines drawn in ink. Anyhow, Happy Mother’s Day, Mom!  Better put your order in now for next year’s Christmas present…

It’s extremely rare that I read the same book twice – I instead tend to focus my efforts on my constantly-growing shelf of unread books, which is the curse (or blessing) of being a person with a book-buying addiction.  But when my book club decided on Traveling Mercies as our latest pick, I felt like I was due for a little time with ol’ Annie Lamott – it had been 3 or 4 years since I’d picked up anything of hers.  And good, good Lord, this is good, good stuff.  Like, speaks-to-my-soul kind of stuff.  Like, makes-me-laugh-out-loud-then-want-to-cry kind of stuff.  Like, ‘Amen, Sister!’ kind of stuff.  She talks about her faith in a way that allows you to understand that it’s entirely possible to be deeply connected to God, but still deeply flawed, whether with anger, bitterness, self-centeredness, or vanity.  Being a Christian and being a person with a closet full of skeletons are not mutually exclusive.  And Anne’s closet certainly has skeletons.  But her life is incredibly rich with moments of finding and being found by God.  He hunts her down in the midst of her drug and alcohol addiction; she accepts His embrace through the death of her best friend; she even takes a moment to talk with God in the midst of the most frustrating circumstances, like her car breaking down while she’s on her way to visit an old friend that’s dying of cancer:

“‘It would be hard to capture how I felt at that moment.  It was a nightmare: Bad Mind kicked in.  Bad Mind can’t wait for this kind of opportunity:  ‘I told you so,’ Bad Mind says.  It whispers to me that I am doomed because I am such a loser…  ‘Will you pray with me?’ I asked Sam…  We said a prayer together that we find a solution, that we feel calmer.  I don’t believe in God as an old man in the clouds – ‘bespectacled old Yahweh’, as the late great John Gardner put it, ‘scratching his chin through his mountains of beard.’  But I do believe that God is with us even when we’re at our craziest and that this goodness guides, provides, protects, even in traffic.”

Amen, sister.

Still loving the mix of painting, collage, and drawing.  Inspired by architecture these days – planes, angles, corners, set against a backdrop of color…

pepto sky (2010.10.17):

green glass (2010.10.22):

rambler (2010.11.15):

mod house (2010.11.17):

I volunteered on Saturday to lead a little art workshop for kids at the cafe connected to our church, as a way to reach out to the community and give parents a chance to enjoy a latte on their own while their little ones made a mess under my supervision.  I settled on Cubism as the subject matter, thinking that would lend itself to a good one-style-fits-all project, and I didn’t know whether I’d be working with 3 year-olds or 12 year-olds.  I showed the kids several examples of Picasso’s portraits, with their offset eyes, bright colors, and angular features.  I then encouraged them to paint their own portraits, taking advantage of the freedom that Cubism allows, without having to focus on exact proportion or shape.  I had eight little artists under my watch, and all of them exceeded my expectations.  It was inspiring to see kids in the act of art-making – some focused on coloring inside the lines, while some splattered paint with total abandon, but all of them walked away with a masterpiece of their own.

I’ve been in a bit of reading slump for the past couple of months – it’s been awhile since I’ve had something in my hands that I couldn’t put down.  A Gesture Life by Chang-rae Lee was beautifully written, but I found it hard to truly invest in any of its characters.  Little Bee by Chris Cleave was intriguing, but its ending left me feeling frustrated and unsatisfied.   And so, after years and years of somehow missing the boat, I am embarking on a new literary journey – all seven Harry Potter books, read start to finish, back-to-back.  My dear friend (and book club confidante) Nancy has lent me her well-loved set and has assured me that I will not be disappointed.  I have just started digging into book one and am already reveling in the vision of rainy Sunday afternoons spent curled up on the couch with Harry and Hermione, being whisked off to faraway lands full of wizards and witches, where reality is temporarily forgotten and my imagination runs wild and free.  Yes, I suspect this may be just what I’m looking for…

Back into painting, squeezing globs of nearly-dried-out acrylic paint onto my palette, mixing these colors with a little bit of collage, a little bit of drawing, a little bit of a mess…

lit up (2010.09.28):

bubbles (2010.10.04):

island (2010.10.09):

gridlock (2010.10.13):

Yes – after a multi-month hiatus, I’m back into the groove of my weekly sketches.  Playing a lot with collages, spending my evenings with magazine clippings and a bottle of Elmer’s.  It’s fun.

green (2010.09.05):

tedium (2010.09.11):

west elm topos (2010.09.14):

volver (2010.09.16):

desert (2010.09.17):

Despite frequent hopeful gazes out our living room window, I was unable to track down even a hint of blue sky today – seems that we have moved into a season (or seasons, plural, as is the case in Seattle) of gray skies and rainy afternoons.  Summer felt so fleeting this year.  I’m not sure if it’s because we’ve spent so much of the past several weeks on the go, or because this Summer was cooler than typical, but I’m having a hard time accepting that this season is really over.  Do I really have to bid farewell to Saturdays spent working in the garden, evenings spent spent drinking wine on the back porch? The forecast (rain for six of the next seven days) seems to be telling me a definitive ‘yes’.  At least this overcast weather was perfect for curling up on the couch and finishing up the book I’ve been reading, which turned out to be one of the best novels I’ve picked up in a long time.  Set in the midst of a traveling circus in the 1930’s, Water for Elephants was full of drama, action, romance, and suspense, carried out by characters you love dearly and hate passionately.  It’s was fun to be so absorbed in a book that I couldn’t put it down – especially during a weekend like this one, when I didn’t have big plans or sunny weather vying for my attention.  This will be a tough novel to top, but as I pull together the stack of books I’d like to finish before the end of the year, I will remain optimistic – here’s to hoping that Chang-rae Lee, Chris Cleave, and George Orwell do not disappoint.