On the Road ... Well, In the Air Again

A week from now, the husband and I will be in transit in the Atlanta airport, awaiting flights to Los Angeles and then on to Sydney, Australia. I have decided to put whatever trip blogging I do here rather than set up a stand-alone blog. It's one thing to do that when we're actually living somewhere for a month or more, but this is travel rather than residence.

One friend suggested that I not blog the trip but simply enjoy it. I could easily do that, but the blog posts function as my trip journal. I could write the narrative down in a paper journal or type it into a word-processed document that only I see. Blogging it saves me from feeling as if I am repeating myself when people ask how the trip is or was. It also means that I don't unnecessarily bore people. If someone wants to read the words and see the photos, they can. If they don't, they don't have to.

In terms of those photos, I am making this something of a point-and-shoot trip in that I am not taking my Canon 60D DSLR. Instead, I'm taking the Canon Powershot SX50 I got because I was intrigued by the 50x optical zoom. It's not a SLR, and can't be set manually, but it will do. Much as I like it in terms of shooting manually, the 60D is large and heavy, and I do get tired of carrying it at times. I'm also taking the pocket-sized Pentax that was the husband's camera or my backup camera in Vietnam and Australia two years ago. I am not really looking to shoot masterpieces or prize-winners. I really just  want decent images that will stoke the firing of some memory cells.

The current trip business is figuring out what to take clothes-wise. The evenings will be cool given that it is late autumn there; nights may be cold. Given that we are doing the "gold service" on the train, I should probably plan to dress a bit above t-shirts there at least when it comes to the dining car. I always feel inept when travelling especially when travelling internationally. Everyone else looks to me to be so put-together, confident, and comfortable, as if they just stepped off a travel magazine page. I usually feel like someone tagging along, disguised as best I can to look like all those other people.

I am also trying not to get too nervous over things left here. I should not miss any work since both projects I'm working on will be done by when we leave. Older son can work out the kinks of the pets and his work schedule not to mention the overnight GORUCK Challenge he and younger son are doing. Yes, s**t may happen, but that's what trip insurance is for, eh? And now I should get back to some proofreading so that those work projects I mentioned might even get submitted this week.

On Being Suited to a T

I delivered a quilt this morning, one I was somewhat hired to make. I usually do quilts intended to be given to a particular person. This was the first I did at someone else's request, in exchange for, yes, money. As Homer Simpson was told, "Money can be exchanged for good and services" and in this case it was exchanged for a quilt. As I began to draft this post, it occurred to me that I did not post about the quilt I finished before this one. I finished that one some weeks before the recipient was in town to receive it, after which it just slipped my mind. I'll add something about that after covering the one delivered today.

Several years ago, a friend approached me about doing a quilt or quilts from t-shirts following her daughter from about kindergarten to adult-hood. I blogged about those quilts here along with one I made for my son to practice working with shirt fabrics. Then, in response to a karate master instructor's asking me to make him "something," I did a quilt of shirts from several decades of Myo Sim Karate and Kendo. That's the one I'll show below. As I was working on the two for my friend and her daughter, I was approached by a Facebook friend whom I met through the Charlottesville Photography Initiative about doing some t-shirt quilts for her. Never having done one for money, I perused various websites and set a rate of about the midpoint of what those sites charged.

When I finished the karate t-shirt quilt, I started the quilt delivered this morning, one made of t-shirts collected at various rock concerts or festivals over the years, centering on--I hope I get this right--Phish. The logos had already been cut from the shirts, meaning that I didn't have much leeway in terms of how to frame the images. I ended up going with blocks that measured 15 inches finished with something of a pattern in terms of the colors of the shirts. Here's the finished product.

I quilted each shirt square a bit differently. Here are a few of them.

I was very satisfied with the result and, more importantly, so was the person for whom it was made. When I delivered this quilt to her, I accepted another set of t-shirts, these related to a summer camp in Maine. While I may play around with design ideas now, that quilt won't actually get started until I return from Australia in early June.

The quilt of martial arts t-shirts was also well received by the recipient and all the more special because it was a complete surprise to him.

Here are just a couple of the squares.

This last one was not from a shirt, but is an insignia from when our school of karate was taught as a physical education class at, where else, the University of Virginia. There aren't many of the top symbols still known to exist, so I was quite grateful to the master instructor who gave me this one for a quilt for the master who had been his principal instructor.

To Blog Here or There

In less than a month, the husband and I will be setting off to spend almost three weeks in Australia, revisiting some of the people and places we went in 2012 while adding a few new adventures, some more off-the-wall than others. It appears that we will have free Internet at most of the places we will stay (the two overnights on a train excepted), I should be able to post some photos and narratives as a blog since not everyone who will be interested in our adventures is on Facebook. When we visited Iceland for our 25th wedding anniversary, I did a trip mini-blog as part of this blog. When we have taken longer trips including living in Hue, Vietnam for a month, I have used stand-alone blogs, here for the 2009 trip and here for the second one. (Those links will actually take you to the last post in each blog, but if you got that far you probably know how to get back to the beginning.)

The 64 cent question today is how I should handle the upcoming trip, somewhat longer than the Iceland adventure but quite shorter than the Vietnam ones. Where does the middle ground put me? By posting this, I'm allowing the few people who still read this now-very-irregular blog to comment on their preference. As I proceed down a pre-trip checklist of items such as notify the credit and debit card companies of our travel plans, I need to get the question of where to blog decided. If I'm going to do a stand-alone blog, I need to get it set up and maybe even add a post or two about the getting ready of it all.

But for now, I need to get started on dinner, the husband's having just awakened from a nap to ask me what time it is. Comment away!

Is it Pronounced "pica-key" or "pie-cakey"?

Younger son has, for the last several years requested a pie baked inside of a cake for his birthday. He asked for it again this year, but I decided to mix things up and see if I could bake a cake inside a pie. Indeed, I could, and younger son thought it actually turned out better than the various capiekes (pronounced cah-pikes) have. The photos below are from the pilot piecakee that I did two weeks before the real one, which did not look too much different from the one shown here.

That's just a pie, you might be thinking, but not if you look at its inside. 

If you want to make one of these, it does help to have a (very) deep dish pie pan. Step one is, obviously, making a pastry crust and placing it in that (very) deep dish pie pan. I could show you a photo of that, but (1) you probably already know what that would look like and (2) I forgot to take any photos until I got to the step of adding the upper pie filling.

That's a lower pie crust topped with cherry pie filling, chocolate cake batter, and a second layer of cherry pie filling. Next is adding the top crust. I made this easy on myself and used a cake mix and canned pie filling. For the pilot, I only used one can of cherry filling, which meant that I didn't have enough for the whole area. I remedied that in the final, birthday version.

Note that the top of the unbaked crust seems a bit lower than the top crust in the above photo showing it post-baking. Cake batter always rises--the finished cake is higher in the pan than the batter alone was--and that's what happens here as well. In terms of temperature and time, I baked it much as I would a pie. The first 15 minutes were done at 425 F; the last 30 to 40 minutes was done at 350 F. If you're still thinking that it might not work, here's a close-up of a slice.

Nice browned, flaky pie crust, cherry filling, and normal looking chocolate cake. Now if I could only find a way to work the icing in.

Saying It Better than I Ever Could

Can I just make my resolution to do or be all Neil Gaiman talks about in his three New Years Eve messages? I shall be quite happy if, in the coming year, I can make some art, dream dangerously a time or more, and make some epic mistakes.

Opening the Door on a New Year

I have been going back and forth on "official" resolutions for 2014. I have no desire, though, to come up with a list of specific, quantifiable goals as I have in some years past. I'm not even sure I want a list of general things on which to work. Last year, I wrote of wanting it to be a year of not asking why I should do something but instead asking why the hell I shouldn't do something, a philosophy suggested by younger son. Sometime in the past year, I read another sentiment worthy of deliberation. Googling it just now, I have learned that it is from Henry David Thoreau.

Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you've imagined. As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler.

The statement I read and have pondered is the middle statement, sandwiched between two others that just don't have offer quite the same food for thought. Live the life you've imagined. Live. The. Life. You've. Imagined.

What is the life I have imagined? I'm honestly not sure, though I do know that the life I would imagine was very different at different times in the life I've been living. And is it a life I have imagined, or a me I have imagined? A life to me implies so much that is external--what is around me as opposed to what is within me. There is certainly much in the world around me over which I have no control. What I can control is the reaction I offer to that which I cannot control. So perhaps the life one imagines is both outside and inside each of us. If I have had more than one philosophy class, I might be able to articulate it better.

Exactly what it means aside, I think my resolution for 2014 will combine last year's thought with the one I have been incubating throughout the year: Why the hell not live the life I've imagined? I can't say exactly how that will evolve, but I hope it happens thoughtfully. In the life I imagine, I am not as much the light-switch all-on or all-off over-reactive person I often am. I will admit that in some areas, I am already living the life I've imagined. I have the means to nurture my creative spirit even if I don't always make time to do so. While there are things to which I would like to devote more time--chiefly photography and writing--there are certainly enough others to which I do devote time.

And so I prepare to bid adieu to 2013 and open a brand new, clean and unmarked calendar holding a year in which I will endeavor to live the life I've imagined, because, well, why the hell not?

Out with the Old

Re-reading my last post from 2012, it appears that I resolved to make 2013 a year of "asking why the hell not" and of learning some Vietnamese. Meat Loaf told us that two out of three ain't bad, and I'll say the same about one out of two. I did things in 2013 that I never expected to do, some more intentional than others. I never expected to complete a GORUCK Challenge, but I did, along with four GORUCK Lights and one Nasty. I'm even registered to do two more Challenges and two more Lights in 2014, in pairs of one Challenge and one Light within the same 24-hour period. Why? Why the hell not?

To help prepare for the GORUCK events, older son and I started working out with a group called SEAL Team Physical Training. As a result, I have actually appeared in public in workout tights or capris. In terms of capris, the workout ones would be the only ones I have ever worn since I have never embraced capris as everyday wear. In terms of workout tights, I have always hated seeing the skin-tight leggings worn by many women, but here I am wearing essentially the same thing. They're warm on a cold morning, though, and quite easy to move in.

On the unintentional front, I spun out a 2000 Pontiac Firebird on an ice-covered stretch of Interstate 70 while rescuing younger son from a paperwork fiasco by driving him from Rawlins, Wyoming to here through something called Winter Storm Q. I, the original snow weenie, drove in deeper, more blowing snow than I ever had and managed to get all three of us (younger son's dog was also along) back safe and sound.

As for learning some Vietnamese, well, I tried. My first attempt at using Rosetta Stone on a daily or almost daily basis got interrupted by the week-long adventure of Winter Storm Q and playing catch-up on work and life after I got back. I started over again in late spring and worked my way to a bit further along than I had the first time before getting hit by an assortment of life things I don't even recall now but which made working on Vietnamese seem a very self-centered activity, sort of like, well, blogging. Will I get back to it again for the third time's being the charm? No one knows, certainly not I.

I now find myself three days from the start of a new year, and halfway through the 58th year of my life. How should I resolve to spend it? Living a philosophy such as asking why the hell not somewhat was? I do have one in mind that might work. Doing specific, quantifiable things such as exercising a certain number of days in each week, month, or the entire year? Doing one profound thing in each of several general areas? I've done both of those in earlier years. The quantifiable one encourages a competitive streak that I'd rather be rid of, but it's also hard to know if I've really done something remarkable in any given area.

Non-caloric food for thought, I guess, over the next several days as I try not to think about the excess real food consumed during the holiday weeks. For now, let's just say that I resolve to come up with something by 12:00 a.m. Wednesday.