I’ve never made marmalade before, or any kind of jam, but I knew this year was my year to do it. I collected all the jars I could find, and realized I didn’t have any lids for any of the narrowmouthed ones, so this was not going to be my chance to experiment with canning. Freezing and refrigerating it is.

I used an approximated recipe based on this basic one from Chickens in the Road. Only I mostly had clementines so I looked for a clementine marmalade recipe as well to get a rough idea of the amounts.

The most notable difference between my version and Suzanne’s (apart from the clementines) is that I used about 2/3rds the sugar that was called for. Since I’m not canning it, I don’t have to worry as much about the acid levels, and it was QUITE SWEET so I’m not sure how it would have tasted with the full amount of sugar she called for. Sweeter, I guess.

I used:

1 lemon
1 navel orange
6 clementines

I peeled the orange and clementines and thinly sliced the peel and separated it from the pulp. I didn’t pulp it enough, I’ll squeeze harder next time.

Then I thinly sliced the lemon without peeling it and altogether I had about 4.5 cups of peel and pulp.

I added 3.5 cups of water and brought it to a boil, simmered it for five minutes, then let it stand in the fridge for about 20 hours (it was supposed to be 12 to 18 hours. Didn’t seem to make a difference).

I brought it back to a boil after I let it stand, and boiled it rapidly for 30 minutes until the peel was tender. My peel was all different sizes because I am lazy with the knife, but this step would have gone more quickly if I’d been uniform about it.

Then I added 4 cups of sugar to the 6 cups of citrus slurry.

I boiled it for an hour and a half to get it to almost-gelling point. Remember I’m 5,000 feet above sea level so your boiling time will be different. You can tell when it’s close by either testing it on the back of a spoon or spooning some on a plate, putting it in the freezer for two minutes, running your finger down the middle and seeing if it gloops back together. If it doesn’t, it’s at the gel point.

I then added it to my jars, and ended up with about 3 pints (1 pint jar full, two half pint jars full, and one 500g French jam jar full).

It is absolutely delightful and I will be eating it on biscuits and Greek yogurt for hopefully weeks to come. “Hopefully” because I know I can knock back a half-pint of marmalade in a week, so we’ll see if I exercise restraint.

I am testing to see if the one jar I have lids for will seal with just heat instead of canning – I can do this because it’s going in the freezer, don’t try it at home, I just wanted to see. Note the bottle of two-buck chuck in the background – we tried it with dinner last night, and both of us give it two thumbs up.

(those jars on the right are waiting to be sanitized for marmalade. And we find it difficult to recycle the lovely wine bottles we collect. Josh has been known to pick up a bottle that’s been empty for three years and sigh fondly and say “Remember this tempranillo? Best one I ever had.”)

We’ve had scads of marvelous meals – chops and roasts, soups and stews, and I am getting pretty used to him greeting me every morning by asking “Do you want an omelet?”. However, none of my pants fit, so I’ve taken over the job of doling out my own portions on my plate. Otherwise, he gives me enough food for a 180-lb. man, and I don’t hesitate to eat all of it because he’s damned good at this cooking business.

There’s been a storm every weekend for a month, and in between the skies have been leaden and morose, so we’ve been making ourselves leave the house whenever we see a scrap of sun. This is Josh eating waffle fries at the restaurant he calls “Waffle”. We like to watch the ducks from the window while we stuff our faces. I figure we’re practicing for retirement. I got a strawberry soda the last time we were there and they served it to me with sliced strawberries on top and it made me happier than a four-year-old.

Almost as happy as I was the day our sharp knives came back home with us.

(Very fancy papertowels as napkins. We look for every opportunity to use our sushi plates from Studio Yria on Paros. Not that Josh will eat sushi. Though strangely his objection is to the sticky rice and seaweed, not the fish)

I haven’t been posting any pics at Flickr for awhile, though I still use my camera and my phone to document a lot of my days, so this post was intended to clear out the last few photos I’d taken. Tonight Josh is roasting us a chicken and making Greek salad with the incredible sheep’s milk feta we picked up yesterday. Normally I wouldn’t use the qualifier “sheep’s milk” because feta is supposed to be made with that, right? Yeah, well, not here in the states, so finding a slightly more authentic feta is a complete treat.

A snapshot of our newsprint-papered walls, my easel, and a small glimpse at some of the stacks of books laying around. We are in desperate need of bookshelves, and there’s four huge boxes left in the blue room still waiting to be unpacked.

I have been busy with Utopian.net and with writing, and the seedlings I wintersowed a month ago are peeking up – beans, peas, radishes and an assortment of greens. Yesterday Josh suggested I plant dandelions to make xorta with, and I was able to smugly reply – “Already did.”

But the weather has been gloomy and the seedlings look a little worse for wear, what with the freezing and thawing and so on. Our lavendar bushes are ragged and dead, I hope they come back in alright shape.

Thus endeth the litany of my recent days and how they were spent. Growing, cooking, creating, devouring, all the things that make me human.

There’s nothing like an entire month of being snowed in under gray skies to propel me outside for seed starting after three sunny days in a row. I spent a happy hour digging in dirt and here’s the earliest of what is sown:

Red Hamburger Onions (these probably have a real name, I call them what I would use them for if I could grow them bigger than scallion size before the chipmunks munch ‘em)
Aiguille Vert and Tavera Filet Beans – these are darling little white “rice” beans and I am curious to see what they look like.
Dwarf Grey Sugar Snap Peas
Three kinds of carrots – baby and round carrots, as well as Chantenay.
Salad mix – I make this mix by hand from endive, three kinds of lettuce, two kinds of arugula, and cutting celery.
Cherry Belle radishes – when I was a kid in Hawaii, these took approximately 10 days from sowing to eatable size. Volcanic soil ftw.

I enjoyed some free time this weekend reading permaculture and farming blogs so I thought I’d link to a few of my favourites:

Throwback at Trapper Creek - this has been in my RSS reader for years, it’s a longtime favourite.
Subsistence Pattern – a new find through the blog above.
The Walden Effect – I like it when people experiment and document their experimentations to share.

So I sat down today and went through my seed packages, some of which go back to 2006 (yikes), some of which I’ve saved from previous year’s crops in the hopes that they’ll be better adapted to our weird climate. My favourite seed source is Freedom Seeds, run by the Dervaes family in Pasadena – non-GMO, non-Monsanto seeds that have GREAT germination rates and seem to do really well up here.

I thought I’d list my current holdings. Most of the listed flower seeds are old and will be tossed out into the yard with crossed fingers in the hopes that they might, you know, do something. A lot of the veggies are fresh though, and if I can keep the raccoons out of my pots and the voles away from my root crops, I might actually get to eat something I grow this year.

Of course, I think that every year.

TOMATOES
Tomato, Valencia
Tomato, Thessaloniki (best variety I’ve found for this dry altitude. Tasty)
Costaluto Genovese
Tiny Tim

PEPPERS
Mulato Isleno Peppers
Cal Wonder Bell Pepper (I can’t keep peppers alive, the chipmunks strip them to the stems. Last year had 2 tiny peppers that I harvested the day after the first frost. They were a little soft – but that plant grew from a stem the chipmunks stripped that I didn’t have the heart to tear out, so there’s hope. The climate’s good for them anyway)

MELONS, SQUASH
Sugar & Pie Pumpkin
Sugar Baby Watermelons
Charentais Canteloupe

Black Zucchini

Poinsett Cucumbers

ROOT CROPS
Cherry Belle Radish

Little Finger Carrot
Chantenay Carrot
Thumbelina Carrots
Baby Carrots

Red Burgundy Onion
Ciboule (perennial) Onion

PEAS & BEANS
Dwarf Grey Sugar Snap Peas
Sugar Daddy Snap Peas

Filet Tavera Beans
Aiguille Verte (tiny and sweet)
Cannellini
Garbanzo Beans (these do FABULOUSLY up here. But the chipmunks like them too)

BRASSICA
Romanesco Broccoli (haven’t tried broccoli yet)
(Kale, but I list it under greens ’cause that’s how I use it)

FLOWERS
Dandelion Red Rib (grown for xorta/Greek braised wild greens)
Campion (these do brilliantly up here and seem to be native. They’re also native to Paros. They are currently showing green on the hill above our driveway, so I’ll sow more of them up there)
Poppy
Lupin
Marigold
Nasturtium
Borage
Forget-me-not
Skyscraper Sunflower (I can only dream. The chickadees are all over these when I direct sow them, and they don’t do well started indoors)
Dwarf Sunflower

GREENS
Lacinato Kale
Raddicchio
Sylvetta Arugula
Arugula (Heirloom)
Summer Bibb Lettuce
Little Gem Lettuce
Rhubarb Chard
Sorrel
Cutting Celery

HERBS
Dwarf Basil
Mammoth Dill
Greek Oregano
Spearmint
Summer Thyme
Sage
Parsley

CORN
Golden Bantam Corn

Okay so books:
1) Sirens of Titan, by Kurt Vonnegut – I haven’t read this since high school, when I loved it, and when I finished it this time around I adored it.
2) Bird by Bird, by Anne Lamott – I bought this secondhand just before I left for Greece, but didn’t get a chance to read it. Instead, I borrowed Jane’s copy, and finding my own copy in a long-unopened box was like Christmas.
3) My Man Jeeves, by P.G. Wodehouse – Pay attention to all the ways Jeeves manifests himself into the presence of Bertie. He “trickles” into rooms, “slithers” into them, “shimmers” even. I think I’ve read everything Jeeves at least twice.
4) The Sparrow, by Mary Doria Russell – yeah I freaking love this book, I think it’s why I wanted to be a linguist in high school.

I unearthed all our Saul Bellow and Discworld novels as well as Turgenev, Faulkner and Hemingway. I’ll find something new to read in the Bellow, or find myself re-reading Terry Pratchett over and over.
***
While I’ve been sketching each topic for IF this year so far, this is the first one I’ve completed:

Hoping to catch up with the other two before the next topic is chosen. Only three weeks behind!

If you friend me on Facebook so that you can then slag off on IF immediately after I accept your friend request, I will de-friend you and daydream about writing cursewords on your forehead with a sharpie. IF is very simple – we post a topic once a week and you draw a picture about that topic if you want. If you don’t want, we don’t need to hear your lameass opinions about it. And by “we” I mean me.

If you friend me and immediately start trying to recruit me for Jesus or tell me how the gays are tearing holes in our social fabric, I will unfriend you and block you from my email. You might notice that I don’t often offer opinions online. This makes me pretty boring to read but has the effect of disguising what is a rather notorious hot temper (on my part). I’ve gone off half-cocked on the internet enough times to know that it is completely not worth it, and much simpler to pretend you don’t exist.

If you friend me and your feed consists entirely of self-promotion, I may hide you from my status feed because I get tired of people selling me things all day. Unless I like your work, in which case I won’t.

If we’re related and you do any of the above, I will politely hide you from my status feeds but not unfriend you because I’m mostly just happy you’re around and that we have this amazing thing called the Internet making it possible for us to disagree.

I don’t always check Twitter. I don’t always check Facebook. I never check MySpace. I have these accounts so I can explain to our clients how to use them (and so I can make fake farms and grow fake things in FarmVille and CountryLife, there, I said it). If you posted important life news and I missed it, you don’t really have the right to be irritated with me about it because you didn’t actually tell me in the first place. Also, I am simply not equipped with the emotional numbness necessary to read 1000+ people a day bitching about movies, standing in line, eating lunch and the other numerous things that people bitch about when they have an audience. I’m not really a dumpster for negativity. Sorry.

Email is always the best way to get a hold of me. It is more reliable than calling me on the phone. Email, email, email. You have my email address. I don’t check GMail every hour, just once a day or so, but my direct lines at Utopian.net and Brianna.org are always being piped straight into my forehead.

No matter how you get a hold of me, you are very important to me. I don’t always respond immediately because sometimes I need to think about my responses. It doesn’t mean I’m ignoring you -quite the opposite. It means I’m thinking a lot about you, and what to say, and how to say it.

Random brianna.org screenshots set to Vivaldi:

Sunbeams

Originally uploaded by briannaorg

I haven’t written anything in nearly three weeks, since our cat was taken ill and subsequently put to sleep, so I figured I’d write a little bit about Fitzgerald here and see if it helps me resume the tenuous writing habit I’d so carefully built up over the last six months.

We found him at a pet store in Long Beach in 1999, both of us telling each other the entire time that we didn’t want a cat, we were only looking. The shelters were closed and only one place in a 20 mile radius (that’s a wide swath for LA, btw) had any kittens. We found the shop, walked in, and Fitz was in a tiny cage looking at us. There was another kitten, about a year old, but very sick, and a third kitten, tiny and sad. Fitz was quiet and just looked at us, until Josh opened the door of the cage and picked him up. He crawled up to Josh’s shoulder, looked at him and meowed, and Josh looked at me and said “I want THIS one.”

They told us he was nine weeks old and I laughed in their faces. My first job was at a pet store and to my “trained” eyes, Fitz was at least four months old. He was huge. I’d never heard of the Ragdoll breed and it would be a year before we figured out that was what he was.

We brought him back to our little blue apartment where he promptly hid under the couch, until we coaxed him out with a feathery toy on the end of a stick. Then he climbed into the leg of Josh’s shorts and sat and watched TV for awhile. Josh and I were both smitten. I wanted to name him Mac or Jpeg. Josh said “Clearly, he is a Fitzgerald.”

I figured for awhile he was mostly Josh’s cat except I took care of him, laying with him on the couch at night when he cried to be allowed in the bedroom, feeding him. He would jump into my lap when I sat at my desk and lay on his back so I could rub his belly. He smacked his head every time he did that, so I started keeping an eye out for him, and when he showed up next to my desk I’d just lean down and pick him up before he could brain himself.

I have a distinct memory of Josh and Fitz laying on the couch napping one afternoon that first summer, both laying in exactly the same position, Josh with his arm over his eyes and Fitz with his paw up over his own eyes. I always wished I had a camera for that, so I made a point of remembering it.

He learned that we would leave our respective rooms at the same time every night to watch the Simpsons, so when the theme song came on at 7 he would come to each of our rooms and meow until we followed him, then he’d sit between us and watch. Through the years, The Simpsons was the only show I ever caught him paying attention to on a screen. Once he tried chasing the race cars on the screen when we watched an Indy car race, but he was too smart to do it twice once he figured out they weren’t going to come out from behind the TV.

He liked to sneak sips of water from everyone’s glasses. He chewed on every cord in the house until we poured hot sauce all over them, and recently Josh realized the ancient mouse he was using still had hot sauce on it from our kitten deterrent period.

I can keep this up all night, we had him for eleven years. He went across the country with us twice. He played like a kitten with his toys until the very end of his life. I will forever be grateful to my mother that for the last three years he had a huge backyard with loads of trees that were all his own, it was something I always wanted him to have and it felt like an achievement to give that to him – sounds silly to say about a cat, but he truly detested life in our 2nd story Kansas City apartment, even going so far as to jump from the balcony to the roof, checking out the other apartments, until he jumped back to our balcony from the one next door. He was closely supervised on the balcony after that.

He held his own in his few spats with the grey neighborhood kitty that snuck into the backyard occasionally. The raccoons were afraid of him, and he was afraid of them. He loved the taste of butter and the scent of carrots, and while he didn’t deign to lay on anyone’s lap too often, when he did it was either because the house was cold or because he sensed we were ill or upset.

Josh doesn’t have the best hearing, so when he gets excited about something he sometimes raises his voice – Fitz always meowed at him to keep it down. He was very talkative, and we joked that he was so close to being able to say my nickname “Anna” that we may as well just do whatever he said, since he was learning English faster than we were learning Cat.

I miss him.

After that, I slept the longest I’ve been able to sleep in a few weeks. The cat urgently awakened me around 8am, when I fed him and checked for snow on my neighbor’s roof. There was about an inch of icy white sleet and a leaden, close gray sky. I went back to sleep and when I finally arose to greet the day the white was gone but the sky was still heavy.

The sky is still heavy as I type, and I have stepped outside once just to hear it brushing the tops of the pines. I like tracking the movements of the planet by the sound of the sky passing overhead. It’s a soft, ceaseless rushing sound, lighter than static or water, too consistent to be the breathing of a giant. Just one long suspiration.

But it’s been a good week, too. I finished a first draft of a very crappy novel, and am exhilarated by it – there are some actual good ideas I’ve been working on for too long, and I needed to do something to show that I could write a draft from start to finish so I could learn the mechanics of it and apply it to these long-term projects like Cheshire Cat Moons and The Second Attic (the Minotte story).  I probably have twice as many words as I need for a complete draft for both those projects, but not very many of them are in the right order yet.

So I finished a novel draft, attended my grandfather’s funeral, saw my dad for the first time in ten years, had food poisoning, stayed mostly caught up with work (mostly) and made homemade mac and cheese for the first time (a funny way to end the list, but it’s another long-held goal that I accomplished. And I’m not doing it again until I have a food processor to do the grating for me).

That’s some week, right there, and I am grateful for every second of it.

Our neighbors gave Fitz a big overflowing pot of cat grass, and when I carried it inside for him his whole little body perked up and his eyes widened and he meowed and ran straight for me. He’s spent the last few days curled around the pot and nibbling on the grass like a lion on the savannah, peeking through the green blades looking for a gazelle to take down. When I carry the pot outside to give it sun, he cries at the front door until I can distract him with something else. It’s terrifically cute and has given us loads of entertainment so I’m sharing a pic with you:

Today is Thanksgiving and we are staying home and spending any downtime we have sleeping, because the one thing this past amazing, cosmic rollercoaster of a week didn’t have enough of was sleep. In fact, my eyes are half-lidded and I started this blog entry specifically to keep myself awake another five minutes, because it seems so wrong to want to sleep at the height of this golden afternoon.

Cowboy Reincarnation poem

Cowboy Reincarnation by Wallace McRae

“What does Reincarnation mean?”
A cowpoke asked his friend.
His pal replied, “It happens when
Yer life has reached its end.
They comb yer hair, and warsh yer neck,
And clean yer fingernails,
And lay you in a padded box
Away from life’s travails.”

“The box and you goes in a hole,
That’s been dug into the ground.
Reincarnation starts in when
Yore planted ‘neath a mound.
Them clods melt down, just like yer box,
And you who is inside.
And then yore just beginnin’ on
Yer transformation ride.”

“In a while, the grass’ll grow
Upon yer rendered mound.
Till some day on yer moldered grave
A lonely flower is found.
And say a hoss should wander by
And graze upon this flower
That once wuz you, but now’s become
Yer vegetative bower.”

“The posy that the hoss done ate
Up, with his other feed,
Makes bone, and fat, and muscle
Essential to the steed,
But some is left that he can’t use
And so it passes through,
And finally lays upon the ground
This thing, that once wuz you.”

“Then say, by chance, I wanders by
And sees this upon the ground,
And I ponders, and I wonders at,
This object that I found.
I thinks of reincarnation,
Of life and death, and such,
And come away concludin’: ‘Slim,
You ain’t changed, all that much

from Cowboy Curmudgeon (1992)

Click here to view the embedded video.

I’ve carved out time for creativity every day, and it’s given me an enormous feeling of relief. The title of this post refers to the Revelations I have had about once a year for the last three years, where the little voice of my conscience reminds me that, you know, some people make art, some people sell art, but I need it like breath.

Gradually it has been dawning on me that my noble intent to “face reality head on” has led to the most anti-social period of my adult life, a deep depression that was unceasing and wearing me down, and the loss of an outlet that I didn’t know I had until it was gone.

Josh used to tell me that he’d never met anyone as compulsive about creating things as I was. Some people smoke cigarettes, I make stuff. Paper crafts, photos, crochet, weaving, I take whatever is within ten feet of me and I turn it into something else. I used to do it without thinking – I never had the deep television watching habit most kids my age had, if the TV was on and I was sitting near it, I was making something. I didn’t see a whole lot of value in the things I was making, it was the activity, the process that I focused on. The output I considered “experiments” and they either ended up in the trash or in a box or rescued by a friend or relative for their own enjoyment. I always loved that. If I keep the things I make, they will eventually be pillaged for their elemental ingredients to make something else.

As I grew up, I tried to gradually change my attitiude about this compulsion to create. I should care more about what I make. I should focus on a medium or a technique and sell the output. I should call myself an artist, I should go to school, I should I should I should.

So when life got dark there for awhile, I told myself I would just focus on my business, building software and websites, and not “put any pressure” on myself to create. Except, I never did put any pressure on myself about that. Other people did, occasionally, but anyone who’s spent five minutes with me knows that had little effect. I could definitely get twisted up about writing sometimes, and I could angst about web art like a pro, but the wax sculptures, the papercrafting, the painting – that was just stuff I did, I didn’t think about it too much.

And that was the key to my revelation. When I “took the pressure off myself” to not create anything, I was actually pressuring myself to focus only on income bearing activities. I felt a deep responsibility to make our business not only work but be SUCCESSFUL, in all capital letters. I had to grow up. I couldn’t laze around in my studio all day just daydreaming. It wasn’t practical.

After three years of being in a fog, it finally occurred to me that maybe that compulsion, maybe that unconscious act of creation was me feeling things. That when Death came (and it did, and it does, often in my life but far more often in the lives of others who have lost many more loved ones and friends than I have) maybe “facing it head on” was completely wrong for me and how I operate. It made me feel like someone else. It made me unrecognizable, and lost.

My grandpa is dying of cancer. In the last three years, since I lost my mother, I have lost more loved ones to cancer, and I was not surprised, only saddened when I heard he was undergoing chemo. We were very hopeful, but it’s been clear in the last month that there is no longer any treatment. This week, he has stopped recognizing people.

Today, when I got the phone call, I tried to go for a walk, but the dogs wouldn’t stop barking and it made me furious. I tried to eat something but my throat wouldn’t open to swallow. I listened to the song my grandpa used to play for me on his rose-inlaid guitar, even though he and I both knew it would leave me wailing with tears, and after two tears struggled out, the flow stopped. I could feel the hurt and fear and sadness welling up and bottled in and I didn’t know what to do with it, even though I know what grief is, the Universe has kept me practicing it since childhood. There has not been a single year of my life since I was five years old that I did not lose someone precious and important to me, and I keep thinking that each time is a time to practice loving openly so that there are no regrets after, and practice grieving openly so that the feeling of being stifled by loss can’t keep me afraid. I don’t always live up to that.

But I told my grandma what a good job she is doing, I offered the help she would let me give, I will see them both at the hospital tomorrow. I told my grandpa I love him, even though he’s not quite sure who I am. And when the woods didn’t work and the tears didn’t work and I was afraid I might not be able to breathe with everything I was feeling all at once, I started to write.

An hour later, the cloud has passed and I remembered the Revelations. Art is how I feel the big things, the things that can’t be expressed only in words. It is mine and has always been mine, when I was a little girl alone in her room sewing dresses and recording music on a tape deck and painting lavish imitations of the Taj Mahal.

Some people can feel things in public for others to understand, I can only make things and know later that what I felt is there, even if a pair of paper mache earrings or a handsewn bikini don’t immediately seem related to the event that made my hands start to work in the first place.

The compulsion to create never left. I still sit in a room covered with half-finished items, finished items, gifts I’ve made that I’ve never given because they didn’t feel complete. It’s just that now I’m letting it back out without apology. This is who I am. I make stuff. I feel stuff. It’s for me alone, but I’ll tell you about it here because you might be like me, and you might need permission to feel life with your hands and some clay or paper rather than the Seven Stages some book laid out for you to use as your Guide to Feeling.

And if this doesn’t make any sense to you, that’s fine too. It isn’t about you, and these losses of mine aren’t about me. I am here to bear witness to them and look up to the sky and say “These people existed, these places existed, and I loved them the best I could with everything I am, and I grieve them the same way as proof of that existence, mine and theirs.”

When the year turns and the air is chilled and sharp, these scents make a single scent, the smell of visiting my grandmother’s house when I was very small, of scuffing my feet in the heaps of dried brown cedar fronds at the edges of the asphalt on the driveway. The scent of decaying oak leaves in piles that gather in all the creases where the shape of the mountains folds in on itself. All of this a single scent, that I can call up in my imagination no matter where my feet stand, the unique fingerprint of the place I was born.

But we’ve hit a level of mass consumption where people don’t understand their machines any better than they did ten years ago, so programmers have been essentially made slaves of the lowest common denominator of user (and, to explain further, we’ve sort of created a monster user who finds virtue in not understanding, because they expect their software to be at a certain level of minimum difficulty for usage. And this is appropriate and great for like, accounting software and stuff [which at its worst is just a checkbook ledger, with simple calculations of adding, subtracting and multiplying if necessary] but terrible for innovation and for really deeply exploring these relationships between these personal machines and the people on the other side of the screen.) And yeah, first and foremost, I am a computer artist, I see the web as an art medium and the computer as a tool – but I’m beginning to understand how other people see their computers, and it’s not the same.

To explain a little bit better, a ledger is really the first step of using computer – logging information. Input. And it seems people today don’t go beyond that, but you have so many options for USING that information – graphing it, automating tasks, etc. Collecting data is so useful, even if it’s just a personal journal, but what about the next step? What about something as simple as knowing that you’re always bitching on May 17th of every year because you have a mood indicator on your journal that’s not just decoration, but provides readable feedback to you?

No eggplant for me this year! Danged rodents.

EarthBox, Day One, before raccoon invasion.

My neighbor gifted us with an EarthBox and a handful of plants to use with it – zucchini, eggplant, and red bell peppers. The first night I had it all set up, raccoons ransacked it and we lost a zucchini. I’m pretty sure they were going for the water reservoir, so I discreetly left other sources of water open on the deck for the next few days and it worked, they haven’t touched the box since.

EarthBox tucked away at left

Monday, Josh gave me my favourite present, an hour of shopping at the nursery. I picked up one apricot double-blossomed hollyhock, and six dwarf “Queeny Purple” hollyhocks. I see hollyhocks all over town this time of year – there’s a little church near Knapp’s Cutoff that has them growing out of a split in the asphalt. I love them. They are the quintessential cottage flower, and I hope mine live long enough to blossom.

Can you spot the hollyhocks? Me either.

I’ve never really been terribly interested in growing flowers, but my neighbor (yes, the same neighbor who gave us the EarthBox) has the perfect cottage garden – an enormous colorful jumble of pots and bright flowers (every kind of viola and pansies, bleeding heart and columbine, sunflowers and hollyhocks, irises and daylilies) that flourish and come back every year, and she’s inspired me to add more color to the giant bowl of green periwinkle that is our front garden/yard.

Snapshots from Mary’s cottage garden next door. Isn’t it gorgeous?!

I also picked up two tomato plants (one Celebrity, one Early Girl). Neither are heirloom, nor organic*, but at this point, I’ll settle for “alive”. I diligently saved seeds from my hand-grown heirloom varieties last year, and when it became clear that I was not able to do the indoor fussing necessary to start 100+ vegetables like last year (only to end up with about eight at the end of the season) I tried direct sowing the cherry variety in containers. No love so far. So I bought a couple instead. They’re already flowering. I might actually get to make pasta sauce this year (I will add that I DID meet last year’s goal of eating at least one Greek salad made from entirely homegrown vegetables, but it was a close shave- the cucumbers ripened long after the last of our tomatoes, so I was hanging on to two tomatoes for that salad for about two weeks).

*wait, I just read the side of the pot the Celebrity variety came in, and it claims to be both heirloom and organic. Well.

Last year's gardening goal - homegrown Greek salad

Lastly, I expanded my herb collection with some creeping rosemary, lemon verbena, and chives. All three I’ve tried to start by hand, and met with little success – chives are weirdly difficult for me. I want a lush pot of them, I usually end up with a wilted handful. Rosemary I have successfully started, but they’ve never grown a second set of leaves before dying off, so I’ve been looking for a strong mother plant I could take cuttings from. Josh found it and bought it, I wouldn’t have spent $6 for it if he hadn’t picked it up. :) It’s gorgeous tho, and I’m hoping it’ll help fill in some of the bare spots at the top of the driveway where our lavendar is (doing beautifully, I might add).

Lavendar!

So right now on my deck, I have chives, basil, verbena and three varieties of violas growing, plus all my vegetables – the zucchini, eggplant, peppers and tomatoes. I have radishes and carrots coming up in one pot, and mixed lettuces, greens and rhubarb chard coming up in another. And last year’s purple oxalis over-wintered beautifully and is once more flowering in birdcages all over my deck. I worked so hard last year for very little yield that I didn’t want to waste time this year on plants for the gophers and ground squirrels to eat, so in the back of my head I’d been planning to container grow everything on the deck this year for easier watering (and easier water recycling – it’s much simpler to dump leftover dish water, water from the cat’s bowl, etc. on plants on the deck than to walk them out to the back herb bed). All I managed was a few seeds thrown into last year’s flower pots, and a daily misting to keep them moist – if we hadn’t been gifted with vegetables, I don’t think I’d have ended up with the lovely little garden we have going right now – but it’s easier to add a few plants or sow a few seeds here and there when you’re already taking care of some.

One of three varieties of mint we grow for tea and mojitos.

Violas, sedum and oxalis

Basil, chives, greens and root crops (carrots, radishes) today

The first year we were here, we planted three lavendar plants, and I love them. Beyond measure. I visit them and run my hands along them so that I can go back to my desk smelling of lovely heavy lavendar. We added three more last year that the voles promptly ate, which was really upsetting, so I’m trying to do more “layering” propagation of the strong plants we already have, so I can plant lavendar all along our back hillside in the back garden. Growing perennials is a really novel experience for me- the fact that Mom’s hellebore and bulbs and peonies come back every year is mind-boggling. I see them as an investment in the shape of our land. Now I just need to find a good sunny spot to put last year’s grapevine in – it’s still in the pot, but looks wonderful.

Mom's lilacs, grown from Omi's lilacs.

That’s one powerful windowsill! The pics below are going to be used in a book on urban gardening by Spanish publishers
Ormobook.

1) Masanobu Fukuoka’s One Straw Revolution (making seedballs from my Freedom Seeds – support the Soil and Health Library if you’re looking for your own copy)

2) Impersonating a plant on Identi.ca for April Fool’s day – thirteen or fourteen years of webbing, and this is the first time I’ve actually joined in the pranks.

3) Blooms. And vistas. And Josh.

And let’s be honest – did you want incessant philosophical ruminations based on my daily bird feeding excursions, or did you want me to take advantage of the fact that I love public domain video archives and share my faves? I guessed you’d want the latter. But we’re back to the former.

In September I switched my CMS of choice from WordPress to Habari. I was really excited – Habari was going to allow me to grow this site easily for another ten years, and another ten after that. And the interface! Oh, it was a joy to use – pretty, fast, clean and simple.

Then I didn’t use it.

Habari was never going to get a fair shake from me, I have to admit. I spend 8-12 hours a day using WordPress on behalf of our clients, and to participate in Illustration Friday. As irked as I was by the slowness of the WordPress 2.7 admin panel, eventually my stubbornness was worn down simply by numbers – all the plugins I worked with and customized daily were for WordPress. When I outlined new features for this site in my imagination, the underlying framework was always WordPress. Yargh.

This site has always been my web playground – sometimes I break things and leave it, sometimes I turn it into a video blog, sometimes I wipe it clean and leave a simple splash screen up for months at a time, until the changing of the seasons romances me back here. This is where I ask all my questions – how can I explore my travel photos to really convey a sense of the places I visited? How can I dress it up like a magazine so all this useless streaming info about my web wanderings gets displayed? What can I do to bring a little sunshine into these pixels?
It’s my messy notebook and my digital imagination, and it’s shown up in my dreams for over ten years now. I’ve dumped some of my thirteen years of web making into WordPress since I first installed it here five years ago, and there’s much more archived outside of it that I’ve yet to integrate – and I may never. Let it be a mystery to explore, this digital past. For once, I’m more excited and curious about what Brianna.org will be like in the future.

Josh gives some usability straight talk over at Joshix.com

I’ve always felt this was by far the best arrangement of this song – I like the Zombies version a lot too.

I am re-launching brianna.org in August to celebrate 10 years of experimenting on the Web at this domain name (my first personal site launched in late 1996). As part of this project, over the last year I’ve been adding to my archives and moving things from my hard drive of collected digital ruminations to the WordPress backend that currently powers this site. I have over 10,000 photographs of my travels through Europe and the United States that I have been adding to my archive.

I decided when the Orphan Works issue was first raised at the Illustration Friday blog that we need more artists who are actually living the models of radical copyright freedom and open source art distribution – to really live the model to see if it could work, to make a living as an artist while openly sharing creative works. To that end, I am going to release all of my artworks that are seven years old or older into the public domain, and license the rest under a Creative Commons or BSD license (I haven’t decided yet – the BSD license actually says what I want it to, but the Creative Commons folks are working for a larger agenda that I really support) with the intent of all my works at brianna.org being free to use for personal AND commercial purposes.

My biggest fear when this idea first occurred to me (oh, in 2000 or so – I’ve had time to work this one through) was that my pieces would be used to further hateful or violent agendas. Overtime, that one fear didn’t seem like a big enough obstacle for me to desist from doing as I feel is right – opening my art to the global creative community. Anybody who spends five minutes talking to me knows that I am 100% for the art of the mashup. Take what I have made, and make something else from it. Please. And then send me a link, not because you have to, but because I will be so pleased to share what you’ve created.

I’m still working out the kinks and legal details, but I’ve modified the licensing on my Flickr images to a Creative Commons license that should be free for personal and commercial use, possibly with attribution (Flickr doesn’t offer the full range of CC licenses). This does not mean you can use pictures of my friends and family in your advertisements: I don’t have model releases for those photos, and I’m slowly setting all of my Flickr photos with people in them to a different license to make sure they’re protected. Everything else is freely available – I’ve recently added a selection of pics from Rome and Venice to Flickr to test it out. These pics aren’t the best – they need work. So I uploaded them at a high resolution and you are free to clone out the little blurry spot in the sky from my time in Rome when I wasn’t able to clean my sensor.

I will be saying a lot more on this as we get closer to the 10 year anniversary of this site.

Lastly, this should go without saying, but my opinions on copyright law are my own and are not a component of how things are done at Utopian.net.

ANATHEA

Fresh from the desert mountain, a shade of red you’re not likely to see again this side of a Belle Epoque bordello.

Yesterday we purchased five hearty and hale goldfish, and one interesting water plant, installed them in an old stock tank my mother likely picked up at some antique-fair-garage-sale-etc. and then sat back to watch them do fish things, like hide under rocks and make themselves invisible.
We named them all Eric. Except the black one, we call him “black Eric”. I voted for Klaus, but then the joke wouldn’t have worked.

Danse Serpentine

Lumiere Brothers, c. 1899

Hand-colored

via CuteOverload

by Waverly Films

“So many out-of-the-way things had happened lately, that Alice had begun to think that very few things indeed were really impossible.”

~ Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

Kale, carrots, dill
Look how far we’ve come since January! These were all sown when the moon was waxing gibbous in the sign of Cancer. I’m not being very scientific in my moon phase sowing experiments, and I have no idea if it had much bearing, but I do know that I’ve been sowing seeds only during a waxing moon for as long as I can remember, so I don’t have much to compare it to.

Attempting to sow by moon phase means I found myself on a prime planting day (astrologically speaking) without any of my seed starting supplies. So I improvised with pie pans, warming trays, coffee cup sleeves and toilet rolls. For anyone trying out the coffee cup sleeves, I am having a hard time with them collecting damping-off fungus – it hasn’t mattered to the seedlings yet, the cinnamon is keeping the soil alright, but the sleeves themselves get fuzzy without treatment. Vermiculite and seed starting mix from the local hardware store (plus a touch of compost from the garden). Everything kept moist with rainwater so far, a rather stunning feat in the arid California climate, but really I’ve only need about a gallon of water yet – we’ll see how long I can keep it up when the weather is actually warming up.

Baby dill

Originally uploaded by briannaorg

Winter surprise

Originally uploaded by briannaorg

It should be noted for the purposes of this record that it has snowed for several hours this morning even though the sun is shining fully and brightly. The birds do not seem to notice.

I just adore this picture. Today my mom would have been 48, and Cathy’s birthday would be coming up in February.

To me, 2007 started with our departure from Paros and our return to the Valley of Enchantment to make it our home. So the story begins in December and moves through January. Tomorrow, I’ll post photos from February and March, and so on until we meet the New Year and sign off for a few days. Most of these photos have never been seen before, and few, if any, have been post-processed. My refined photos will be on display in my portfolio – until then, these are the messy documents of my real life.

You can view the Flickr set here.

December 2006 at brianna.org – we leave Paros and pause a bit in Athens and London before heading home to our newly renovated little house in the Valley of Enchantment.

January 2007 at brianna.org – I read fortunes in Greek coffee dregs and try to settle in to life in the little house without Mom.

It was in one of those chat rooms, six months before I had even graduated high school, where I met Josh. He was JGatsby806, I was Annaethea (annathea was already taken).

We were seventeen when we moved in to that place – the day after my hastily-pulled together high school graduation, two week’s after Sé’s birthday. She’d been out of high school for a year, at that point. We were innocent sophisticates, and accustomed to being independent. Our living room was full of computers and musical instruments.

Josh joined the picture that November when he came out to California to visit a friend he’d gone to school with. This friend was living with a girlfriend, and didn’t have a place for Josh to sleep, so either Sé offered or he asked if he could stay with us. We told him if he showed up and was anything other than a 19 year old boy from Missouri, then we would have him arrested. He took that bet.

The night before his flight was due to arrive, Sé and I were in Westwood, hanging out with her brother’s UCLA friends. We’d tried to go to a rave that night, but our attention wandered after the third or fourth number we were supposed to call and we found ourselves driving around aimlessly, so we parked at someone’s dorm and played drinking games. Sé and I weren’t drinkers, and this was the first time I’d ever played any kind of drinking game (the one Josh and I later invented deserves an entry of its own – it has to do with Martha Stewart). We ended up drinking about half a beer in total when Sé looked up and exclaimed “Oh my gosh! Josh is coming tomorrow, isn’t he? We have to clean the house!” We hadn’t talked to Josh in a couple of weeks at that point, and had completely forgotten his pending visit. So we left the party and headed home to clean.

When I think of the strange interweaving of chance and naivete and that similar chaotic intelligence that the three of us so eerily share, I see so many places where this story would have been different. He missed his first flight, you know. Overslept. So Sé and I stayed up all night tidying the house and making pots of French press coffee, and I went to bed before she did because I had to work. I had a couple of jobs by then, after a tense and jobless summer, and my favourite was at a tanning salon a short walk from our house. I could read books or write poems for the whole duration of my shift, and there was free Snapple in the fridge for employees.

So Josh called at 730am to tell us he was waiting for the next flight, and I scrapped my plans to pick him up with Sé and headed to work instead. I’d glued little nail decorations to my eyelids (we’d been trying to go to a rave 12 hours before, remember?) and the eyelash glue was unforgiving the next morning, so I wore them to work and fielded questions for my entire shift over whether or not they were pierced – seriously? My eyelids? I was dressed in an enormous multicolored button-up shirt that had belonged to my aunt, and my favourite thirty-year old bell bottoms that had once belonged to a boyfriend of my mother’s.

In short, I looked like what I was – a messy, intense little girl with a fascination for makeup and a complete inability to control her hair.

I was in the back of the salon, folding a load of towels fresh from the dryer and in a rare giddy mood from sleeplessness and a steady diet of rice and French press coffee. I think I was singing a Beatles song. The bell over the door jingled and S̩ called out so I skipped out into the hallway and laughed the whole way to the door. Josh was dressed in a yellow ski shirt with a grey horizontal stripe, and had his hair cut so short that at first I thought it was buzzed. He looked so hesitant and cute and as he shook my hand my inner nature took over and I started teasing him about something Рthe haircut, the yellow. He shot back and then S̩ jumped in and it was on.

I remember every single second of the next two weeks while he visited, and someday it will be fascinating material for a biography. For a blog entry, however, suffice it to say that yesterday Josh and I were sitting in Sé’s living room with Ned, the three of us talking over each other and the energy surging and I realized that I have spent the last ten years learning how precious those nights are. It was so much fun.

So on 11/15, it will have been ten years exactly since Sé brought Josh to the tanning salon and I teased him about his outfit and he followed it with a deadpan inquiry as to exactly how I’d managed to get staples into my eyes. Love at first sight.

I am so happy she was with us at our wedding.

I knew when I started this endeavor that I’d save this movie for last – it is easily the movie that has frightened me the most. I first watched it alone during a thunderstorm at the age of fourteen, the vicious winds were a constant roar outside. I could only hear the wind and the screams from the television. I didn’t hear the tree fall next to the window, and when my mother came in later with a pale face and wide eyes and asked me if I had heard it fall, I didn’t hear the door open and the sound of her voice behind me made me scream.

I love this movie.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Night of the Living Dead – 01:35

Director: George A. Romero
Producer: Karl Hardman, Russell Streiner

Click here to view the embedded video.

“Vincent” by Tim Burton, Narrated by Vincent Price.