051 tuesday january 11
arch / things i know poem / ravioli II / things that can happen to a building
wow, it’s already the second tuesday of the year. 2022 is evaporating before our eyes. hope you enjoyed it. hope you had some good times. hope you’ve made some semi-desperate last minute plans for the rest of it, in order to squeeze what little joy remains out of the shriveling husk of the year.
as for myself i went down to the oregon coast this past weekend with a friend who wanted to see the gray whales on their migration from alaska to mexico. apparently they (whales, not my friends) all start heading down there in mid-December, hang out for a while and have their whale kids, and then head on back up.
prior to this trip i had a set of assumptions about this natural phenomenon that turned out to be almost completely wrong. growing up in alaska and spending time in the pacific northwest you are exposed, through school, conversation, public plaques, etc. to a certain amount of information about the natural world that surrounds you. i assume probably this happens in other places as well, but also, i guess i wouldn’t be too surprised if it doesn’t. they don’t call it the best coast for no reason. anyway, i thought i had a decent handle on what the deal with this whale migration would be, generally speaking.
i figured these were humpback whales. humpback whales are the main kind of whale in this part of the world, i assume, and i know they travel a lot, i think i heard about them being in mexico as well as alaska, so it stands to reason. bzzt. wrong. these are gray whales, a type of whale so unremarkable in comparison to the mighty humpback that i barely knew they existed. their main thing is that they are gray. i don’t think they even have dorsal fins.
i figured these whales spend about half the year in either place. the world around us mostly moves in year-long seasonal cycles, and if you’re migrating twice a year (there, then back), well, the math checks out. head down there when it gets too cold in alaska, head back up to alaska for the summer. call it five months in either place, with a month on either end to get the gang together and get on the road.
wrong again! the whales only spend like two or three months in mexico. just long enough to have baby whales, it seems like. also, i learned that the gestational period for a gray whale is almost exactly a year. so when you factor in travel, and child-raising time, and add in that gestation period, it seems like that breeding cycle really would not line up with a yearly migration. you’d start losing time, surely. and what’s up with only spending a couple months in mexico? spending time in alaska (not the part of alaska i assumed, either) is really that much better? what gives?
lastly and most importantly i figured that despite what my friend told me, and despite the fact that whale-watching on the coast at this particular time of year was a relatively widely known-and-participated-in activity, and despite the fact that Depoe Bay’s whole entire “deal” is based around whale observation, despite all those things, i assumed that we would not be able to see the whales, not really. not without going out on some kind of boat, at least. or without very powerful optical equipment. i assumed, uncharitably perhaps, that mostly what we would be doing would be looking at the ocean and surmising or suspecting that somewhere out there, not too far but certainly too far to see from shore, there would be whales passing beneath the surface, and after some time doing this long-distance surmising we would adjourn to some kind of bar patio and drink beer and eat chowder and exchange theories as to why whale watching is so popular when you can’t even see any whales.
as you may have guessed, given the preceding content and the fact that i’ve structured this section in threes, i was wrong about this one too. to be fair to me (something i love to do) i was less wrong: you can see their spouts and sometimes their backs, but they are pretty far out from the shore. but still. we did see spouts and backs. twice, actually. two whales, or maybe the same whale two times.
not bad.
i leave it to the reader to unpack the many lessons contained in the above and apply them to their own life.
1. painting
peekaboo!
not much to say on the subject matter here, i think it’s pretty clear what’s going on, so let’s get going.
i did more sketching than usual on this one, which means i did about three minutes of sketching instead of 45 seconds. i knew basically what i wanted to do and the sketching helped figure out a few key shapes. the shape of the mountain through the gap, the content of the foreground, and that extra plateau on the right.
one more final pass on the left there. i changed the angle of the far mountains to match the angle of the near stump (which became a rock) and stylized the clouds to follow. i also added some more rocky plateaus in the background.
after laying in the basic color within the lines, i turned the line layer off so i could refine the shapes and make sure they stood on their own without the linework holding them together.
look, i’m already bailing on the stump. it’s becoming a rock before our eyes.
more detail. check out the shapes on the mountain in the distance, those are going to change. look at the weird kink where the diagonal slabs of rock somehow turn 90 degrees and become more conventional ridges and valleys. looks kind of stupid, huh? looks kind of like something that wouldn’t ever happen in reality because that’s not really how geology works.
ahhh, much better. there’s some snow on there too.
honestly this could have used one more pass, i think. the foreground is pretty distracting and that far back peak is not really quite in the same visual language as a lot of the rest of it. but it turned out okay. and once again i thought about putting a person in there and decided not to. i think that’s gonna have to be an actual structural commitment over the next year of this project, if i keep it going. i think i’m gonna have to make it a rule.
2. poem
“things i know poem” - winter 2022
every pipe that goes up through the ceiling
most of the tubes and ducts up there
(even the ones painted black)
all of those trusses and beams, even the ones painted black
almost everyone’s name
one of the three big machines in the back
nobody’s birthday
nobody’s favorite food
3. ravioli II
i made ravioli and wrote about it almost a year ago back in the infancy of this little project. how quaint!
a lot of the process will be just about the same but let’s see if i can wring some interesting new commentary out of it.
first step: the “ricotta.” i don’t know how you make real ricotta, but it feels like it’s probably way different than this process, so i don’t really even know if ricotta is a good word to be using here. it’s maybe more like some kind of hummus. but it does taste pretty cheesy. so i don’t know.
cashew pieces (soaked for an hour or two), some water, some garlic powder, salt, and nutritional yeast, and a bit of lemon juice.
also some roast garlic, shallots, and sage. did you know that heat does not really kill Clostridium botulinum, the bacteria that causes botulism (and also, i think, gets injected into people’s faces in some form)?
here’s the “ricotta” all blended up. i cooked some spinach and threw it in there too. and one head of the roast garlic, and the sage and shallot as well. i chopped up some sun-dried tomatoes to stir in afterward because i didn’t want to blend them into oblivion.
this stuff tastes incredibly cheesy, thanks to the nutritional yeast. it’s great. i’m also realizing just now at this very moment that it would make a killer dip.
ravioli dough is also very easy. a lot of pasta has egg in it but all you need for this one is olive oil, semolina flour, 00 flour, and salt. and water of course. then it gets kneaded up for about 10 minutes, which is good for you, and you let it sit for about 10 minutes, which is also good for you. i do not have a pasta roller, so just like last time, i rolled it out with a rolling pin. people say not to do this but honestly it’s fine, who cares. honestly, relax. it’s pasta, jesus, it’s not a big deal.
bloop some dollops of filling down on there. i eyeballed the spacing, being a little more cautious than last time. i think probably i could have squinched another one in there if i tried.
then you brush the bottom noodle with water and carefully lay the top noodle down, attempting as you do so to use whatever portion of a hand you can spare to gently press down around the filling and try to ease the air bubbles out and get a nicely sealed little packet. it’s hard to get all the bubbles out, i’ll just say that. people also say that you need to get them out otherwise the ravioli could explode. that didn’t happen either. everyone might need to cool it a little bit re: pasta.
then you trim them out with your ravioli trimmer and let them dry for about an hour. this makes them a little tougher so they stand up to the boiling water better. i went with round this time because it seemed like a better proportion. i re-kneaded up the offcuts and used them to make more ravioli.
you boil them for 3 minutes, then yoink them out with a slotted spoon and put them right into a hot cast iron where you’ve been cooking mushrooms, garlic, and sage leaves in olive oil. the timing on this is a little tricky. garlic burns fast.
ta da! ravioli.
i ate one of these just like this, and then for the other two i heated up a little bit of that sauce i wrote about the other week and poured it on there. also very good.
4. things that can happen to a building
roof flies off (wind)
window breaks
walls fall over (all at once)
walls fall over (one by one)
new paint
people start writing about it
people stop writing about it
bricks crumble
chimney replaced
new front door, new windows on one side, two new dormers, a new bathtub
rats move in, or leave
roof flies off (non-wind related)
drawn in a picture
well that will about do it, i reckon. have a good week everyone. see ya next tuesday. bye.