What I'm Making

Onion Tarte Lyonnaise. With my own onions! I buy the onion sampler from Dixondale Onion Farms -- white, yellow, red -- and plant them every winter. By late spring (now), they're as large as they're going to get. I use most of them as green onions for salads and garnishes; a few are allowed to reach bulb-size and the ones I 'sacrificed' for the tart were in the spring onion bulb category. Fabulous recipe from the iconic 1970s cookbook "The Vegetarian Epicure," which doesn't believe in substitutions for butter in pastry, cream (and milk) in the filling, cheese (real cheese :). Delicious.

The Weather

And, unusually glorious it is! Highs in the low 80s, lows at night in the high 50s. Sigh. Such a nice reprieve before the 8-month summer hits here in south central Texas …

Unfortunately, the annual Kitten Explosion has ... exploded. In this part of the country you can count on a breeding female cat having 4-5 litters a year, but there seems to be a special peak in Spring. All the shelters are full, as are rescue organizations; and I’m one of many people frantically looking for someone to give some kittens a home.

What I'm Making

Backings for future? pocket vases, probably ... Practicing with using powders to create my own tiles. The two here are L to R: teal and light plum. I've laid a strip of light amber irid across them because, ultimately, I may make a pair of pockets that are connected by similar 'fronts' of the irid. Early days and I want to layer on some different colors, re-fire the backs. But, I like the texture created by my impatience of not sifting the powder evenly; it helps me visualize adding new colors.

What I'm Making

Mistakes. Lots and lots and lots of glorious mistakes. Every day in every way I … make mistakes! Why so happy? Well, according to Lewis Thomas, one of my favorite authors, “Mistakes are at the very base of human thought, embedded there, feeding the structure like root nodules.”

If he has the right of it, people -- eternally unfinished and sloppy – are uniquely primed to create. Sometimes, that means resolving an argument or solving a practical problem. “Whenever new kinds of thinking are about to be accomplished … there has to be an argument beforehand.”

“…there can be no action at all if there are not the two sides and the argument. The hope is in the faculty of wrongness, the tendency toward error."

Cats, dogs, other animals – crystals, snowflakes, rocks – don’t have this “splendid freedom,” as Lewis defines it. “They are limited, most of them, to absolute infallibility.” What the absence of error creates or solves is, literally, nothing. Perfection is also death and stagnation. There is simply no moving forward or even sideways, no movement at all, without mistakes and lots of them. How very comforting.

"The capacity to leap across mountains of information to land lightly on the wrong side represents the highest of human endowments.”

Thomas, Lewis, “To Err is Human,” from Gross, John, “The Oxford Book of Essays.” 2008.