This afternoon’s pickings. Cucumber, pickling cucumber, “communist” tomatoes, turnips, zucchini, acorn squash. Posed for my daughter’s sketching homework
My daughter calls them communist tomatoes because I grew them from seeds taken from a grocery store tomato, thereby “seizing the means of production”.
absolute gorgeous produce, man! good job!
been back in the glass and print studio, working with a new type of glass to make some patterned sushi dishes:
the reactivity comes from an “infusion” of tin in the texture of the top surface of the clear glass. there is copper in the green and blue glass (and the foil strip - obvs), the elements react in the 1440F firing and turn red. neat trick. useful? dunno.
A bookbinder friend made me an accordion book for my watercolor art toolkit. I took it camping over the weekend and challenged myself to paint some little plant from around the campsite each morning.
I still need to ID a couple of them, but a fun project.
Can’t eat sushi off them, though 
Those plates are lovely!
My better half found a (slightly used) chicken coop on Craigslist. All we gotta do is disassemble and move it; no prob, right?
ETA: The day that I manage to get it back up onto those four walls will be the actual pinnacle of said engineering career.
In my ongoing silk painting learning journey:
I had a couple setbacks, so it’s not as vibrant as I’d hoped. But there’s part of an interrupted fern (bottom edge), a sensitive fern (left corner), and a lady fern, and a Queen Anne’s lace flower and leaves. I sprinkled salt on it while it was wet to get the added mottling.
It’s pretty and probably feels divine
El Pollo Coupe™ made the journey at full impulse power, and the structural integrity never fell below 97.5%.
What an adventure. I am glad we did that, as it turned out to be the bucket list item I never knew I had. It feels like I checked off an item that Heinlein found too ambitious for his list. All that said, I’m very glad that we’re done, and I’m very glad we didn’t keep track of our actual time invested.
I know you know this, but, big picture, time invested in reclaiming stuff like this, extending its life instead of letting it go to a landfill, just
Thanks, but we only did it for the bragging rights. Some day, at some hypothetical dinner party, I’ll be the only one there who can say they’ve moved a building. And if anyone else raises their hand, I can say “Uhh no, I didn’t say ‘I had a building moved’.”
Okay, maybe we did it a little bit for the poultry, too.
Dude! That is the weirdest thing about language that I’m always getting on about. My boss (she’s awesome in most ways) is always saying things like, “we Painted our house this year,” or, “we did all this tree work this year.” Before I knew better I was always asking, “oh, did you rent a cherry picker?” Or, “what did you do for scaffolding?” (Me and the Mr are very DIY.) Until I learned she meant they’d “had it done.”
But it’s so funny to me. She and others I work with, if they’d gone to the salon, for example, would never say, “I did my hair today,” or nails, or whatever. They’d say they “had it (or them) done.”
It’s totally weird to me that people use the active voice for certain stuff, even though it’s so inaccurate.
(Minor rant over.)
If you ever are itching to jump into a full-on simmering feud about those distinctions, you can always explore the saga of resentment between the “Owner Builders” (i.e. no General Contractor) Facebook group and the “REAL Owner Builders” (i.e. No contractors at all unless legally required, and even then, don’t tread on me, etc, etc…) Facebook group. The latter, of course, being a splinter group of an exiled member of the former…
No thank you! 
but it is really weird to me where people seem to draw the line. Like, they’d never say, “I detailed my car today,” they’d say they “had their car detailed.”
As a sometimes builder, I find I notice it mostly around construction stuff, but it makes me wonder why people feel the need to say it in a way that implies they did the thing in some examples and not in others. I haven’t figured it out.
I suspect around construction stuff the divide is between
“stuff people think1) they could do themselves (If only I had the time I would etc, etc)”
and
“stuff people realize2) they can’t (and shouldn’t) do themselves”.
1) They usually think wrong, but that’s neither here nor there.
2) Thank The Lord for small mercies.
I got used to it decades ago, when I realized that most of America talks about sports as if they engage in them from somewhere other than their couches. “Oh, you mean someone got paid to run twenty yards while carrying a ball, oh, yeah, now I totally get why you feel you’ve achieved something impressive. I’ll be outside if you need me.”
I read a funny analogy of that once.
" ‘what we really need this season is a decent pitching staff!’ no, ‘we’ are going to to be sitting on our ass in front of the tv. as if Deadheads sit around talking like ‘we’re going to have a tough time on tour this year. we’ve really gotta find a decent replacement for Jerry, that’s key.’ "
A snarky but perhaps defensible response: “Wow! You [cut down] that [tree] yourself? Damn, gurl!”
Perhaps followed by: “Can you come over and take a look at my [tree]? I was gonna pay some company big $$$, but maybe I could do it myself. What do you think?”
I think there’s a word for this type of figurative ownership, but I’m too lazy to look it up right now
I’ve never even wondered about a term for it (other than ‘neurotypical’) but I think the phenomenon itself probably has to do with mirror neurons. Like porn, but without the resultant change in state that causes the person to go do something else.
Hey art loving mutants, The Jersey City Artist Studio Tour (JCAST) is Fri/Sat/Sun October 1-3 with a launch event on September 30. I’m helping two artists and one author to host an event in The Heights and would love to see mutant tour groups as you wander around the city. Generally, there is parking in the area, so stop on by.
