A week on Sunday, no. 44

Welcome to another edition of things I found interesting this week. But first, Halloween! Our kids dressed up as a witch, a sorcerer and an old man and then dispersed near and far with friends to collect candy. Here they are, pictured with a friend dressed as a zombie. 

Our collection of carved pumpkins…

From Robert Caro

I watched Dwarkesh Patel’s interview with Robert Caro (here on Youtube). Caro’s generosity is admirable. And Dwarkesh is a considerate host. Present too is a chasm of years that can barely be bridged in an hour despite the supports of hours of research on the host’s part, English language in common, and good intention on the guest’s. Caro has answered interviewers’ questions many times, and interviewers have subjects of interest in common. Getting past those smooth-as-pebble answers is anyone’s challenge. A bit melancholy to see the interview end on the subject of loneliness?

To Knausgard

This BBC feature on Karl Ove Knausgard (here) was nice to watch. It reminded me of having enjoyed reading the first two volumes of My Struggle in 2018. Take this quotation for example…

When you visualized the future and conjured up a world in which urban life had spread everywhere and man had achieved his long-desired symbiosis with the machine, you never took account of the simplest elements, beer for example, so golden and flavoursome and robust, made from grain in the field and hops in the meadow, or bread, or beetroot with its sweet but dark earthy taste, all this which we had always eaten and drunk at tables made of wood, inside windows through which beams of sunlight fell. What did people do in those seventeenth-century palaces, with the liveried servants, high-heeled shoes and powdered wigs pulled down over skulls full of seventeenth-century thoughts, what else if not drink beer and wine, eat bread and meat and piss and shit? The same applied to the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Conceptions of humanity changed constantly, conceptions of the world and nature too, all manner of strange ideas and beliefs emerged and vanished, useful and useless objects were discovered, science penetrated ever deeper into the world’s mysteries, machines grew in number, speeds increased and ever greater areas of old lifestyles were abandoned, but no one dreamed of discarding beer or changing it. Malt, hops, water. Field, meadow, stream. And basically that was how it was with everything. We were rooted in the archaic past, nothing radical about us, our bodies or needs had not changed since the first humans saw the light of day somewhere in Africa 40,000 years ago or however long Homo sapiens had existed. (p 521)

“Tiens!” As they say in French, to mean a kind of delight in discovery… In this paragraph, an appreciation of historical context (the “understanding” that biographers like Caro obsess over) and the deft display of commonalities (an aspect of the beauty of literature). 

On Conversations with Tyler (here) I like how, over time, the desperate need for solitude he once experienced (mentioned here), has given way to acceptance:

I think that’s the best advice I ever got — to accept everything that happens. So if you have many children, it’s a good thing. If you don’t have children, it’s a good thing. You have to embrace it because that’s your life. That’s where you are, and writing should be connected to that — or painting or whatever it is. 

Reading

This week I finished The Rings of Saturn, by W. G. Sebald. It felt exactly as a blurb describes it: “Stunning and strange - like a dream you want to last forever.” A quote:

If today, when our gaze is no longer able to penetrate the pale reflected glow over the city and its environs, we think back to the eighteenth century, it hardly seems possible that even then, before the Industrial Age, a great number of people, at least in some places, spent their lives with their wretched bodies strapped to looms made of wooden frames and rails, hung with weights, and reminiscent of instruments of torture or cages. It was a peculiar symbiosis which, perhaps because of its relatively primitive character, makes more apparent than any later form of factory work that we are able to maintain ourselves on this earth only be being harnessed to the machines we have invented. (p 282-3)

Cooking and baking

Our menu plan has cyclical favourites, year over year; like last year, we had “Five Spice Slow Cooker Pork with Noodles” and Deb Perelman’s “Vinegar Slaw with Cabbage and Dill” (here). We also tried Jeanine Donofrio’s “BBQ Tofu Bowls with Creamy Apple Ranch Slaw” here via The Dinner Plan. 

Last Sunday we had “Salmon and Tomatoes en papillote” from Dorie Greenspan. She has a recipe for 1 serving here. This, served with a simple fried rice, is a treat.

The sourdough “acquiring the skills” project continues, this week augmented by the acquisition of a Cambro. 

Finding this, and a bench scraper too, lead me to Winnipeg stores I hadn’t previously been in before… A Plus Restaurant Equipment and Supplies is downtown on McDermot and will be updating their website (here), making it possible to order items online.  

And d.a. Niels Gourmet Kitchenware (website) near the airport is fun to browse.  For cookies alone, there are all these cookie scoops and cookie cutters!

Enjoying

• Often, I don’t care about discoveries very much… but this one, of wheat (see here) (via) delighted my prairie sensibilities.

• On a recent episode of the 10% Happier podcast (Youtube link here), guest Katherine May said something I really liked: “I increasingly think that the work for those of us who are not on the front line at the moment, apart from giving all the support we can, is to almost store up those soft parts of life, to kind of maintain them and look after them and tend to them, so that they are ready for the people who need them. It’s almost like we’re maintaining a vision of the world as it should be against that hideous mainstream […] vision of bitterness, selfishness, snatching, anger. It’s the opposite of that. It’s like the work that we do is to take care of all of the stuff that’s beautiful […].”

• To follow Ken Sakata on TikTok is to discover the craftsmanship of clothing. Contrasting Sebald’s depiction of loom workers in the eighteenth century are these women, working for Kuska Fabric. Sakata’s description of the intricacy of silk weaving at this fabric mill is heartening (here).  

• Two outings this week lead me to lunch at the Oakwood Café with one friend, and The Forge with another. The Oakwood Café has recently changed ownership (see their introductory post on Instagram) and further signalling this shift is an overhaul of the restaurant’s decor… the vibe is curated vintage finds and I was charmed. Tables have their own sets of salt and pepper shakers. And look at this creamer!

• As for The Forge (website)… Writing more than once about the local neighbourhood coffee shop contravenes some vague rules that enforce novelty around here, but this bagel shop keeps evolving. It will soon be celebrating one year of business, and when it opened, it rewarded sweet-tooth expectations. On this week’s visit I chose the BLT on a Swiss and Ale bagel and the flavour combo was perfection. You might expect a business to open with their best foot forward, but this place keeps finding new ways to treat the tastebuds, and I’m happy for it!

How nerds throw a party

Finally, on the subject of entertaining, and because its fall, I really liked Malcolm Gladwell’s assessment of his father’s ability to gather students. He tells the following story:

My father, who was a nerd, but a very clever nerd, went to his graduate students. He said, “I’m going to have a party at my house called the leaf raking party.” And then the first year, like, five guys came, raked leaves, and then he had a dinner. And then they played party games of the sort that mathematics PhD students would like. 

The next year, 15 people came. The next year, 40 people came. The next year people who had got their PhDs drove like hundreds of miles to come. And by the end of the leaf raking party, by the end, before we moved out of the house, it was literally like a hundred people from […] like 25 nationalities. […] it was this kind of joyous event. And no one cared that they were raking our leaves. […] 

Your immediate sense of […] “oh, it’s a cynical act - he’s outsourcing labor to his grad students.” But if you knew my father, you knew that was the furthest thing from his mind. He understood […] ‘this is going to be way more fun if we do it together. A little outdoor physical labor is great. These are PhD students who are in their room all day.’ And then we’re going to have a fantastic dinner, and then we’re going to play the nerdiest, most complex party games […].

[…] The only reason he had that insight into how to create enduring connection with these people was that he was a nerd. And it was inconceivable for him just to have a party and invite people and have them mill around and talk. He wouldn’t have known what to do. He had to contrive this elaborate thing and that was the beauty of it.

He concludes:

The nerds, in compensating for their nerdiness, make the world a beautiful place. (Told here, on Revisionist History.)

Walking the dog

Our path along the river begins here, with an abandoned tree house, the kids who might have played there have long since grown…

It’s another week of pretty fall colours… more bronze and gold and green and a pretty handsome dog. 

If you time it right, he will look into the camera…

Happy Sunday!

A week on Sunday no. 43

Welcome to a new edition of the various things I found interesting this week. To set the scene, a picture from Friday, when it was so warm, a giant pile of leaves could be bagged in shorts and t-shirts.

Research

To answer the question “who owned the house at 216 La Verandrye” I’ve been going through copies of the Henderson Directory on the Internet Archive. There’s a rumour that this house, which once belonged to my husband’s grandmother, was owned by a religious community, but I haven’t found evidence for this yet. As I’ve been tracking ownership backwards through time, I’ve come across a change in the way houses were numbered on that street, and a short-lived attempt by the city of Winnipeg to change street names between 1891 and 1893. (A 2002 Winnipeg Free Press article by Christian Cassidy contains this plaintive quote by James Gray: “If Winnipeg originally had been laid out by surveyors instead of meandering cows, and if the pioneer urge to erect buildings in the most outlandish places had been squelched, Winnipeg would have little cause to worry about town planning today.”)

I’m ashamed about how slowly I work, how my research seems to rely on laborious methods. At the same time, these tiny discoveries seem more palpable than if I had read Cassidy’s article alone (here). Not all aspects are slow, but this week has been a pleasant plunge back into this kind of data gathering.

World news of an unexpected death

A Catholic priest, Fr. Patricio Sanchez Molinari, died in Ecuador last week and news of his death was relayed everywhere, no doubt because of the apparent irony of its circumstance. (An obit here.) If I give myself permission to imagine this priest, I think of someone sincere, muddling through pastoral life, maybe having visited a sick parishioner, maybe concerned about the effects of social media; either way, having eaten, going to the church, smiling at the people, putting on his robes. He feels inspired to talk about death, and so he does. And what is an accident some minutes later happens to be recorded so that not only is it shocking, but also, the sermon he felt inspired to give doesn’t just leave his mouth for the benefit or the possible ennui of his parishioners. Instead, it takes a leap and becomes a ricochet. What was he talking about? “One day, all of us here will also die, and sometimes the time we have spent on certain things does not hold as much meaning as the time we have spent with God. The quality time we dedicate to God, to our brothers and sisters, to our spouse, to our children, and to our family, that is time spent in the best possible way.” (Source) 

The news was about the inauspiciousness. But how often is it that a priest dies and the whole world can hear his last sermon? And furthermore, that their regular sermon can be true to their values and also a fitting testimony? We, as a society, insist on the bad; but it can make us blind to the good.

Baking (sourdough)

Perhaps this sourdough looks good, but learning to make this bread has been an initiation to a world of “crumb”.

Just as a stylist learns to judge an outfit, I am learning to judge bread texture and study flaws in surface appearance.

I’d rather get to the successful end of this process before posting the intermediate pictures, open as they could be to the gaze of more successful bakers than myself. Nonetheless… it shows the current preoccupation I have with sourdough. Nothing else I made this week has taken as much space in my head. For this I credit a book by Matthew James Duffy called Bread etc., published last year in Canada. 

When I mentioned adding this book to a Christmas wishlist, my daughter declared that I didn’t need another book about bread. But there’s a strong case to be made for this one… Duffy’s experience, which he unpretentiously details in the introduction, is wide and varied and his interest in bread has a charming nerdiness to it. Perhaps what is best about this book is its combination of excellent writing, Duffy’s teaching background, and the thoughtful organization. For every step of a basic recipe there is a minimum two-page explanation and accompanying pictures. Reading through the first chapters while my kids were at piano, I got excited about making sourdough. So while the beautiful Big Book of Bread launched this adventure, and Hailee Catalano’s sourdough starter recipe helped me overcome my fear of commitment, Matthew Duffy’s book is exactly the friendly teacher I need in order to learn how to improve. 

Enjoying

• The “What It’s Like To Be…” podcast is back with a second season, debuting this week with a contortionist. I hadn’t expected to learn so much about contortion, nor have someone in their late twenties have such appreciative points of view. About her mother she says: “she did the best she possibly could to give me all the tools to succeed and […] the road after that was […] in my hands, and it was a lot of work for me. But at the same time, without those tools, you have nothing.” And about how her profession shaped her perspective on the world: “for every tiny niche thing out there, there’s someone with a full breadth of knowledge, top to bottom, and it’s their whole world. It’s really fascinating, and it’s awesome to love in a world where there can be so many diverse interests.” (Here) 

• I’ve been finding motivation to get on the stationary bike for a bit of cardio if I can watch a few episodes of Design Notes on Netflix. In one episode, House and Garden featured shell artist Mel Campion’s house and studio. Her work is fun to look at (her website has a gallery here) and her house tour exhibited an ideal harmony between artist and environment.

A section on bugs…

• My sister celebrated a birthday last week and in the Venn diagram of our interests, hers, in bugs, is one that doesn’t overlap. Nonetheless, her love of bugs has made me consider them with more respect than I would normally. Should I learn more about isopods? Sure! Why not! While not technically an insect (they are a crustacean!) they fall in the general category of “bug” (“any insect or other small anthropod”) and look how many there are! This picture of an isopod’s shed skin fascinated me (see here). (Via) 

• In the same vein are amphipods, distinguishing themselves from isopods by the fact that they have two kinds of feet. And I only know about these things thanks to the wonderful Geo Rutherford, who every year in October does “spooky lake month” on TikTok (her webpage here). Lake Baikal makes repeat appearances and among its many peculiarities are the larger-than-normal amphipods. (An article from New Scientist here.)  

• And this week, the Sidedoor podcast featured an episode on beetles (here)! I already knew that the world contains a lot of beetles (“a quarter of all known animal life on Earth”) having read Candace Savage’s book Prairie (mentioned here and here) which featured a memorable, beetle-related, anecdote. She writes: “Asked what he had learned about the Creator from a lifetime spent studying His works, the Scottish biologist J. B. S. Haldane is said to have quipped, ‘He seems to have an inordinate fondness for beetles.’” (p 231) (Wikipedia relays this quote as well, here.) The podcast was an interesting listen.

Walking the dog

This week, the maple trees are laying a carpet at our feet. 

And the line of willow trees look soft from a distance.

Do you think Enzo would make for a good construction worker for Halloween? He’ll stay on the job only so long as the supply of treats doesn’t run out, or an animal make an appearance.

Happy Sunday!

A week on Sunday no 42

Swimming (Part 4)

(Part 1 here, part 2 here, part 3 here)

It has been a year now since Christian and I have taken up the habit of going to the pool Friday night. We once had to miss a week and when I returned to the pool I noticed myself almost embracing the familiarity of the water. That feeling in itself was a reassuring sign of improvement. Although I can’t yet swim and have not graduated to the deep end, there have been milestones worth recording in this self-experiment.

As with the beginning of most projects, I had a lot of enthusiasm. This waned when I felt like my progress plateaued but gradually, the accumulation of practice and exposure lead to increasing comfort in the water. 

I fill an hour in the pool with drills… kicking in streamline position, pulling using a pull buoy, sideways kicking with fins - all while wearing a swimmer’s snorkel; and backstroke and floating and rhythmic breathing in between.

A significant snag in my progression was the fear of being unable to breathe. Fear of water is very common in adults and tackling breathing has been akin to undoing a knot. I started watching videos by Caribe Swim (here). I’ve noticed that when I’ve hit a wall in my progress, I need to find techniques that break things down into even smaller increments. Here’s a recent example. Step 4 of “The Shallow Water Mastery Course” (here) teaches a forward glide, with a head lift to catch a breath. I tried this repeatedly, over weeks. I’d pause to practice breathing exercises and relaxation techniques (here) and still, I could not lift my head to breathe. I realized that lifting my head and breathing was in fact two things. The pressure of having to catch my breath in this movement was preventing me from being able to execute the head lift. Decoupling breath from the movement made it possible, just last Friday - marking the 50th hour in the pool - to glide, holding my breath, then glide and raise my head out of the water, then glide and stop with my feet on the ground to catch my breath. The point was to prove to myself that I could lift my head without having to touch the bottom of the pool. And this felt like the happiest success, because by continuing to practice the movement, I am confident I’ll get to a point where catching a breath will come naturally. 

These small wins, and the growing ease of movement I feel in the water are encouraging signs that this experiment is working, even if very slowly. 

Telephone table / night stand

I found this telephone table on Facebook marketplace and instantly liked the design. I’ve given it a dual purpose in our bedroom as nightstand and as menu planning station… the filing cabinet fits neatly underneath and houses recipe printouts categorized mainly by ingredient. Nearby I have a shelf of cookbooks. Making a “station” for this weekly exercise, complete with its own chair, fills me with content!

Collage

In the spirit of experimentation and making art, this is another batch of little collages… They are for individuals, but also, they are fun, and I lose the sense of time cutting, arranging, and glueing things into place.

In the spirit of this exercise, Brendan Leonard has a video about making art here. What is unique about collage is that I don’t feel pressure to improve. With drawing, I do. With collage, it’s just experimentation. It’s a true hobby!

Cooking and Baking

I made these fruit and nut-filled “crowns” on Thanksgiving as a change from regular bread. They are of the “looks impressive” category of bread. 

Christian brought home such a large butternut squash that not only did I use it for Melissa Clark’s Butternut Squash Pizza, from her cookbook Dinner; I cut up the rest for soup (recipe here) and served a butternut-squash-themed meal. 

Another vegetarian meal we tried this week was Anna Jones’ “Proper Chilli”. I can’t remember how I had access to the recipe from her Substack (here) but The Guardian offers the recipe here. This recipe, like Bolognese, is markedly better on the second day. On the first day, the spices all clamour for attention, and the raucous competition made me second-guess their quantities. On the second day everything calms down a bit. You can enjoy a bowl as if you were a passenger on a train, cupping a bowl in your hands while taking in the scenery outside. 

Finally, I really liked Maggie Hoffman’s podcast episode with Mark Bittman (here). Towards the end, Maggie asks for cookbook recommendations, and Bittman offers a list and concludes “the important thing is that people cook. It’s not really how they cook or what they cook or how they learn how to cook. It’s that they cook.” Maggie asks why and Bittman answers: 

Cooking is just better. I mean, cooking for yourself, cooking for your loved ones, it’s just, it’s better than not. […] Not everybody can cook at home and not everybody has the time or the ingredients. Not everybody even has a kitchen. But for those of us who do and can, I think it’s sort of the first step toward good head and a good life is teaching yourself and your loved ones how to cook and cooking for your loved ones. If you can’t make the time for cooking, first you have to ask if that’s legitimate, I think, if you really don’t have the time for cooking. And if you really don’t have the time for cooking, that is a societal problem that we need to help you figure out how to address. 

At a different spot in the podcast, Bittman says “So much of what there is to cooking is experience.”

To end this… my kids… cleaning up after having made and portioned out a batch of soba noodles with sauce for school lunches…

Enjoying

• Out for lunch with a friend, we discovered one of the best wonton soup spots… it’s Aroma Bistro at 741 St. Mary’s Road, and this picture makes me want to go back for another bowl!

• Enzo being Enzo…

• Sometimes, we just want to watch a rom-com. Love at First Sight made us cry, but it was also a great love story!

• Running errands with the kids… here catching a snack at the many-mirrored KHAB Tapioca near Polo Park!

Walking the dog

Said dog pointing me in the direction he’d like to sniff…

Fall has been mild so far… It’s teasing us with all the pretty scenery…

The display of colour before everything turns white and blue and brown.

Fall teases and says, “wanna collect leaves?”

I say no! I can’t collect leaves! I have no time for a leaf collection! No space!

But fall says, look how sculptural!

And fall says, look! I made a version in pink!

Happy Sunday!

A week on Sunday, no 41

Welcome to this weekly edition, where I’ll jump straight to things I’ve appreciated this last week… 

Enjoying

• A board game: The artwork on Transmissions was what drew my son’s attention to the box, and what lead us to buying the game as a birthday present. We finally pulled it out, watched the Youtube tutorials, and spent an evening immersed in play. The game’s design didn’t feel like anything we’d tried before - points are tallied once a resource runs out - and the objective isn’t the kind that has you mentally calculating your points and comparing yourself to your opponents as in Catan for example. I liked reading this interview with its designer, Adam West, here.  

• Make your art. This is the title of John Green’s YouTube video, and, just like the little essays in The Anthropocene Reviewed (the podcast he hosted from 2018 to 2020 - here) I appreciate the reminder. (here) 

• Uncertainty. In the same vein is this blog post from The Marginalian, which I found comforting to read… It is titled “The Creative Power of Uncertainty”. I like the phrase “a continuous ‘I don’t know’.”

• Home remedy: I caught a cold last week. I ate a cookie one afternoon and then my throat was sore. In the evening I made Julia Turshen’s “Cold Elixir” (a recipe here) and discovered its warming effect on my dulled sinuses. 

• Back spasm: Muscle-relaxing pills are great for getting to sleep when I get a back spasm, but what helps me recover are short daily yoga sessions like those offered by Adriene Mishler. (This one in particular is a frequent repeat.) It doesn’t only stretch my muscles, it reminds me how to move in a way that protects my back. 

• Gratitude for the small things: A perfect poem as an oblique nod to the Thanksgiving holiday here in Canada. It’s titled “Love Like Salt” by Lisel Mueller. 

Walking the dog

Leaves have turned and are falling. The last bit of colour on display until everything goes bare…

Scenery is a jumble of tall grass, untrimmed brush, and trees, but here I spotted a new bird house!

And on an overcast day, a calm river backdrop to highlight the silhouettes.

Happy Sunday!

A week on Sunday no. 40

History of concrete

What a funny quirky movie! Christian and I left the Dan Barber theatre downtown full of thoughts… In the shower the next day, I was still thinking about Jack Macco and how Wilson’s narration feels like it tempers eagerness. “Calm down” he seems to say, “let’s have a look here.” The between-projects feeling is real. The film’s editing that cuts from one idea to the next is my favourite thing: it’s the flash of curiosity alighting on a new tangent.

I’ve read some reviews online… The Gothamist (here) has lines about Wilson’s finding “meaning in the mundane” and how he is appreciated as a “comedic visual poet”. And this one (here) by Charlie Von Peterffy includes the line “concrete in reality and metaphor is mostly a myth of reassurance”. I like that. To pave is “to cover with a layer of something so as to form a pavement-like surface” and this documentary examines covers and plays with layers. 

How to critique

Sometimes I confuse feeling inspired with critique and I appreciate the distinction Dana Jeri Maeier makes (here): 

The most important thing I learned in art school does not fit in a nice click-bait-y list, however. The lesson arrived during a critique in a painting class. A fellow student was presenting her oil painting, a beautiful still life of an orange or maybe an orange peel. At one point in the crit, I mentioned how she could add a hand or something, some indication of a narrative or backstory.

I thought I was being clever, of course. But the professor shut it down immediately.

“She could do that,” he said. “But then it wouldn’t be her painting. It would be your painting.”

The ultimate lesson: judge art on its own terms, not yours. “This is what I would have done,” is not a critique. What’s the goal of the piece? Is it achieving it? Why or why not? That probably applies to a lot of life advice, too. If it were me, I’d do this generally does not take into account the fact that the other person isn’t you.

Ageing

This quote: “Ageing is the aggressive pursuit of comfort” (via an interview with Jim Murphy here) sounded like it was in conversation with Vivian Gornick’s discussion of literature. In The Situation and the Story, Gornick compares Jean Améry’s On Aging and Seymour Krim’s “For My Brothers and Sisters in the Failure Business” and writes: “each man, as he entered middle age, seemed overcome by the realization that he had not done the work necessary to attain inner freedom […] the work [D. H.] Lawrence was referring to when he said, ‘Man is free only when he is doing what the deepest self likes, and knowing what the deepest self likes, ah! that takes some diving.’ Central to both Krim and Améry was that each one considered himself a failure because neither - by his own lights - had engaged with his own deepest self. Here was a pair of men widely separated by culture, geography, and focus - yet both haunted by the inability to have faced down their own youthful anxieties, to have made themselves dive.” (P 64)

It’s a theme that continues to gain in relevance!

Cooking + Baking

We had friends over last Friday and I made Sam Sifton’s Chicken Shawarma (a NYT recipe here) and like he says “It is perfect for an evening with family and friends.” We served it, as suggested, with home-made sauces: tahini, white, and hummus; and home-made pitas and (not our) garden-grown cucumbers, tomatoes, and quickly-fried Indian eggplants. It was a fully customizable meal, delicious in all forms! I had fun writing labels so that the buffet-style table was self-explanatory.

For company on Sunday, I made Amanda Rettke’s Chocolate Zucchini Cake from her cookbook Homestead Recipes published in 2022. The recipe, featured (here) on her website, is similar, except for the simple syrup step. Instead, I frosted the cake with store-bought Betty Crocker chocolate icing. 

Enjoying

• I like it when different reading and listening sources converge on a subject. First there was Manoush Zomorodi’s post (here) on the subject of publishing and marketing her latest book, Body Electric. One of the post’s subtitles is: “Podcasts aren’t the powerhouse converters they once were.” (Via) And then, I listened to Derek Thompson’s podcast episode with Chuck Klosterman, titled “Why Things Become Popular” (here) in which part of the discussion is an appraisal of non-fiction book sales and podcast appearances. 

• I mentioned illustrator and author Melissa Sweet in the previous post, and this week savoured her book Some Writer. I don’t think categorization should impede the enjoyment of a book, and it is all the more perfect that W. B. White who declared “I would rather wait a year than publish a bad children’s book, as I have too much respect for children” should be the subject of a biography that, in turn, treats its readers with just as much respect… One proof of this is the book’s 135-page length. Lots of good quotations, including this gentle poem (here).

• I like following Ryan Stefan (website here) on TikTok if only because it makes me able to talk about perfume with better vocabulary. His website has a great list of Canadian perfume brands.  

• I never thought of clenched vs unclenched as an attitude, until I read this article (here), and since then, I’ve  thought about it often. I know someone who laughs heartily, like the article describes, and the observation - “you can tell how much work someone has done on themselves by the depth of their laughter” - feels true. Via

Walking the dog

As soon as the wind picks up, it rains leaves. Otherwise, cool still mornings are alight with colour, and we’re enjoying every one of them!

Happy Sunday!

A week on Sunday no. 38

Welcome to a regular edition of the random things that comprise a week… outings with friends, errands, and other dailyness…

Cinnamoon - a new bakery downtown

A friend and I went to the newly opened Cinnamoon bakery on Albert street… the street with old Exchange District charm at one end, and graffitied dereliction at the other. People huddled on a stoop as the forecast fulfilled rain; others walked with brazen nonchalance, gaze up, hair down. The pale mauve colour inside matched storm cloud greys. The decor was ordered and still as leafy-green elms swung their branches around outside and the new awnings crisply fluttered. I wasn’t the ideal customer, looking for free wifi to pay for parking, and maybe wanting the trompe-l’oeil egg-on-toast to surpass what it was meant to fake was asking for too much. There were better, more ideal customers… young people who came in little lanyard-wearing troops, with smiles on their faces, excited to collectively buy pastries that shimmered with dewey cake-sweat under glass. Loose-leaf tea is listed for 7$. On the socials, everything at Cinnamoon is 10 out of 10. 

For fun

A friend suggested lunch at the Lily Stone Café in Rosenort. It’s a small town directly West of Aubigny that was a regular destination for farm-related errands for my father-in-law. Lily Stone Café is one of three businesses including The Rolly Stone restaurant and Lily Stone Gardens. A nice discovery! (Website here)

This is Enzo when his upper lip gets caught on his teeth. My daughter and I think it’s so cute!

Can you spot Christian prepping the garage fascia for paint? 

Baking

With the maintenance of sourdough starter, comes an accumulation of discard, and incorporating into rotation recipes that make delicious use of it has been a fun exercise. This week, besides crackers, I made these Sourdough Discard Cookies (recipe here) which feel like an indulgence given their use of cocoa and chips and the recent prices for chocolate. The cookies have a nice soft texture and brownie-like flavour.

Enjoying

• Just another argument supporting a love of reading:  “The Golden Rule for Becoming a Better Writer” by T. R. Napper (Here, via) 

• Since Stitcher ceased to exist in 2023, I’d been using the default podcast app from Apple. With only one redeeming quality - the transcription - for its otherwise frustrating user-experience, I’ve been happy to find an alternative called Castro (website here https://castro.fm/ ). Using Castro has been like getting to a beach-side destination, throwing open the windows and realizing it is only a short walk till you can feel waves lapping at your feet. 

• I recently went to Toad Hall downtown for gifts and came across this book, titled The Right Word. Decorated with awards, I was nonetheless drawn in by the collage-style illustrations that told the (true!) story alongside the text. (A peek at the book here.) It was the kind of book I felt I would appreciate more than my young recipients, so after sitting and reading through, I left it behind in search of other fun things. Melissa Sweet, the illustrator, has a really nice website. I liked the Q&A page here.  

• Sometimes it’s nice to clap on a set of noise-cancelling headphones and get lost in a bit of music. Most recently, most dreamily, Haruomi Hosono’s Yours Sincerely. 

• I like it when The Daily takes a detour into art and culture, as it did for the Bayeux Tapestry. To complement it, I liked watching Deep Down History’s overview of the story on Youtube (here).

Walking the dog

This dying season has its spots of beauty… red berries, droplets collected on long stems of grass…

And wooly bears! Normally, I find them on the ground and avoid stepping on them, but this one was nicely posed on a weed…

Happy Sunday!

A week on Sunday no. 36

A generous spirit

Somehow, this apartment tour, titled “An Artist’s Collected Home Brimming with New York Character” appeared on my Youtube homepage, and it proved to be the perfect viewing antidote to a restless Monday morning. I watched a handful more videos from the Homeworthy channel, but Thomas McKean’s felt heartwarming. I’ve tried to put my finger on why it was… His collaboration with poet Ruth Pitter? His family history? His sense of humour? The fact that he made a piece of art from the cards and envelopes he received and called it a “grateful collage”? Or is it his storytelling? I’m not sure, but perhaps its the quality of generosity that stands out. He says, for example that what “makes a New Yorker, [is] somebody who’s ideally here to share the space, appreciate the history, and maybe contribute to it.”  

It reminds me of having really liked an episode from the six-part documentary series on Netflix titled “My Love: Six Stories of True Love.” Among others, it featured Kinuko and Haruhei in Japan. Kinuko, who cared for Haruhei “ever since they met at the facility where he was treated for leprosy” - eventually marrying and having three children together - talks to the producer at one point, full of admiration for her husband: “In that type of difficult environment, he was a really unique individual. […] He had a very kind face. No matter what people said, he never got angry, even when the staff verbally abused him. He really talks up a storm, but he has the warmest heart.” […] “…ordinarily, a person with a severe illness like his could easily become disheartened and bitter, but he strived to do his best. He’s an impressive man. I believe that.” It’s an attitude and a relationship that has stayed in my mind ever since having watched it in 2021 (mentioned here).  

Enjoying

• There are still some warm afternoons for enjoying a book lounging on a chair in the backyard. Partly because I wanted to enjoy the weather, and partly because I liked the book so much, I finished The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead quickly, considering I started July 11th, and that it is over 500 pages. It has been my favourite from the reading list so far. I dedicated a blog post (here) to the book in appreciation.

• Listening to the short podcast series “The Gaza Chef” (here, via) I felt momentarily disoriented… Which region again? Which war? These tragedies pile up. But the journalism dedicated to the individuals and the nuances is so worthwhile.

• The kids are about to go back to school. I drive them to the store, then take sneaky pictures while they pick out school supplies. We even helped a mannequin who had lost his pants…

Eating

One rainy afternoon this week, I made Julia Turschen’s version of “Rascal House Stuffed Cabbage” with a Taiwanese cabbage so large, I had to steam it in sections. It’s our favourite version of cabbage roll, but the recipe isn’t available online. It’s from her 2021 cookbook titled Simply Julia (her website). Cabbage roll photos are not very aesthetic…

It’s a bit of a project (the kitchen looks more like an artist’s studio space…) but I’ve often found Nigella Lawson’s observations to be true. Years ago, while listening to the short-lived “Simple Pleasures” podcast (six episodes aired in 2018, link here) hosted by Yotam Ottolenghi, Lawson, who was a guest once, said: “People as a general rule confuse two things. They confuse time-consuming with difficult. It’s whether you’ve got the time and whether you feel like doing something like that.” (4:00) And: “The daily cooking: often I just feel, ugh, you know, exhausted, I can’t do that. But the minute I start cooking, I feel better.” (16:15) And: “The shopping can be harder than the cooking. Because unless you get your shopping organized, you can’t actually cook and cooking is relatively straightforward and simple, once you do it.” (17:47)  

This time of year, when produce is abundant, I get a little disconcerted because it’s almost better to make a meal plan after visiting the market, rather than before.

Walking

This thistle has seed heads like tassels

This branch, severed from the trunk, is drying out with the prettiest shades of yellow.

Happy Sunday!

A week on Sunday (no. 35)

What does summer look like here? It looks like a new coat of paint on our house, and a coat of stain on the fence…

It’s the dog sitting in regal elegance on one of the folding chairs left strewn about between family gatherings…

It’s a round of go-karts and bumper boats on a bright sunny day.

Fun signs…

Leisurely cart returns and noticing the sparrows that have elected to preen their feathers there…

It’s tomatoes ripening on thick green stems.

A day at the beach…

Reading List: Searches and Seizures by Stanley Elkin

Elkin’s writing is described, on the wikipedia page (here) dedicated to his biography, this way:

Characters and especially prose style take full precedence over plot. His language is extravagant and exuberant, baroque and flowery, taking fantastic flight from his characters' endless patter.

And indeed, it seems fitting that the son of a costume-jewelry salesman should bedeck his stories in lavish frivolity. I would have the impression, at the end of a story, of having spent time not getting anywhere. So why does Francine Prose like this author? For good sentences. She writes: 

It’s a good idea to have a designated section of your bookshelf (perhaps the one nearest your desk) for books by writers who have obviously worked on their sentences, revising and polishing them into gems that continue to dazzle us. These are works you can turn to whenever you feel that your own style is getting a little slack or lazy or vague. (Reading Like a Writer, p 47.)

It’s appropriate that a passage I liked captures the end-of summer feeling creeping up on us right now…

[The pool was] thick with people who had not been in it all summer and who now, in the last week it would be open, found themselves rummaging its waters and equipment, the Styrofoam kickboards, striped polo balls and outlandish toys. Last-flingers - some of them actually on vacation - who out of some deep sentimental instinct, like people who crowd aboard a train they have never ridden but which is about to be taken out of service, they squeezed their feet into rubber flippers, scurried to do one last memorable milestone lap, one final dive, kissed the snorkel, cruised on ribbed, rubber air mattresses. Yet despite this element of the frantic, their overall mood was mellow with reconciliation and detail.

Beside them at poolside, his distinguishing characteristics as their lifeguard worn thin (as on ocean voyages the initial mysteries of ship and crew diminish with custom and ultimately accommodate themselves to that democracy of voyagers, passenger and sailor both drawing near land, and it suddenly occurs to you that the deck steward also has an address and the captain hand luggage), easy now because here it is autumn and no one has drowned or been seriously in trouble (so he’d saved them after all, standing by like a peacetime army), his pith helmet and whistle nothing more now than bits of eccentric jewelry, Preminger melded into their midst, listening, hearing them, never so comfortable (unless it was driving in that limousine to his father’s funeral), nothing on his mind save their voices, monitoring their babble like a ham of the domestic, listening so hard that he was able to pick out individual conversations. (“The Condominium,” p 282.)

By contrast…

I read this book in less than a week.

Luke Burgis (here) on Conversations with Tyler said “we might be entering an age where we can actually learn more about what it means to be human than less, and that might lead to a renaissance in the humanities, for instance. I think AI is performing a kind of via negativa on the human person, maybe even the human soul, and helping us discover who we are. And to me, that’s very exciting.” I also think it’s exciting! And in that vein is Alexandre Dianine-Havard, reaffirming the existence of the soul, the values and virtues that make life fulfilling.

Cooking

I gathered all our favourite recipes celebrating corn (here) and then tried a new recipe by Pierce Abernathy (Instagram) called “Corn Compound Butter”. It’s very popular right now. It’s been mentioned on three different Substack newsletters (one, two, three)! 

A still life… the counter as I was preparing Corn Chowder this week.

Enjoying

This sentence by Elle Kamihira (here): “And mostly my mother stepped in to close the gap between his imagination and the inevitable work it took to achieve anything.” Via Curious About Everything

I like thoughtful tributes made to Dolly Parton, subsequent her death. This I relate to: “…if I write about things that bother me then they don’t bother me anymore.” Via Hanif Abdurraqib (on Instagram).

And how about this encouragement to write by hand? (here)

And to conclude…

A view of the Red River at golden hour…

Happy Sunday!

A week on Sunday 33/52

Welcome to a new edition of “A Week on Sunday”. Pleased to be home and back into the routine of things, here’s a little roundup of things I’ve noticed online and in real life. 

“Grey gold”

A fan of Australian, Beau Miles, I’ve been keeping up with the updates on his latest project to restore an abandoned cottage. It’s an unappealing adventure, but Miles is generous in sharing the ups and downs of his undertaking, and that’s what makes it interesting. In a recent video “stumpers” are hired to redo the foundation, and we get to meet a man named Danny who is not only in high demand for this kind of job, but who took the time to do a little research into the cottage’s history. The fact that Miles calls his new concrete stumps “grey gold” make me think of my dad who liked working with concrete and was foreman at a cement plant before he died.  

Clogs

Authors of the cookbook Kismet, Sara Kramer and Sarah Hymanson, recommended Calzuro clogs for long days in the kitchen, and I took their advice when invited to help cook for a week for a girls camp in Quebec. The old sugar shack kitchen had two fridges on a slightly raised concrete platform. Inevitably, one day I rammed my foot on one of the corners, but hardly suffered any pain. The “co-polymer rubber compound” the clogs are made of provided not only good support but excellent protection. It was a worthwhile recommendation! (Mine are tomato-red, pictured here with the visiting kitchen mascot… a tiny dog named Pistache!)

Dinnerware

My son had a birthday party event on the western end of Portage Avenue and I took the opportunity to visit a Value Village I hadn’t yet been to. There were such pretty sets of dinnerware! How darling would it be to outfit a cottage with one or both of these?

Eating

We had company this week in the spirit of summer holiday gatherings with friends and family… We served mojitos and Hailee Catalano’s Maple Cheddar Snack Mix. 

Ina Garten’s Slow Roasted Spiced Pork is a reliable main when feeding a crowd and choosing the oven over the barbecue.

Besides salad and fresh beans from the garden, we also served Sohla El-Waylly’s Bravas Potato Salad which was a hit!  

Summer views

A few pictures from evening walks in Henteleff…

Happy Sunday!

A week on Sunday 28/52

Welcome to this week’s blog post edition, in which is featured a little road trip to Lockport, a few quotes and some scenery.

Local tourism

This week we were a group of three friends that took to the road for a late breakfast, early lunch, at The Heritage Tea Room. Newly renovated, its wood interior shines, the paint is a fresh deep green, and the wallpaper a cheerful blue and white floral that contrasts with the paintings that hang from a railing. It’s a charming place to go if you like that “stepping back in time” feeling, plus modern amenities. We ate lunch on the patio, shaded from the sun, with a view of the river just beyond.

River Road is one of the most scenic of scenic routes and while travelling it is a treat in itself, we also stopped at St. Andrew’s Anglican Church where we slipped in as final funeral attendees left, to admire the stained glass windows. I would have been curious to hear the sound that comes from these tiny set of pipes…

Across from the church is a cheerful rectory, with artefacts and interactive displays. Mostly I admired the dainty size of the stitches in these granny squares… I like how this shot captures four patterned materials too… the blanket, the chair upholstery, the stool underneath and the carpet. It feels instantly cozy.

Visiting small museums feels a bit like going to an all-you-can-eat buffet. At a buffet, you can sample so much and leave feeling so stuffed. At a museum, there can be so much reading, that the information gathering can leave you feeling oppressed. I would argue that unless you visit a museum by yourself, determined to feel immersed in its subject, going with family or friends exempts you of any reading duties. Flit about like a butterfly, see where your attention goes, read that little plaque if your curiosity invites you to, and move on to the next thing! From this visit, I couldn’t tell you anything about the historical figures profiled, but I learned about how broken dishes could be repaired with staples (See here for example.) and left feeling awed by the contrast it represented to today’s culture of dispose and replace.  

Making art and Making a living by Mason Currey

Again, I am mentioning this book, perhaps risking “gushing” doing so… but I finished it this week, almost reluctantly, since I so enjoyed the way it was written. Currey’s final chapter has a passage that crystallizes the impetus behind his book’s project; in opposition to “a kind of stingy, withholding, resentful energy that seems to be trending in society” he looks to the lives of artists.

[…] what I love about the artists in this book is their embrace of the opposite values: of possibility, of giving yourself permission, of staying true to your instincts and indulging them even when they lead someplace totally impractical - especially then - and asking necessity to wait while you figure things out, even if you never quite figure things out.

I am so grateful to him for making this book. 

Podcast quote

I liked listening to Bryan Stevenson as a guest on the Ezra Klein podcast. This reflection on linking the past with the present is touching:

What I realized is that there was power in the hopes of those who had come before me. I felt lifted up by generations of people who had struggled. And that’s what we’re trying to do with this history. We want to be very direct about the harms and the horrors of slavery. But we also want people to understand the resilience, the power, the strength, the courage, the character of people to love in the midst of agony. I then gives you something to celebrate in a new way.

The dog is well

The dog, on the children’s summer holiday, gets accessorized with apple-peel bandanas, which he can eat if he’s patient enough for a picture…

Evening walks

Although a weed, the Western Salsify becomes such a cute little puffball among all the Hairy Vetch…

The milkweed is in full bloom right now.

And this “Ipomoea” is called “pretty white trumpet flower” in my head.

Happy Sunday!

A Week on Sunday 27/52

Welcome! This week, a little photo-essay of the things that keep us smiling and keep us busy as we transition into summer holidays, plus a few quotes from articles from around the web.

Winnipeg has been getting a lot of rain. The skies above it are often filled with painting-worthy clouds and dramatic light. On the way to the pool one evening, I just managed to catch a tiny rainbow.

My mother-in-law moved from a main-floor room with a basement window to a second-floor room with a regular window. I can now wave to her from the parking lot! At the MCC Thrift Store on Chalmers the other week, we found a comptometer like the one she used when she worked at Eaton’s in the 50’s. (Previous mention in 2023.) 

The peonies are blooming and I couldn’t resist taking a picture of a home-made bouquet of them on a desk at Artists Emporium.  

Long daylight hours mean that Christian and I can go on exploratory bike rides in the evening, getting a feel for neighbourhoods that is different from taking a car. When we last explored Warde Avenue’s funny breaks and continuation, the Bonavista neighbourhood was still being built. The difference in atmosphere from our comparatively middle-age neighbourhood is perhaps in part because Bonavista is a master-planned community. (And it feels similar to ones visited in Airdrie, AB!)

Here I present my second sourdough ever… It was better than the first and the family has been spoiling me with encouragement. Keeping natural leaven alive produces discard and I’m now on the third batch of Discard Crackers. Turmeric and black pepper happens to be a very healthy combo and a fairly addictive snack.

For our daughter’s birthday we went to Blufish downtown, where the soy sauce was served in such cute ceramic vases, we mistook the presentation for missing a flower rather than hiding a condiment. 

My Mom sent us a packet of Magic Fire and we experienced our first backyard campfire with colourful flames. One packet lasts a surprisingly long time.

Quotes

On the subject of beauty: In a Youtube video about typography and book design, designer Klaus Krogh says: “I think beauty and faith is interlocked. The beauty of the language for prayers, the beauty within, we’re trying to make it show on the outside, and that’s our deepest inspiration.” (Around the 5 minute mark.) 

On the subject of courage: “Courage is an ancient predisposition that has played a protective role on the stress.” Hearing about “the courage response” to stress on a podcast, I was immediately intrigued, and found a scientific paper on the subject. Incidentally, it is common in French to wish a person “bon courage”, whereas in English, we commonly wish people “good luck”. What’s nice about the French expression is that you are recognizing a behavioural approach that implies agency. 

On the subject of negativity: A study linked and excerpted on Marginal Revolution shows how negativity gradually increases over time because negative responses stand out, more than positive responses. “[…] analyses suggest that negativity rises over time because social media users seek to make unique comments on the same topic, and it is easier to differentiate oneself through negative comments than through positive comments. As threads and communities evolve, and it becomes more difficult to make unique observations, users turn to negativity.” This feels true in real life, where the greater effort must be devoted to focusing on what is constructively positive rather than destructively negative.

On the pitfalls of rationalization: In an article titled “You don’t have to swallow frogs” Andrea Pitzer writes, “But the truth for nearly everyone is simpler. You don’t have to turn your back on the big issues, but you also don’t have to import the entire national crisis into your personal one. You just have to think for yourself. Know what tradition you’re aligned with, whether it’s a philosophical one, a religious one, or one that rises out of a particular past oppression—or all of the above. There might even be a group or a school of thought you’re reacting against. If you haven’t thought about these things before, read less daily news and try to find an approach that reflects what matters to you. Having answers to that will do a lot to give you direction.” 

On the subject of human dignity in design: I really liked this article by Sara Hendren titled “Pattern Recognition”. She discusses dignity in relation to design (and includes this definition of what dignity is by Helmut Thielicke: “Dignity is not a possession to be more fairly meted out but a universally contingent relational force […]”) and includes examples of design that incorporates human dignity, from babies to the elderly. Sequestered dementia patients are a fact of the society I live in, but reading about places where that isn’t the case is heartening.

Eating

My friend invited me for an al-fresco lunch in her backyard and made the Jennifer Aniston Salad. It was delicious! 

For a snack table in our garage for our daughter’s outdoor birthday party, I had fun cutting “handles” for the watermelon, an idea I saw here!  

Walking the dog

Here’s a picture to bookend the spring season of walking the dog, now that summer holidays have begun and Christian has taken over the doggy duties!

Happy Sunday!

A Week on Sunday 25/52

Welcome to a little roundup of things I’ve been reading and doing and listening to… plus a few pictures of the scenery here.

Making Art and Making a Living by Mason Currey

It’s hard to describe what an enjoyable read this book has been, only a few chapters in. I really admire Currey’s writing… as a reader, I feel like the examples he offers are deeply researched while also being succinct. The examples he chooses offer contrasts that feel fresh and interesting. Overall, the goal, as he states it in the introduction:

I hope that these stories help readers […] at least see their own dilemmas reflected back at them, and draw strength from reading about how those who came before them kept up the effort and came through

is one I feel he meets. (His website here.)

Collage

I continue to make little collage cards, pressed on by a mission to make a hundred this year. It’s really intriguing though… I thought I could be frivolous about it, but it turns out to be far more absorbing than I expected. At first I thought I could trick myself into a carelessness. But I soon noticed that collage, despite how easy it is to do, imposes its own rules. I like how Jake Kennedy says:

Because it’s so quick and accessible, collage to me is also a great leveler. Anyone can do it - or their own version of it - and by the same token, even the best collage artists can make absolute stinkers.

And how Leslie Siegle says:

I aim to be a blank slate, not to force things, and to let that gift of connection overtake me. Some days you have it, some days it’s just experiments. Those little failures are necessary, though; they plant a seed you can go back to later.  

Were it not for the fun of making something pretty from bits of paper collected from everywhere, I wouldn’t know what “not forcing things” meant. Take a failed collage for example… I was trying to tell a fairytale-like story, but the elements refused to cohere (see left side). I changed tack and made something much better for the purpose of a birthday card (see right side).

Running this little artistic experiment aligns with what Brad Neely says in his typewriter interview with Austin Kleon (May 2026):

Your mind can’t hide if you’re doing art, so know yourself as much as possible, but here’s the twist, you get to know yourself by making art. Learn by doing. Experience. First-hand experience by making art, second hand by reading and watching and listening and staying open until death.  

Previous collages here.  

Enjoying

1. The BBC and 99% Invisible podcast have teamed up to present a series titled “A History of the United States in 100 Objects” and it’s been fun listening in!  

2. Articles of Interest recently did an episode on clothing sizes. I’m still thinking how demanding a job it is to be a fit model… something I had no idea existed!

3. This episode of Family Lore titled “Father Figure” was one I didn’t want to pause!  

4. Lunch at Shirley’s (135 Osborne St.) featured this assortment of pickled vegetables and grapes. They have shelves lined with a whole assortment of preserved food and this was a nice taste! Pickling for the win!

Cooking

When we don’t know what to cook, Hetty Lui McKinnon’s “Tomato Macaroni Soup and Scrambled Egg” from her cookbook To Asia, With Love, is one of the recipes we turn to for ease and comfort.  

On Friday, we topped waffles with an improvised rhubarb compote… about 10 long stalks of rhubarb, 2/3 cups of sugar, simmered 10 to 20 minutes with just a splash of water, then cooled outside and served. For fancier compote, add vanilla!

Walking the dog

Cooler weather and occasional rain showers made for impressive clouds this week… 

I like this distinctive flower…

And Enzo can barely sit long enough for a photo… 

He much prefers sniffing around…

Happy Sunday!

A week on Sunday 24/52

Welcome to a new edition of a weekly post, rounding up thoughts, quotes and links to things I enjoyed reading. This week, I finished reading Don Quixote (translated by Tobias Smollett, 2001 Modern Library Paperback Edition) - horray! And online reading lead to a little collection of quotes I liked.

Storm

Winnipeg and parts of Manitoba were hit with storms Tuesday evening. In our area and in St. Boniface, there was a lot of rain and wind. This tree in front of the St. Boniface Cathedral was one of the most impressive casualties:

Don Quixote

Finally, I finished this brick. It’s a classic, and I’m happy to have read it, but there are some classics you enjoy more than others. I don’t like delusional characters and I don’t agree that some morality is to be found in Don Quixote’s way of seeing the world. Trying to sympathise with these arguments makes me impatient. That being said, the friendship between Don Quixote and his squire, Sancho Panza, demonstrated in their dialogue, has a touching quality to it. Take, for example, how the squire names the knight:

(…) the knight asked what had induced Sancho, now, rather than at any other time, to stile him the knight of the rueful countenance. “Truly, answered Sancho, I have been looking at you some time, by the light of that torch the unfortunate traveller held in his hand; and in good faith, your worship cuts the most dismal figure I have almost ever seen; and it must certainly be occasioned either by the fatigue you have undergone in this battle, or by the want of your teeth.” “That is not the case, replied his master; but the sage who is defined to writ the history of my exploits, hath thought proper that I should assume some appellation, by the example of former knights, one of whom too the title dog the Flaming Sword; another, of the Unicorn; a third, of the Ladies; a fourth, of the Phoenix; a fifth, of the Griffin; a sixth, called himself the Knight of death: and by these epithets and symbols, they were known all over the face of the earth; and therefore, I say, that the fore-mentioned sage hath now put it into thy thoughts, and directed thy tongue to call me the knight of the rueful countenance; an appellation that henceforward I adopt: and that it may suit me the better, I am resolved to have a most woeful figure painted upon my shield, with the first opportunity.” “There is no occasion, said Sancho, to throw away time and money on such a device; your worship has no more to do, but uncover your own face; and I’ll warrant, those who behold it, will call it a rueful one, without your having recourse to pictures and shields to explain your meaning; and you may well believe I tell you nothing but the truth, when I maintain, tho’ it be but in jest, that hunger and the want of teeth, makes your worship look so ill-favoredly, that we may very well save the expense of a rueful picture.”

Don Quixote could not help laughing at the pleasantry of Sancho, tho’ he actually determined to assume that name, and have his shield and target painted according to his fancy. (p 181)

My favourite passage is Sancho’s appraisal of sleep:

(…) while I sleep, I am troubled neither with fear nor hope, nor toil nor glory; and praise be to him who invented sleep, which is the mantle that shrouds all human thoughts, the food that dispels hunger, the drink that quenches thirst, the fire that warms the cold, the cool breeze that moderates heat; in a word, the general coin that purchases every commodity; the weight and balance that makes the shepherd even with his sovereign, and the simple with the sage: there is only one bad circumstance, as I have heard, in sleep; it resembles death; inasmuch ,as between a dead coarse and a sleeping man there is no apparent difference.” (p 1051)

Enjoying

1. On a recent episode of the podcast “What it’s like to be… with Dan Heath”, Esther Berkowitz, a clinical ethicist, described an aspect concerning the respect of autonomy this way:
   
   “there's this concept that I really love called the "dignity of risk", which is the idea that we support people's dignity in allowing them to make decisions that sometimes are high risk or very inadvisable. But that's a part of human dignity to be allowed to take risks and potentially not have good outcomes.”
   
   It struck me that the New York Times article, “Tenderly Tracking My Husband” by Caroline Bailey (via Kottke) offers an example of this concept in action (Archive link).

2. On the one hand, an article titled “My Students Can’t Read” by Tyler Jagt is alarming, but I like the point he makes on the subject of analysis:
   
   “When I assign analysis, I am not trying to extract a polished product; I am trying to put the student’s mind through resistance in order to make it stronger. Offloading the struggle to a chatbot does not ‘free students up for higher-order work.’ It deprives them of building the strength to do any substantial cognitive work at all.”
   
   On the other hand, “The Power of Patience” by Jennifer L. Roberts sounds ennobling.
   
   “I want to focus […] on creating opportunities for students to engage in deceleration, patience, and immersive attention. I would argue that these are the kind of practices that now most need to be actively engineered by faculty, because they simply are no longer available ‘in nature,’ as it were. Every external pressure, social and technological, is pushing students in the other direction, toward immediacy, rapidity, and spontaneity—and against this other kind of opportunity. I want to give them the permission and the structures to slow down.”
   
   (This practice of attention reminds me of Hisham Matar’s book The Return, in which his staring at artwork is a practice he describes.)

3. This quote by Charles Leifer: “What sustains me through difficulties is not a single thing. On motorcycles, it's just me, the bike, and the environment. Selling the home, it was the harder thing: to turn away from selfish scheming towards faith that right principles, when put into action, would produce a good outcome. AI cannot address either, because the sense of technical mastery is itself the reward for the hours spent in practice. And similarly, it cannot supplant faith, because faith rests upon hope, and these grow only by taking a risk. I had to experience a lot of pain, mistakes, loss to understand the value of the kind of love Dickens writes into Betsey's spirit.” (via Robin Sloan)

4. Robin Sloan’s popup newsletter (here) lead me to L.M. Sacasas’ substack, called “The Convivial Society” where one post lead to another. I like many of the points he makes. For example, from one post titled “Do you Still Look at the Stars” he writes:
   
   “We are habituated into a mode of life that doesn’t reward, and actively inhibits, our capacity to see what is there before us. Our gaze is monopolized by our devices, and the demands of efficiency and productivity steal from us the leisure that, as Josef Pieper wrote, is ‘a form of that stillness that is the necessary preparation for accepting reality.’”
   
   In “AI as Christian Heresy” he writes:
   
   “AI is apocalyptic in exactly one narrow sense: It is not causing but rather disclosing the end of a world. (…) the manner in which AI is developed, deployed, and marketed reveals the degree to which our modern institutions are failing and expiring.”
   
   And:
   
   “Build a techno-social system which demands that humans act like machines and it turns out that machines can eventually be made to displace humans with relative ease.”
   
   And in a post titled “Waste Your Time, Your Life May Depend On It” he writes:
   
   “Most importantly perhaps, I think that we should recognize that with all the talk of automated labor and outsourced intelligence we are being distracted from the one element of most profound human consequence—care. Care is what creates the possibility of purposeful action. Care is what issues forth in meaningful knowledge of the world and others. Care is ultimately what transforms the quality of our involvement and engagement with the world so that we pass from ‘getting things done’ to living.”

5. This week marks a first attempt at sourdough, following a recipe from Hailee Catalano’s book By Heart… The result exceeded my (very low) expectations: the flavour was surprisingly mild and the whole loaf was eaten in the course of 3 days. I’ve taken note of the flaws, and find that The King Arthur Baking Company Big Book of Bread offers a reassuring amount of suggestions for improving sourdough outcomes. What is attractive about Catalano’s method of making starter, compared to King Arthur’s (heh!) is that hers requires only a single feeding every 24 hours, compared to King Arthur’s two. Catalano’s also uses less flour total; 50 grams instead of 75. Learning to make bread from natural leaven is a hobby in itself.

6. A pretty colour combo from a gifted knitted dish cloth!

Cooking

We enjoyed Hailee Catalano’s “Spinach and Artichoke Ziti” so much that we made it again for a dinner guest. Catalano’s recipes don’t feel like they’re incorporating unusual ingredients for the sake of unusual-ness. Instead, as you’re cooking and eating from her cookbook By Heart, it feels like you’re entrusting yourself to capable hands and good flavours will ensue.

Walking the dog

This week featured warm temperatures, après-storm views, and a bit of rain. The milkweed looks like this:

Everything is very green

Bees are at work

And Enzo can barely stay still.

Happy Sunday!

A week on Sunday 23/52

Welcome to another edition of a weekly roundup of things I’m thinking about, enjoying and doing around my house, in bright, sunny, quite-hot-right-now, city of Winnipeg.

Drawing how-to book advice

I recently finished Drawing Outdoors by Henry C. Pitz published in MCMLXV. (How fancy! A year in Roman numerals… I remember seeing this in movie credits, like a frustrating code. Apparently, this is intentional. It is “associated with prestige and enduring value”.)Whatever the publisher’s intention for putting 1965 into Roman numerals, I really like Pitz’s book. It ends with this section, titled “Benefitting from Discouragement”, with advice that sounds like it shouldn’t be limited to learning to draw:

All this is part of the artist’s life and although the core of his life is always the work at drawing board or easel, the peripheral activities support and feed his experience. Once committed to a serious program of picture-making, you need to work out certain strategies to sustain enthusiasm, to strengthen resolve, and to circumvent discouragement. Each artist is faced with the facts of his own temperament and must adjust his tactics accordingly.

A last suggestions may be helpful: discouragement is usually intermittent but inescapable. Discouragement loses some of its terror when you realize it is often an encouraging sign; it indicates dissatisfaction with and rebellion against your present level. It is a growing pain. It can be a message that you are beginning to reach out for something better. Discouragement can be an important interlude in your practice and growth. (P 141)

Enjoying

1. The Uppercase Magazine newsletter recently featured an artist whose craft is so unique, I spent some time just admiring her pieces… Her name is Susanna Bauer and she combines lace crochet and natural leaves. The intricacy and end product are stunning.

2. One link lead to another, and I ended up watching this documentary on the opening of the very first Disneyland in 1955. Workplace safety wasn’t in practice then, and I actually thought I might see a man get squashed by scraper. What is curiously heartwarming is seeing the variety in age of the male workers, the humour, and the artistry. 

3. A recent episode titled “The Photograph” from the This is Love podcast made me tear up! A really beautiful story!

4. I really liked this wine label and wanted to save the illustration for using in collages. This tutorial on removing wine labels was a perfect how-to!  

5. Finally… my starter is taking off! This stage took far longer to get to than the method I followed suggested. But that’s fine. I’m happy I didn’t give up! I followed Hailee Catalano’s method in her cookbook titled By Heart. This week, I’ll attempt a first loaf. Expectations for the success of this first loaf are reasonably low… But I’m interested in adding to my small bread-making experience and using natural leaven has felt like a good next step.

Cooking

I really like Ottolenghi’s “Beyond Potato Salad” (pictured here). It is mixed with greek yogurt and a bit of mayonnaise. It is topped with toasted cardamom seeds, sesame seeds and nigella seeds and a nice tarragon-and-pickle mixture. Unfortunately, no one else in my little family likes it as much as I do.  

What we all like is Jane Rodmell’s version of Jambalaya from Best Summer Weekends. I think prep and cooking takes about two hours, especially if you take the time to brown ingredients as directed, and it yields a generous six portions. 

Chicken and Sausage Jambalaya

2 tablespoons vegetable oil
1 cup smoked ham, diced
½ cup spicy smoked sausage, diced
2 cups boneless chicken breast, diced
2 large onions, finely chopped
4 stalks celery, chopped
1 green pepper, chopped
4 cloves garlic, finely chopped
2 bay leaves
1 teaspoon oregano
1 teaspoon cayenne
1 teaspoon ground black pepper
1 teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon thyme
1 teaspoon filé (optional)
2 cups long-grain converted rice
1 cup tomatoes (fresh or canned, San Marzano), chopped
3 cups chicken stock

Heat oil in a large heavy pot, add ham and sausage, and brown lightly. Lift out and set aside.

Add chicken pieces and brown, then remove and set aside.

Add half the onions, celery, and pepper to the pot, cooking until soft and well browned. Toss in the rest of the vegetables and the garlic, and cook over moderate heat until softened.

Return meats to pot with all the seasonings and cook for 5 minutes. Add rice and stir for a few minutes, then add tomatoes and stock. Bring mixture to a boil, lower heat, cover pot, and leave to cook gently for 20-25 minutes more until liquid is absorbed and rice is tender yet still has texture. Toss gently, remove from heat, cover, and leave to rest for 5 minutes. Serve hot.

Tips: It you want to prepare part of the jambalaya ahead, cook the meats and vegetables as described above and add the tomatoes and stock, but do not add the rice. Refrigerate or freeze. When you are ready to serve, bring the mixture to a boil, add rice, and cook for 20-25 minutes as described above.

Jambalaya often includes seafood, such as shrimp and/or fresh oysters; add them during the last 5 minutes of cooking. Add some hot sauce if you like things spicier.

Walking the Dog

Here’s Enzo, paw daintily lifted, as if the dandelion fluff were a little too much to endure…

Indeed, there are dainty flowers everywhere, and I grab a shot of my favourites here and there…

Then there are the dandelions after a storm. I think they look pretty like this too…

And here’s milkweed. It has pretty long oval-shaped leaves that stretch upwards at the tip, but spread out in pairs as the plant grows.

Here’s another mushroom to add to the collection (here, here).

A mallard on the river…

And Enzo again, looking like a dignified dog.

Wishing you a great week ahead!

A week on Sunday 21/52

Writing and creativity

I liked Michael Nielsen’s essay “Developing creative identity” so much, I read it twice. The section titled “What feeds the writing?” felt like the clear articulation of something I only vaguely understood before. Two quotes I want to remember:

I feel foolish for not forcefully articulating this to myself much earlier. But it takes time to become legible to oneself when outside well-defined communities.

And:

And while I say "drill down on fundamental questions" often there is no well-formed starting question, merely a hunch there is something worth exploring. So you must endure creative fog and confusion and ignorance, to find questions worth drilling down on, all without knowing whether you will eventually find insights worth the effort!

(Via) 

Enjoying

1. Another interview with an enthusiastic writer, this time on Conversations with Tyler, who hosted Bob Spitz.  

2. I liked this little tour of a datacenter by Dwarkesh Patel. It goes well with Search Engine’s episode “The many lives of Taiwan” and Interesting Times episode “The U.S. and China Are Not In An A.I. Race”. 

Greenhouses + flowers

I like visiting all the greenhouses along what used to be a single strip of road on St. Mary’s south of the Perimeter. It has been bisected with the construction of the new overpass, and what time you are saving by not having to wait at a light to cross the Perimeter, you should use to visit all of them. Ron Paul has a rustic charm I like, and their petunias seem to perform ultra-well in my flower bed.

Lacoste was the busiest greenhouse when I went this week, but the slow spring has really staggered the customers’ arrival. There were no lineups to have to queue in. There is St. Mary’s Nursery, and then, getting back on St. Mary’s, there is Red River Valley Garden Centre. I’m always impressed with the colour of their flowers… though they are a smaller greenhouse, everything is so neatly laid out. I spied a bee taking a nap.

Sage Gardens at the southern-most end offers a hundred varieties of tomato! 

A selection of flowers always looks pretty all together… 

In the kitchen

I feel a little uninspired this time of year when the weather warms, and kitchen habits demand a shift… Nonetheless, I planned to try this recipe - Kismet’s Springtime Chicken Skewers - baking the chicken rather than barbecuing it, and I’m glad I made it. It was a real treat for the tastebuds! I served it alongside plain buttered shell pasta and we had Sarah Fennel’s Salted Caramel Pots de Crème for dessert. Both were a real hit!

Walking the dog

The leaves are only timidly coming through on the trees…

On our way back home, Enzo noticed a cat on the neighbour’s fence and was completely incensed.

Happy Sunday!

A week on Sunday 20/52

Play

Years ago, I read Ray Bradbury’s book Zen in the Art of Writing and nothing else by him. The other day, by chance, I listened to a speech of his from 2001, and then contrasted it with one he gave in 1968. I tried listening to The Martian Chronicles, but relaxed a little better when I switched to Dandelion Wine. In a way, this latter book is like the drink - bottled up thoughts from faraway.

Bradbury in 2001 has strong opinions: “don’t live on your computers” he says. And “don’t let them flim flam you into buying all these devices.” In 1968, to a graduating class, he says: “We all know when we’re getting sick. Don’t you? I think we do. And when we ignore the signals over a period of years, we wind up with a sick individual, or a sick society.” It’s a speech in which he talks about loving what you do and protecting it from the twin temptations of money and academic pretension. There’s a glimpse of idealism. But it gives way to Bradbury’s emphasis on fun. He has a lot of fun writing, he says. “I had plenty of memories and sense impressions to play with, not work with, no, play with” he writes in the introduction to Dandelion Wine. 

I think it’s his idea of “play” that is infectious… it sounds wholesome, his prescription for reading and writing… And sure, a writer shouldn’t take themselves too seriously. But play becomes a bit of an escape in its own way, when old ladies die full of dignity and grace for example. It’s riddles and fantasy as off ramps from whatever is irresolute in life. That’s what I feel, anyways, listening to Dandelion Wine.

Collage

If writing is work, hobbies are play, and even more fun than drawing (for me), is collage. I started earlier this year and have continued to pursue the practice over weekend evenings. I bought tools for greater precision in cutting, glueing, and placing images and I’ve been having fun catching magazines and flyers for a quick look-through before they go into the recycling bin. The other day I rescued an abandoned children’s book from the ground where it had settled over a few days, its pages blown about and spattered with a few rain drops. In it was a perfectly useful drawing of a seagull! Here’s a handful of tiny “artworks”:

Baking

This week I made Chewy Earl Grey Cookies. Here’s a picture:

Here’s the dog under the plate, wishing one would fall…

Dust

Thursday was an especially windy day… Driving, you could see a haze of dust. 

In the evening it was worse.

Walking the dog

These waves are deceiving… they don’t look like much but for the Red River they are impressive.

This is the forest of fallen-down trees. They’ve been fallen-down for a number of seasons already. They are the regular, mundane, part of our walks.

These are the trees still trying to push out their leaves. It’s been very slow this year.

To end, a picture of the green grass coming through amidst the gold… The sunlight is lovely.

Wishing you… a Happy Sunday!

A week on Sunday 19/52

Intro

There are weeks that feel bloggier… weeks that I take more pictures, eventful weeks, or weeks where my reading and listening had themes that converged. This wasn’t one of those weeks. I wrote, ran errands, failed a cookie recipe, and set up starter. My husband’s colleague’s chickens have begun laying eggs, and the shades of beige have been nice to see again!

The cold is holding on, but the evening skies glow like in summer… I like how the transmission towers and street lights reflect light from the setting sun…

Swimming - Part 3

(Part 1 here, part 2 here).

“Where your fear is, there is your task.” So says Carl Jung as perfect encouragement for continuing to throw myself into a pool. A bit of the excitement from early days has worn off now… Since last writing, I can swim with my arms and legs, but I still need a snorkel. I’m envious of the older women I see who swim purposefully and peacefully their laps, with fine nonchalance. I’m still afraid of drowning. It’s very much like Kaitlin Frehling describes… the hardest thing to do as an adult learner is to trust the water.   I’ve begun to think of my weekly pool visits as exposure therapy. The next challenge is rolling over in the water. (For example.) I think it’s very scary. 

Cooking

The easiest meal that makes everyone happy in this house is pasta with Marcella Hazan’s Tomato Sauce with Onion and Butter. It’s a nice break on the last day of the week, when you’re happy its the weekend and you’ve reached the end of your ambitious meal plan! What does this “ambitious” look like? Oh, not much really… We had Deb Perelman’s Crispy Lamb and Lentils on Sunday and it was a perfect meal!

Enjoying

1. Last year I listened to this documentary on René Girard and felt a little depressed about his all-encompassing theory, and how widely it was accepted. It was a relief to read an essay this week by Joshua Landy, titled: “Deceit, Desire, and the Literature Professor: Why Girardians Exist.” It concludes:  “All in all, then: the Girardian theory is not true; it does not make us better readers; and it’s not an exaggeration of anything important”

2. I liked Dwarkesh Patel’s podcast with Ada Palmer so much I reserved a copy of her book at the library. I brought it home but was too busy to get past the first few chapters before I was obliged to return it for other patrons who requested it. Still, the podcast was a really fun, enthusiasm-sparking listen!

3. This documentary by Samuel-Goldwyn titled The Booksellers was briefly available for free on Youtube and it was a fascinating look into the lives of book collectors… (Another channel has a copy here.) I especially liked the part where some booksellers reflected on the historical aspect of their work: 
   
   “A good bookseller is another kind of discoverer, historiographer, and thinker-of-history… […] They also provide a really important context. That’s why when you acquire things, you generally keep the descriptions they gave because sometimes you see a box - it doesn’t tell you that history that they understand and have done work to understand.” (at 47 minutes) 

Walking the Dog

Some snow…

Some phantom-like fallen tree

The impressive stump of a tree cut down earlier this winter.

And spring tentatively pushing through…

Happy Sunday! 

A week on Sunday 18/52

Intro

A little while ago, in an e-mail to my brother, I declared “The blog helps me to confront, weekly, two struggles: 1) clarifying my thoughts and 2) handling topics that expose opinions I feel vulnerable about.” For the longest time, I thought it was much safer not to have opinions about things and I think that can be felt in the stiffness of earlier writing. Taking a plunge - life is a river in this metaphor - distilling a cup at a time, paddling on; all that is a more vigorous way of living… And so, this week, more reading, more listening, and just a little more opinion.

Finished reading

I’m happy there are so many books on the subject of writing… I can go on in life continuing to find them and take in their little doses of inspiration. Lately I finished a classic; John McPhee’s Draft No. 4. Of the dozen pages bearing a sticky note, I’ll transcribe two quotes that are in fact pieces of advice. The first:

No one will ever write in just the way that you do, or in just the way that anyone else does. Because of this fact, there is no real competition between writers. What appears to be competition is actually nothing more than jealousy and gossip. Writing is a matter strictly of developing oneself. You compete only with yourself. You develop yourself by writing. (p 82)

And the second:

Never market-research your writing. Write on subjects in which you have enough interest on your own to see you through all the stops, starts, hesitations, and other impediments along the way. (p 180)

Podcastland

Part of being a fan of the Freakonomics podcast, with host Stephen Dubner, is admiring how he manages to find not just interesting topics (horses!) but also interesting people. Recently he interviewed Judy Faulkner, shining a light on how a company can be run differently than the maximizing profits model I feel trained to accept as normal. It felt like a refreshing point of view.  

The other, less-fun part of being a fan of a podcast and its host, is accepting that they, like you, are paddling a river and can influence you to like and accept something that later, you realize, wasn’t all that great. A case in point is a recent episode of If Books Could Kill. Titled “Grit”, I was reluctant to listen. Grit is Angela Duckworth’s word for a quality associated with success, and I’d been won over by her voice on Steven Levitt’s People I (Mostly) Admire. But here, Michael Hobbes and Peter Shamshiri were going to apply their show’s tagline: “the airport bestsellers that captured our hearts and ruined our minds”. 

Is it embarrassing to have to revise a previously favourable opinion of something? I used to think so. I used to think that you had to be categorical about things, about people. It’s both harder and more liberating to accept that people are more like fellow travellers than sovereigns; that ideas can be more ephemera than doctrine. 

Collecting

Adding to a previous picture of a bar code I liked, this one, featured on a bag of Pop Corners:

A French audiobook

I liked listening to Veiller sur elle by Jean-Baptiste Andrea. This description of the protagonist’s feat of sculpting a saint, as if he was alive, made me laugh when I heard it:

Il examina le saint François dans mon atelier tandis que Francesco et moi, comme autrefois, attendions  son verdict. J’avais bien travaillé. […] J’avais sculpté François la main levé près de sa joue, un oiseau perché sur l’index. Jusque là, rien d’anormal. Mais l’on devinait par une audace insensé de ma part, que l’aile de l’oiseau avait dû frôler son cou dans la seconde d’avant, le chatouiller, car le saint souriait. On n’avait jamais vu un saint chatouilleux, encore moins souriant, en tout cas, pas en statuaire, où tout les saints arboraient en générale des mines de fonctionnaires divins, harcelés de demandes d’intercession.

In interviews around this book’s winning the Prix Goncourt, (such as here and here) Andrea talks about his love of writing and the priority he gives to a story’s structure. 

A birthday

Enzo, our velvety drapes-for-ears beagle, turned 6 this week, so we gave him some gifts to unwrap.

Baking

Occasionally I’ll get a really specific dessert request, and this week, is was for something simple. Something that didn’t have any hidden “health” to it. No sneaking in some fancy flour, like buckwheat. No fruit and nut-filled batters. I complied and made vanilla cupcakes with chocolate buttercream frosting, thanks to a recipe for both from Smitten Kitchen Every Day. In the quest for interesting flavours and unusual ideas, I sometimes forget that basic can be perfect.

Walking the dog

This week, what caught my eye was texture… more golden grass, more sticks, more curly bark, and hey! Check out the chickadee that landed there!

Sun-drenched texture… from pine tree branches to pussy willows.

And in the forest, where last week we spotted a frog, this week, there was a box.

Do you know what was in the box?

Nothing!

Happy Sunday!

A week on Sunday 17/52

Intro

Of what is a week composed? Of daily walks, and small routines. Of BBC News in the morning and bringing my 88-year-old mother-in-law to her eye appointment in the afternoon. Of making a shopping list on Saturday and dessert on Sunday. Of packing lunches in the evening and the impromptu visit of a nephew travelling through Winnipeg on his way elsewhere. Amidst these routines and events, the mind flits elsewhere, a stream of consciousness fed by podcasts and books and little projects. Here’s what caught my attention this week…

Intentional effort

When I was young, I thought that “bothering” was to be avoided, as in “bothering” people, and by extension that the point of life was to get to greater ease. I don’t think that way anymore, and the following quote from William James nicely contradicts the idea of wanting to get to “ease”:

Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day. That is, be systematically ascetic or heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than that you would rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test. Asceticism of this sort is like the insurance which a man pays on his house and goods. The tax does him no good at the time, and possibly may never bring him a return. But if the fire does come, his having paid it will be his salvation from ruin. (Via)

In a similar vein is are two interviews of Stewart Brand who is promoting his latest book titled Maintenance of Everything. There is the idea of care - caring for tools, of “honouring the process of taking care of things and yourself and others” and there is the contrast with a world that is increasingly automated. He says at one point: “we're going to spend more and more of our life arguing with robots. These things have automatic procedures based on somebody else's idea of what will be obvious and not obvious when you're messing with it.” Stuck in line at a bank for half an hour, then with a teller for an hour and 15 minutes to resolve a small issue made me think “here we are, arguing with robots!”. The intentional effort manifested in the form of equanimity - a kind of caring for each other as we’re dealing with these robots.

Environment

Beau Miles recently concluded a series of videos on four different rivers in Australia, ending with the Murray River. I like how he grapples with being unable to end the story on a satisfying note, and how he includes his conflicting feelings in the video… His friend, Brian Wattchow, suggests “Unfortunately it’s going to have to be managed and rules are going to have to be imposed until we can get a whole new set of values and values for the river. It’s sad but I can’t see personal choice and individual responsibility saving the river at the moment.” His argument is consonant with Andri Snær Magnason’s observation on humility toward nature (quoted here).  

On the subject of rivers, but in Canada, is the CBC’s Ideas podcast episode “What the River Wants to Be”. 

Baking

This week I made Vaughn Vreeland’s Lemon Blueberry Cookies.

There remained, after this recipe, a lot of frozen blueberries left, and so I made a pie. The pie was unphotogenic, but delicious.

Walking the dog

This week, there was a bit of cold weather leftover… just enough to take pictures of the icicles formed on the branches from the preceding days’ higher water levels.

The sun came out, and so there was the view across the water…

I look down when I walk, eyeing the ground, surveilling Enzo who follows his nose everywhere. At one point I looked up and was so delighted to see pussy willows!

The last few mounds of snow that remain covered in grass look like wooly mammoths.

One day this week, we found a frog on our path! 

Enzo’s sniffing  caused it to raise its arms… “Leave me alone!” So we did…

Happy Sunday!

A week on Sunday 16/52

Quotes

Via the newsletter Scratch, a link to Marisa Kabas’ post “Refusing to accept an AI-poisoned future of journalism” had this wonderful bit on writing:

I don’t write because it’s fun (though sometimes it is.) I write because it feeds my spirit. It helps me unspool my thoughts and feelings in the hopes of helping others do the same. The process is the purpose. You don’t have to always like or enjoy the process, but if you don’t respect it enough to do it yourself, there is no purpose.

And from Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s article “I Taught My Son Everything, Except How to Take a Vacation” this reflection on the oft-repeated “it goes by so fast” (referring to childhood) that felt especially true:

I realized that it’s not that it goes fast, that’s not what people mean. What they are saying is that they wished it would last forever. And that is something I can endorse, that I wish it all could last forever.

Old recipes

Our household has inherited a pile of cookbooks and a stack of hand-written recipes. Fond memories of a particular recipe from Kitchen Treasures prompted me to make it this week. I’m not very familiar with hot dish type meals, and in fact failed to get this one right (the rice I’d prepared in advance and took from the fridge stayed too cold and prevented the layers from combining in that pleasing hot dish way…). I think that my interest in cooking coincided with the trend towards from scratch cooking and very much influenced our family’s taste in food. 

Trying to discover more about food trends lead me to The Food Historian’s blog, and two posts in particular here and here. Besides some helpful context, there was this:

As the old adage goes, you can have good, fast, and cheap, but never all three at once. Good and fast is expensive, good and cheap takes time, and fast and cheap is usually not very good. And when you're working multiple jobs to make ends meet, getting decent-tasting food on the table in a timely manner is more important than worrying about cooking from scratch.

On the subject of old recipes, there is a touching story of a cook at a nursing home, choosing to find and use recipes from the residents’ lives. Told (around the 9:42 minute mark here) by Craig Bowerson thanks to host, Chef Owen Roy, Bowerson concludes saying: “cooking: it’s the ultimate expression of love.”

Cooking

This week we tried Hetty McKinnon’s “One Pot Broccoli Quinoa Soup” and it was perfect, considering, if you will, the weather here… freezing rain, and snow, and ice…

Postcards

Adding a mushroom to last week’s collection…

Making up for the dismal views this time of year is the cheerful birdsong.

Happy Sunday!