Caitlin and I have a family membership at the ROM, which means that I can go any time I want for free, and take Nefarious and a friend along as well. My only complaint about the museum is the existence of the kids area, which is really just a play area where kids goof around — nothing particularly museum related. Trouble is, stuff like this is a “cheap thrill” for kids, and many would rather go there than go to the effort of exploring the museum. Personally I wish they’d eliminate it — it’s not just a waste of space, but actually takes away from the whole excursion.
I can’t wait until she’s just a little bit older and can really enjoy the museum experience…
Nefarious has been asking me to get her dragon fruit (aka pitahaya) lately, and I figure the more healthy stuff we eat the better. It was on sale at the grocery store today so I got one for us to have for desert and it was a huge hit. The flavor was great — sort of like a sweet melon with the texture of a kiwi. We cut it in half, splitting it between us, and scooped out the flesh with a spoon. I highly recommend trying it if you never have before. I suspect it’s a pleasure that too many people let slip by them because they’re really not sure what to expect from this odd looking delicacy.
Other than that, I got a message from someone seeking permission to develop parts of my biography into a comic book. Now that’s an ego-stroke! I was pretty excited.
Speaking of overlooked food items, I made a salad recently out of kale, which is a light leafy kind of cabbage. You can get giant bunches of it for a dollar, so it’s less expensive than lettuce-type salad, and I suspect it’s much richer in terms of nutrients like beta carotene and vitamins. I ate it with a simple balsamic dressing (a bit of mayonnaise, a bit of oil, and a bit of vinegar) and it was quite refreshing.
Nothing exciting to report… I hung the work on “Kubla Khan” up next to each other so I can see the progress and fill the holes. Also gotta write a “screw you, landlords” letter today giving notice — once again, this afternoon there was no water pressure for about three hours.
Expanded after bedtime… Having finished Coraline last week, Nefarious and I started on Caitlin’s latest book-gift, James and the Giant Peach, which she’s absolutely loving. We made it through the first seventeen chapters after school… I think when we finish this we’ll read The Twenty-One Balloons, which for some reason I thought was actually by Roald Dahl but is actually by William Pène du Bois. I enjoyed it a great deal as a child.
Other than that, if you haven’t already checked out the idle entertainment of Bizkit the Sleep Walking Dog, one of the latest viral hits, do enjoy it. In more productive watching there have been a couple great features on Make today — this post in which “lost-foam” casting is done to create a set of pulleys (although I have to think that just machining them would have been easier), and also this idea about building flat-pack houses on location using a CNC cutter… Reminds me of the old portable steam-powered saw mills that could be brought to location to fabricate most of what was needed for a barn or home on site.
Friday, February 27, 2009
Nefarious has told me that for her birthday she would like me to paint a new portrait of her, with a unicorn. I was thinking I might do one based on the many medieval pictures of young women capturing unicorns, drawing inspiration from paintings like the ones below — “Wild women with unicorn” (1500), “The Maiden and the Unicorn” (1602, Zampieri), “A Maiden with a Unicorn” (1478, Da Vinci), “The young woman and the unicorn” (1470, Platearius), “Maiden with Unicorn” (15th century tapestry), and “The Woman with the Unicorn” (1505, Raphael).
Other than that, I’m happy to see that America is going back to the moon — although I do feel that we need to also start spending some real time and money exploring the ocean, which we probably know less about than we do the moon — and I got idle amusement from a couple of recent Oddee lists — “7 Most Bizarre Skin Conditions” and “10 Worst Plastic Surgery Disasters“.*
* Which lead me to the deeply disturbing FamousPlastic.com.
I mean, WTF? …Eek!
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Today Nefarious and I read quite a lot of Coraline — we’re nearly finished. At first she was a little worried that it would be too scary for her, being the most “adult” book we’ve read, but it’s completely entranced her and we must have read a good fifty pages of it today and were it not for the need to cook supper, we’d have read more. It’s definitely nice that she’s now at the point where she can read books that I enjoy as much as she does.
I didn’t draw either of these; they’re just pieces of clip art that I found.
