Thursday, January 31, 2013

Last Dose

Forgotten video department.
It seems like a lifetime ago, the Interferon.Maybe because it was ultimately ineffective that it has lost any significance in my long and eventful life. Like a lot of things.
But at the time it was a big deal.
I did 28 weekly injections.
Here is a video of the last, the very last one. Kind of sad, in a noble way. Honest. And the violence takes place just off screen. I cuss a little bit like I always will do, but taken all-in-all it's pretty civilized.
(Warning: Drug use and Strong Language)

Monday, January 28, 2013

Island

Changes up in here!
Over Christmas I cooked a gigantic feast for my pal Maggi and I which was a lot of fun. I could not help but notice that my little galley kitchen is, well, little. I had more food prep area on Felicity Jane, my recentlly departed Ericson 27 which you may remember from these pages.
In the course of preparing our Xmas dinner, I made a pie, which was a good bit of the aforementioned fun.
The other day I made another, as you well know. How could you forget when I will not shut up about it?
It, too, was an amusing and engaging thing to do. As I kneaded and mixed and chopped and measured a plan sprang forth fully formed, like Apollo from the forehead of Zeuss.
I would remodel my kitchen!
Well, sort of, anyway.
Years ago I was given a sample chunk of a similar orangey granite by the folks at Oregon Tile and Marble which I heat up and wrap in a towel to warm my little cold feet at night in the winter time. It was sheer coincidence that the only slab that was finished on both ends was a.the appropriate size, and b. orangey. There were plenty other slabs, including a two-part chunk of round table-top in inch thick marble that was quite tempting, but I don't really have room for that much surface, although I do have an unlimited supply of clutter.
So I hopped on the #4 bus the other day and hotfooted it over to Mississippi Ave to the Rebuilding Center where I quickly located and purchased an old 24 by 24 base kitchen cabinet with a wide drawer under a wide slide-out cutting board over a door with two wide shelves on which a vast number of pots and pans may reside instead of on the top of the range cluttered and clattered in plain view, as they have for the past 11 years.In the lumber shed I had previously noted a couple of rolling pallets with an array of stone slabs suitable for kitchen use, leftovers from Portlands many kitchen remodels, slabs of granite and marble and travertine and even a green chunk of slate.
I found just the thing, a two-foot hunk of fully finished orange speckled granite drainboard, highly polished and  bullnosed on both ends, 24" wide ande maybe 32" long, which was mine for a mere 10 bucks. This shit sells for 60 a square foot downtown. Savvy?
Mom gave me the little stoneware bottle that I am using for a rolling pin in my quest for puff pastry. It's quite heavy which means mass which means good thermal reservoir: chill it in the freezer for rolling out the Mille Foille!
Mom says I gave it to her a long time ago which I have absolutely no recollection of doing but I probably stole it someplace its just about the right size to go under a young criminal's jacket. I have much to atone for.

Maggi, bless her little Plymouth Saturn heart, brought me and my stuff across the river. Tired and very excited and happy.
It took about a half an hour to set the thing up. Budget total $30. At some point in the near future I shall finish things off with four roller dolly feet, and my island will meander around in the stream, and out of the stream, and any damn where I please, for I am American, and my will is not a thing with which to trifle.
I kept the stone cool with a bag of ice cubes under a towel while the dough was resting in between turns. Even so I was shocked and amazed when the stuff began to puff at about the 15 minute mark in the oven at 400°
Warning: There is a pound of butter for every pound of flour...which does not go away in the baking it is usually worn on the hips.
 Something about "no man is an island" etc, but the island, unlike the man, is a very useful place to prepare cool stuff to eat, such as Julia Childs and Michell Richard inspired MIlleFoile  dough which became today some reasonably nice apple turnovers. The pastry actually puffed, the filling was delish, and we are very happy up in here tonight.

Sunday, January 27, 2013

Amaryllis





Mom (through one of her many minions) sent me an amaryllis at Christmas. I have not had a houseplant in many many years.
A plant in the window in the winter is not that easy to photograph. I did this one before I thought about that.

I was sceptical at first, but I did what I always do and I overwatered the s**t out of it right away. Recovering my poise, I put it by the wondow and left it alone. Then it began to grow like a mad bastard.
The old shoots even started to grow. I finally figured out that I was drowning the poor thing, so I stopped the watering and I removed the moss mulch to let the soil breathe a little.

It kept growing and then a second shoot sprang forth.

A bud appeared and then another and another in a triple head on the first tall shoot.

I got really excited and I took dozens of pictures. Now and then there was a good one although I still can't tell you what is so much better about that one and not the others. But there's a big difference.

This Amaryllis is a spectacular flower.

Sunday, January 20, 2013

Pie #3: On The Map


Very happy tonight the eating test score was higher than I had expected. First, the bottom crust got done just right, a bit crunchy no scorch no sog. The filling kept shape perfectly, as Uncle John would say, zero filling slump. Juicier than last time, better "pie" flavor with the cinnamon and nutmeg just about right. Almost sweet enough, could use maybe a bit more, but real good texture, the apple done thoroughly no crunch no moosh. And that crust continues to be amazing, great tooth "dente", good crust flavor, and still crumbles in almost flakes. I think I might invest in a better pan just for presentation, and if I were to rotate at halfway it might brown more evenly, but I'm not going to change the temp or the time. 

If they get any better I'm going to have to get a real pie pan. This crust technique is the shizz.
I have to think about the filling a little more the way to parboil the apples is a reaction to the very first one last year that was still crunchy the apples didn't cook at all very bad.
And I felt bad. 
So now I cut up 8 apples and put them in a saucepan and turned it on med-low and let them get real hot-steaming so the ones on the bottom were rather stewed. Problem is that the juice comes out of the chunk and collects in the pan, with the flavor and fruit sugar sweetness, so this time I added it back before the top crust went back on, along with the spices and the thickening flour/sugar, you'rE supposed to toss the filling but it was too tender and then the weight of the dough overflowed the juice which went all over hell and gonE (good excuse to mop the darn kitchen)
Last time I poured off the juice but the pie came out with great texture but dry and sort of flavorless.  So adding the liquid back worked well just have to adjust the method a bit.
So it gets a score of 8 on the crust, a 9 on texture, and a 7 on filling. I think I can get it up to all 9s and THEN think about egg-wash glazing.
By freezing the butter it doesn't penetrate the flour, so when it bakes the little butter pockets interrupt the texture of the dough and the little layers of interrupted dough form actual flakes which is the ne plus ultra of piecrust
  The secret technical wrinkle to this is to freeze the butter overnight, and then after the shortening is peasized with a fork, grate the butter in with my cheese grater. Then I put it back in the freezer for a minute with a few oz ice water, and then bring it all out and mix it with a fork until it clumps and then make 2 dough balls and refrigerate for 24 hrs. They say only an hour will do it but I'm an addict. If one is good 24 is better!
Plus I used better flour this time, 1/4 cake flour, 3/4 regular white flour.
I tried to figure out hows to make pies years ago and the crust was just soggy cement but this stuff is the real thing.
The way I was brought up your worth as a woman was determined by your apple pie and your fried chicken.I never thought I was capable of cooking something like real people do. 
My fried chicken comes and goes.  I have to work on the "rub"
But this here apple pie is gonna put me on the map.

Saturday, January 19, 2013

Summer Movie

Here's a little something I had forgotten about, a video from my second camping trip to Hayden Island last summer. I haven't fucked with it, no titles or splices but it is cute as hell.
What I love about this is the narration. I'm obviously having a wonderful time, enthusiastically describing the things I see as I look around through the camera, the crappy low-quality 240 pixel camera, however it plays on anything which makes up for the poor image quality.
And it is a great place which I love, and all that comes through. I shall definitely be doing more of these next year.

Friday, January 18, 2013

Earrings

The old sailor song goes "Worm and parcel with the lay, then turn and serve the other way."
I'm making earrings for the sail in the old way.
I left enough slack at the corners to make up these reinforced loops to fasten to. In the old days they were called earrings. Throat, Peek, Clew and Tack.
This here is a cuntline.
This cuntline has a worming.

Neatly wormed and ready for parcelling.
 First you worm the cuntlines, the actual name for the grooves between the strands of a rope. The worm is a strand of small stuff laid in the crack to give more surface for the outer windings to bear on, making the whole finished product quite stiff, weatherproof and chafe resistant.
Nice clean new white canvas!
 Then you take a strip of canvas and wrap the wormed rope in a solid winding and tie it up like a parcel with a string and some half hitches. In the old days both the rope and the parcelling would be soaked in Pine Tar and linseed oil but that's stinky and smeary and very soon I would have tar on everything which wouldn't matter on a sailing ship at sea. Not in my apartment, thank you.

Tied down with a bit of sailmaker's twine. Like a burial shroud in those cultures that don't believe in coffins.
Then once the thing is wormed and parcelled you wrap 'er up tight as you can with waxed marling cord, tight as the dickens, keeping the turns of wrapping evenly jammed right next to each other.It took me a minute of sleepy confusion to figure out which way to wind the serving. There are four options. Think about it. Tell me if it doesn't make you a little bit dizzy to visualise all four.And I think I still got it wrong. Oh well. I don't think it really matters that much.
I made a little bobbin out of a bamboo stir-stick from Powell Paint.
Oregon Leather sells many types of waxed twines including the traditional waxed linnen, which this is not. I used dacron sailtwine for the sewing, and I like this nylon because it stretches a bit and you can get more compression with it.
I was surprised by how much the twine compresses the rope, and that makes it very nearly rigid. Quite transformative. I will eventually marl the whole corner especially including the earring, to the sail. 14 cuntlines each way.
 But the stuff does an interesting thing to the loop of soft hemp rope.Stiffens it up nicely. Keeps the loop open. In the later days of sail the earrings were made of wrought iron lashed with marling onto the boltrope. Too modern for me.
Then what I did on the one loop, the Peek Earring, is to hitch over the service with green tuna cord keckling, a form of ring-bolt hitching that spreads nicely around the loop in a sacrificial chafe-proofing that can be easily renewed as it wears. Re-serving would be a tedious task I would just as soon undertake as seldom as possible.
Keckling, or hackling or hogsbacking as it was sometimes called
The Clew is the lower outer corner that the sheet ties on with which you control the sail.
The Tack is the other lower corner tied down at the mast to spread the sail.
The Throat is the upper inner corner where the halyard fastens on to raise the sail and keep her raised.
The Peek is the outer upper corner held out by the sprit, that other skinny pole that runs diagonally across a spritsail.

Tuesday, January 8, 2013

Busy Day (UPDATED)

Update: SECOND SOAK     This tannin process is very weird. I hung the sail in the shower yesterday by clipping it with vice-grips, and today when I looked at it the places where the steel came i8n contact with it the canvas turned black, which did not wash out with handsoap. On the contrary, the soap acted like bleach. So today I added half a box of baking soda to neutralize the PH a bit, and soaked the sail again in the same liquid from yesterday. After 4 hours soak the sail looks appreciably darker. But the spot I soaped didn't take any more tannin at all, in fact, it looks like somebody spilled bleach on there. Shit. I guess I'm going to chalk it up to the inevitable mystery of life. I do think I'm done with this process, though. I am happy with the result. We will see how well it preserved the canvas next fall when I take it off the boat for the winter.

To begin with, this was the day to tan the sail. 
Its dark out now, 5 o'clock. I'm resting. It was a busy day.
Dry and smooth and ready to go. I replaced the reef band which was a pain in the ass but the right thing to do. That took longer than it should have because I fucked around being embarrassed about having fucked it up so bad. But, as Peter Green used to say, Oh well.
 BY 830 or so I had my coffee done and the big washtub on the stove heating up.
I tried different combinations of burners but really just the big one in front did all the work, for reasons that have to do with housekeeping and safety, and that was fine. I had to open the windows a couple times to let out the fumes, kind of a motor oil type smell not real bad but I'm glad I don't do this every day.
Bailing it out in reverse. I guess that would make the phrase "bailing it in"

Alum. Mordant. I don't know how or even if it worked, but I was tired of looking at it in the spice cupboard and afraid I would eventually mistake it for the similarly packaged Thyme and fuck up an otherwise tasty stew.
 Supposedly aluminum acetate works better for cotton than alum which is for wool but like Donald Rumsfeld said you go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want. Fucker. Sexy, though. But I digress. The stuff dissolved right away so that was fine.
Good to go.
Thanks to my brother-in-law Jim for the excellent oak bark chips. I put some acorns in there too.
 The oak bark chips were still frozen but not for long, in the strainer bags  divided in thirds more or less. The water started turning red right away as the tannin flooded into solution. Very responsive stuff.
 Sinking the canvas and making it stay sunk was a bit awkward but I made one very long handled spoon winter before last which worked pretty good for a manipulator, nice and sturdy, so eventually most of the air bubbles worked their way out from the folds and pockets and the thing stayed down. I added enough water to completely cover the works, pulling the dye bags out so the tannin could drain down into the canvas.
The washtub was in fact large enough, and the much cuter 24 inch model might have been but there was enough to worry about so I was glad to have the extra room. That oval thing on the wall is a photo of Jeff and his dog Wally on the beach at crab flats.
low tide 1988 the greatest kid with the greatest dog on the greatest beach by the best mudflats in the whole world
 I threw in the bolt-rope and the sinnet halliard just in case I decide not to tar them, I'd like to avoid that even though I absolutely love the pine-tar smell it is very messy stuff until it dries up a little which takes weeks.
The pot never did really boil but it did get quite frothy simmering hot.
Delicious-looking froth. Reminded me of hopping the wort.
 I left it like that for 4 or 5 hours. All afternoon, anyway. I forgot to look at the actual time.
 I spaced out and read a book but that was boring and so I  sharpened my wooden convex block plane and had a go at working down the remaining oar of the pair of commercial beaters that I got with the boat. Poplar. Warped, and thick as a brick. Glue laminated chunks, so the grain goes all over hell but I did make some of those nice curly planer shavings and the thing might work better for haveing gotten rid of some of the clunky extra thickness on the blades.
Long about 4 PM I declared victory, transferred the canvas to the sink to drain and set about collecting containers into which I scooped all the dyewater.
I had more containers than I would have thought. Necessity is a demanding bedfellow.
 Finally I managed to find a way to hang the sail up in the shower on ropes from the sprinkler pipes. They are quite sturdy which is good because the fucking wet sail weighs a fucking ton. I made plans all the while to be sure and make some sand bags for ballast so I don't tip over the dory the first time I come about in a blow.
 Compare the color of this SECOND SOAK  with the first results below. A bit darker is all you get, but I am actually quite happy with the result. And it was scads of fun doing.


About the color I expected thanks to my test-patch. I'm in it for the tannin, but I know I will have to have the conversation about why it isn't tanbark colored even though sails that are the dark red like they call tanbark are not really tanned they are dressed which is a different process. Maybe I will just tell people to STFU..
A bit of finely powdered oak bark clung to the sail, so I gave it a rinse from the shower head.
I don't know whats for dinner but it is time to find out. I'm hungry.
 Like I said it was a busy day.

Thursday, January 3, 2013

Workbench

The finished product after a soaker coat of boiled linseed oil Linaza Hervido which would be an excellent name for the mayor of a small California town plagued by scandal.
I love my work table. I sit here every single day and work on my  projects. A wooden cleat for the new mast, a voodoo doll in the background, a hitched-over watering bottle on the little medicine chest, and way in the back by the lantern is the Order of the Gilded Coconut trophy still only half gilded because I am afraid of how much the little brass plaque is going to cost. That other little thing hanging downto the left of the new pully is a thumb-cleat that looked so much like a ducky that I left his little bill on there.

Those grooves in the ends of the cheek will eventually receivea plaited foxtail strap. Soon, I hope. I must decide whether to tar-dip the yarn or wait and tan the strap by dipping the whole magillicuddy in the oakbark soak when I do the sail.

The coke made of a bit of #4 copper wire pounded into the traditional rivet heads over a bit of copper strapping drilled out to make a rove. Nobody around here sells the real thing. Why they call it a "coke" is a mystery. It's the axle.

Wednesday, January 2, 2013

Block

Means Nursery out in the Scappoose Bay terrace cut down a couple of big seedling cherry trees years ago. I got into the woodpile with a campsaw in the rain, brought home a bunch of rounds for spoon blanks, dipped the ends in wax and stashed them away. By scoring a groove with a rat-tail rasp, and then slicing off the result, I got a pretty good sheave for my wooden block. I wouldn't want to sling aloft under it to tar the backstay, but it might work OK in the dory for a mainsheet block.


Its a lot easier if you clamp that thing right on down tight. You've got to really throw your weight behind a coarse wood-rasp. If you want to get anything done that day, that is.
You get the idea.