Famous Cat-Waters of Europe,

or

Write Me Another One o’ Them Li’l Bad Guys, Willya?

I’m sorry, I just couldn’t resist. Some things leap out at you and grab you by the throat. (In this case, a variant syllabification [is that a truly righteous word?] of “Chateaux”, and a slight misspelling of “villanelle”.)

I’m not sure I’m quite ready to write another page of this journal, partly because I don’t have Internet connectivity at the moment. That, in turn, is because I’ve moved, which is a long story that I can tell you only part of. Suffice it to say that I had to relocate; that it was the quickest move I’ve ever made (about a day and a half); and that despite this it was far and away the least traumatic, largely because I had massive support from my hosts and from Dave Mann, who is one of the honchos here. About all I had to do was cart my belongings from one location to the other, after Doug and I chose the destination. I am a very happy camper.

Getting back to connectivity, I’m sitting in an undisclosed location in Laurel typing this, a place with large Internet bandwidth; this location houses the Network Operations Center of Cidera. Cidera was, until recently, called Skycache, but things changed. I can’t quite read email (well, it’s extremely painful), but at least I can run emacs and work on this page.

My new quarters are a few blocks from here, in a nifty house with an unassuming exterior (put it in a phonebooth and it turns into Clark Kent) that was built around 1870. It has a sign out front proclaiming this fact, and giving its name as “Harmony House”. I have a sign in the window, which I would like to scan, but I’ve got to get a USB-to-SCSI adapter and the correct driver for my surplus Scanjet first. (It’s a IIc, rather old, and HP doesn’t have the driver on their Web page, which I must confess irks me because they talk a lot about how they have their drivers available on their Web page...)

(Note, added in proof a couple days later: I looked a bit more carefully at the scanner and discovered that the clearly marked “HP ScanJet IIc” cover doesn't want to fit, for an excellent reason: the scanner is actually a 4c. They do have the 4c drivers on their page, and I have the scanner running now, on another Mac that I'm setting up for some friends. The 4c proves to be a real honey, and I find it easy to understand why this model held its price for so long. It was clearly one of the better machines of its era.) My connectivity from home is currently a Ricochet modem, quite portable, and I should be able to upload scans from the 8500/120 until I receive the USB-to-SCSI dongle that I acquired on eBay the other day.

The sign (which I was indeed able to scan with and then upload from the 8500) looks about like this:

It is clear that I am not a professional calligrapher; on the other hand it was fun, and that was what I wanted from it, so I’m not complaining.

One of the things that made this house an easy choice was the smell of the original hardwood flooring, which is still present at the front of the building. Yum. Another was the fact that the owner had just ripped out and replaced the kitchen, which meant that there was a brand new gas stove sitting there waiting to be Initiated into various Mysteries. I have taken it upon myself to perform at least some reasonable subset of those Initiations, and have started by sharpening a knife I acquired at Goodwill for two or three bucks, applying the resulting edged tool to a turnip, and sauteeing the sliced turnip in mayonnaise.

...Mayonnaise? Well, hey. It was an abrupt move, what can I say?

I’m currently sauteeing in Frantoio Casa Dello Zoppo Mosto “fruttato” extra virgin olive oil, a joyous liquid that Doug and Lisa turned me on to. (I get it at Fresh Fields, which seems to be owned by Whole Foods. Most peculiar, but it works.) If you like your olive oil fruity, I commend this brand and type to you. Well worth investigating, not hugely ’spensive.

The stove is not a fancy object by any means (we’ll get to that later, when the Viking has been installed at Lisa & Doug’s place), but it was refined enough to refrain most politely from objecting to the mayonnaise. It has since been happy to accept chicken with Greek oregano and organic Portobello mushrooms, and also a slightly modified commercial (hey, I just moved, okay?) marinara, into which I tossed some ground buffalo. (Yes, they have Trader Joe’s here too. It helps.) I ate both of these things on Alu Paratha, also commercial; I was just bringing the water to a boil to make spaghetti when I realized that I don’t have a sieve or a colander yet. Maybe tomorrow.

I hope it’s clear that I’m settling in happily, sleeping on a very nice 4" thick solid cotton futon and doing many familiar domestic things. I expect to get back to items like attieke with improper protein (attieke traditionally goes with broiled fish, but I am playing with variants), and perhaps mohn-flavored yokan, another nontraditional combination I’ve been contemplating. (Mohn, for those unfamiliar with it, is basically the poppy-seed filling people put in cookies and other pastries. Yokan is a gelid Japanese tea-sweet that seems to involve agar as a matter of course, and usually involves adzuki or other beans as well. I really like yokan if it’s made right, but the texture takes a bit of getting used to. There are many flavors; mohn is decidedly not among them...yet. It will be, though, if I have anything to say about it. Maybe a mohn/citrus combination, I’m not sure yet.)

(...And again, added a few days later...) I acquired something today that may serve as a cutting board, along with the most ridiculous casserole (mayhap I will take a photo of it at some point; mere words cannot do it justice) and a few other small items. I regret to say that thrifts out here, though they are pleasant, aren't a patch on thrifts in Seattle. I doubt, for example, that I'm likely to find too many Chicago Cutlery or Old Hickory knives here.

Results Dept.

I went down to the pottery today (this was written on Valentine's Day) and actually retrieved two glaze tests. One of them is Doug and Lisa’s back yard on a platter, as it were: the brick clay, the whole brick clay, and nothing but the brick clay. I didn’t sift it, particularly, just wet it and smeared it into a little bowl.

It fired to a metallic brown, rather as I had expected, but with little blobs and blebs in it from the things I should have sifted out. In any case, fairly encouraging: looks like brick clay, and should be suitable for a variety of pleasant glazes including tenmokus, kakis, and the like.

I also got back my first hit at reconstructing the red tenmoku, using the brick clay I talked about a few sessions back. That’s a bit problematic. (When I get the use of a digital camera I will add photos to this page, even if it is already archived at that point.) It is actually nice, but it isn’t what I was trying for. On the other hand, I have just enough experience with this family of glazes to be able to tell where I should go with it next. That, however, is probably going to have to wait until I get my own kiln built.

Speaking of which, I believe that the “N” board I’m going to build it from will ship tomorrow or the next day (I’m writing this late on the evening of February 15th), and will arrive within a week. I’ve revised my thoughts about this, and will be attempting to make a downdraft kiln rather than an updraft kiln unless I change my mind yet again. (I saw a diagram, probably in a Japanese ceramics magazine, and it set me to thinking. Within a few minutes I had figured out a half-decent design that gives me approximately the 8 cubic feet I would have gotten from the updraft version, but should heat a little more evenly. We hope.

I've Moved That Cookie Thing.

Figured it should stand as a separate item. You'll find it here.

Brutally Paraphrased Favorites

In keeping with the bit of play at the beginning of this B/SCUIT, I have another bit for the end. It seems to me that certain items could stand to be adjusted for reality. Here’s a little snotty example, a favorite madrigal “repaired”:

The Silver Swan

(By Orlando Gibbons, if memory serves, which it may not.)