walking on the beaches, looking at the peaches

Things I have gotten totally pumped about within the last few hours, end to end, causing me to kind of want to tell everyone about it despite being surrounded by squares:

• Pose Drawing!!!! I've been doing 90-second stints, and am already feeling a lot more confident in my grasp of anatomy. Especially drawing heads with the egg-shape method.
• The following songs:
  - Ratatat - "Alps"
  - Queen - "I Want to Break Free"
  - The Everly Brothers - "Cathy's Clown"
  - Homestuck - "Crystamanthequins" and "Three In The Morning (RJ's I Can Barely Sleep In This Casino Mix)"
• David Lynch's Blue Velvet (feat. Kyle MacLachlan. Jegus.)

• Getting a new computer through a combination of Brock's enduring generosity and forking some cash over to the fine fellows at Newegg. I WILL DRAW SO MANY THINGS ON MY NEW LARGE MONITOR SCREEN! Note: the last time I acquired a new computer was in 2004, hopy shit.

Lately my favorite activity at work has been not doing work, because there is none to do. That's fine with me. I just wish bringing in my Wacom tablet was acceptable, to say nothing of potentially functional with these shit computers.

OKAY PEACE EVERYONE

you could be a star - it ain't hard

You guys, what is with "everything" bagels? I was just eating one on my lunchbreak*, and realized that nothing about their name indicates what is actually involved in their flavoring. They could be flavored like everything you hate about Wisconsin! Or everything going bad in the back of the Crazy Mocha refrigerator. It's a risky option, is all I'm saying. I would never order one if I was in America for the first time, speaking English with a thick Estonian accent.

Anyway, times! Here is a bit of weird fate-style hooliganry: this weeekend people complimented my singing voice in a pretty sincere fashion, enough to increase my confidence in it and start believing that it is maybe something other people would like to hear sometimes! And then today one of my Patrick friends asked if I wanted to sing for/with his band which I already like a lot. And which also contains other good friends of mine. This is exciting, except that this move actually decreases the band's dedicated fanbase by 50%. Whoops.

Pretty soon I can start practicing striking this pose:

Maybe I should get some wrist bands.

*Other things I did on my lunch break: crocheted more of a green beret; listened to Sonic Youth. It was the kind of lunchbreak EVERYONE WANTS but ONLY I GET TO HAVE SUCKAAAHS!

visual cue

I made this for Brock the other day, as an explanatory assistant for my feelings on the organic/local/conventional/green/yuppie/hippie/trustafarian/blagblag issue as relates to fresh produce.
Frankly, I still want to tweak it into oblivion and add a million nodes of interim decisions, but this is the gist:



Extremely poor resolution thanks to my extremely old work computer operating system. Also, it appears in this relatively simplistic, streamlined presentation precisely because I made it at work and could not tinker with unlimited care. Look for the expanded version... sometime. Actually, what's more likely is that I will dig through my gmail archives and find other diagrams, charts, illustrations, or pastiches I have produced in a chat-inspired mania, and post those instead. Perhaps it will be a regular feature. Perhaps!

ETA [8/11/09, 7:35pm]: Updated (though not much expanded) version, after all. I started with adding an extra notch on the hierarchy of preference... and overhauled all the fonts. I can't resist the temptation to muck around with font styling. For historical purposes, original here.

a pot of cabbage. i shall call it "pottage."

Image from 101 Cookbooks.

I just finished off this Rustic Cabbage Soup from 101 Cookbooks. As far as aesthetics go, this soup is not in the running for any kind of prize. And, it's not really glamorous enough to serve on fancy occasions - I find this applies to many things cabbage-related, but perhaps I have a nasty little cabbage bias. (I do.)

However, if this soup is good for anything, it's good for using up a giant honking cabbage head I got in my third of the CSA share from Penn's Corner. I have to admit that my first attempt at using this cabbage was a disaster - okonomiyaki that tasted like sawdust, entirely my fault. But I've come back from my stumble, and now I'm pleased to announced that this soup is worth the hour and a half I just spent slicing, draining, chopping, and testing. I did deviate from the recipe as posted on Heather's (incredibly useful, informative, and imaginitive) site -- I added some dried split peas that have been abandoned on my shelves for an embarrassing amount of time, and I used chickpeas instead of the white beans she suggests. But, as with many of Heather's recipes, I think this one was meant to adapt well to whatever's on hand. It really does reach maximum satisfaction with the Parmesan topping.

In other news, here's what I would look like if I were a cartoon rendering of a typist from the 1960s:(Donald Draper hates my guts, even when I'm bringing him coffee in the middle of the typing pool floor. P.S. You can do this too at AMC's MADMEN Yourself page. You could even be something other than a typist!)