What I'm Making

The oceanic large pocket now has a wire hanger across the back, twisted through fused-in glass brackets. Very nice. It's heavy (> 10 lbs.) with a large interior that can hold water for flowers or leaves. Or not. It would be equally happy to hold dried frondy things and shreds of plant.

Aren't you a Beauty ... !!

What I'm Reading

Sometimes, books almost jump off the shelves of the library into my hands -- I've had them fall off a shelf onto my feet on occasion if I, perhaps, had missed their more subtle entreaty. Here's the latest catch/cache:

The Plenitude / Rich Gold

"creativity, innovation, and making stuff"

Gold, who died in 2007, worked at various times for Xerox PARC and Mattel, and characterized himself as wearing 4 hats [science, art, design, engineering] -- sometimes singly and sometimes, as he says, on top of one another at the same time.

C Street: The Fundamentalist Threat to American Democracy / Jeff Sharlet

Damon Lee Fowler's New Southern Baking

Yum.

 

The Best American Essays, 2011 / Edwidge Danticat, Ed.

Essays are conversations and they are my favorite form of literature. Frequently nonfictional or autobiographical, they don't have to be; it's a very open genre in content and style. Essays, however, are always personal and one of the most intimate forms of literary communication. I've been reading the annual collections for 20 years. This one looks to be as amazing as the others.

 

The Weather

39 degrees this morning and sunny. What’s it like where you are?

For gardeners and weather-followers, the USDA has updated its Plant Hardiness Zone Map

http://planthardiness.ars.usda.gov/PHZMWeb/  Based on the average minimum winter temp, you can simply type in your zip code and find your hardiness zone. Also available as an interactive GIS-based map, the 2012 update was prompted by the nipping, nippy slavering Hounds of Climate Change…



http://ehp03.niehs.nih.gov/home.action



Others are hunkering down to look more closely at nanomaterials -- forms of carbon, silver, aluminum, etc., often less than 1/10,000^th the width of a human hair -- used in cosmetics, clothing, paint – and medicine. The National Academy of Sciences is concerned that their potential health and environmental risks are not being studied sufficiently  

http://dels.nas.edu/Report/Research-Strategy-Evironmental-Health/13347.

This interfaces with debates about the role of self-teaching, adaptive nanotechnology purposefully introduced into the human body to fight cancer, affect gene expression, build scaffolding. We haven't yet figured out how to insist that nanoparticles obey the Three Laws of Robotics.

What I'm Reading

Deadhouse Gates, Book #2 in the Malazan Book of the Fallen series. Very very dark. Nobody gets out alive. There are 12? books in the series, I think (Steven Erikson). When you start any of them, you're immediately sucked into a whirlwind of action and characters -- human and nonhuman -- battling their way through continents, oceans, sorcerous realms. There's a glossary to identify characters, ethnicities, places, but I've found it hard to take a break to refer to it. I'm just muddling through without a map and enjoying the very wild ride.

Just finished  Atchafalaya Houseboat by Gwen Roland, and that's a trip in all senses of the word. Gwen and her partner, Calvin Voisin, spent 8 years in the backwaters of the Atchafalaya River Basin of Louisiana, living on a houseboat they built with no power tools, no Internet access (this was the 1970s after all...), and no previous building experience. Gwen wrote about her experiences first in the alternative magazine, Gris Gris, and National Geographic's C.C. Lockwood photographed the journey. A fairytale true story with roots deep in swamp water and mud.



C.C. Lockwood, photographer
http://beta.lpb.org/index.php?/site/programs/atchafalaya_houseboat

What I'm Making

Working to finish a large (about 18" square) pocket from a fused glass volume control project that I created in a class at Wired Designs Studio: Set up a bunch of glass pieces on a slanted kiln shelf, fire, and see what you get! It turned out to be sort of oceanic with either coral branches -- or demonic tusks? protruding out one side. Awesome! Gail at Wired Designs Studio added a back to it and voila! Now I need to add a wire hanger to the back...

Step 1 -- Before first firing

The Weather

57 and drizzle in beautiful San Antonio, Texas. We love our drizzle and our cool temperatures and we are NOT looking forward to Hell again this summer. No 105-degree days for us, please?

Other weather: Politics is still dominating the news. Who thinks any of it makes the least difference when we elect legislators to whom we have given: $$, our trust, a complete list of what's important to us, and a mandate to try to make at least some of that happen -- and, these same individuals are unable to do anything but get together in groups, posture like the primates they are, and squabble amongst themselves...