Category: Hobbies and Projects

We are the meekest of dilettantes. But I think we harbor modest visions of the future, in which, while ruling our intergalactic empire, we might also have ten to twenty thousand important paintings, not to mention the collections of rare manuscripts, pillaged Bronze Age statuettes, ancient codices, amulets/crown jewels, signed first editions of Nabokov’s and Steinbecks great works and Shakespeare’s First Folio. Oh, and maps. O!, the maps. Halls and halls full of maps. Perhaps the maps could go in the wing with all of the Rothkos. Or near the Magrittes and Tanguys and Cornell boxes.

Over the past couple of years, we have made barely-lightly-informed, impulsive purchases by dint of haunting local auctions and art shows. Our acquisitions are a leap of faith: they’re mostly tragically-framed (it is ceaselessly amazing to see the dollar-store frames things end up in), possibly worthless, definitely displaying signs of age and fading. But they make us inspired, as art should, and they make me excited about the future.

David’s 35th birthday was last week. After my first four gift ideas went wholly south, I decided to get him something he’d been asking for. Well, sort of. Our kitchen’s mortar and pestle complement was sorely lacking. Our little guy only held a few ounces and served more to spray bits of things around than to crush or muddle them usefully. David had, for some time, been on the warpath for a new mortar and pestle, a big, manly, indestructible one.

I took it a bit further and found something shaped like a pig. Instead of an outsized marble variant or, even less usefully, a ceramic one, I found a jumbo-sized Mexican molcajete. These three-footed vessels are traditionally made from volcanic rock, tend to shed dust and grit until they’re seasoned, and have been around in some way or another since the Aztecs ruled Tenōchtitlān, awesome calendaring system and all.

The story begins: I once had an Amazon Kindle. I love to read and I love technology. It seemed like a good match. Except I kind of hated it.

Enter the iPad, with its iBooks application, and then re-enter Amazon with a Kindle reader for the iPad. Then there’s Kindle on iPhone and other options on the iPad, and, holy moly, what a morass of possibilities.

Things rarely get me unreservedly excited in my ripe old age. I’m thinking excited in terms of the way I felt about birthday presents when about ten. When I could, I’d stack them in order and slowly open each one and try to stretch out the event as long as possible, coaxing open paper and laboriously untying ribbons. The kind of excitement that actually makes me slow down instead of speeding up, because it’s just that good that I don’t want it to end.

We are building an Orrery, a brass-and-gears wonder of a mechanical thing (and heavy!) that models the planets in the solar system. I can’t stand how much fun I’m having with this. Even cutting the pieces out of their wretched blister pack and setting them out on the table (set screws, gears, axles, planets) is bliss.

I’ve been shopping at Powell’s City of Books for my entire life, and as such, maintain a complicated, sometimes fretful relationship with the enormous bookstore not unlike relationships I might carry on with a human, full of bluster and happy times and occasionally anger. In the way of a blunted, old friendship, sometimes I take for granted the gems that still can be found.

My goal was to find a good edition of Plato’s Republic, but I was in, oh, what you might call the Plato section; this being Powell’s, reputed to be the largest bookstore in the free world, you could probably build an inhabitable structure out of their selection of Platonic texts. Tucked into the rows somewhere, which, by dint of the astronomical number of volumes Powell’s holds and the rather unassuming dun brown color of the spine, was an adorable copy of Plato’s Symposium or Supper from the Nonesuch Press, from 1924.

I am seriously pro-food. I like to think about food, read about food, gently prod food, ferment food, garnish food, smell food, buy food, seek food and experience new food. I regale the difference between 6-month and 12-month Manchego, care whether asparagus is in season, and am honestly fond of (not just making a point of) eating sweetbreads (thymus and pancreas, usually, of calf), bone marrow, squid and fermented fish sauce. However, my upcoming trip to Iceland is making me gustatorily anxious.

Icelandic food specialties read more like grievous and fatal fraternity hazing rituals than anything that a human with extant taste buds and olfactory capability would submit to willingly. The regional recipes manage to get an F- on each of the rough trinity of food-is-yummy criteria, offending the user psychologically, aesthetically, and sensually.

With the early arrival of “magnolia season” here in town, I’m looking ahead to the year’s bounty in terms of things I can heat up a lot and force oil out of. Yep, it’s almost time to take the big ol’ Portuguese alembic copper pot still off of the shelf.

The great hurdle with distilling your own essential oils is obtaining knowledge.

This is unfortunate, because mistakes are not always benign in this craft and I could sure use a strong guiding hand. Distilling the wrong kind of cedar can make your lungs bleed. Being a doofus about your condenser setup can get you exploded.

This post is part of my ongoing goal in 2010 to “fix my little problem” with Italian wines. In other words, my ignorance. It’s slow going. Tonight I’m sipping a wine that is startling me: 2006 Felline Alberello Rosso Salento.

This wine tastes like something from California or Australia. Approaching opacity, dense, sugar-plum jam. Why does this wine taste like this? My perception of Italian wines: dusty-dry, sere, almost fruitless, reds that require a certain fortitude and often a whole lot of food to enjoy appropriately.

This wine is nothing like that.

Photo of Negroamaro grapes by Pietro Di Bello

In my recent efforts to streamline publishing processes on my blog, I find that I need an automated way to use a custom single post template for certain of my posts. There’s a great plugin—Single Post Template—out there, but it means I’d have to remember to assign the right posts to the right template. I found a quick way to hook into WordPress and insert some logic to use my own custom single post template based on my own criteria: maybe you can use it, too?

WordPress icon by koka sexton

I wanted a piece in my stationery arsenal to bridge the gap between business cards and note cards. I get asked a lot at social events what my site was called again? How do you spell “Lyza”? It is my hope that these new cards give an idea of what interests me and how to find me.

In the end, I have about 50 first-rate cards and about 100 acceptable ones. I considered numbering the run of 50, but that seemed a touch pompous. Want one?