Joy advisory

Wind advisory tonight.  Sustained 30 mph winds with gusts up to 50 mph.  Drivers may experience difficulty controlling high profile vehicles.  Puppy walkers may have trouble controlling exuberant canines on leashes.

ZigZag found joy in chasing the blowing dried leaves along our walk tonight.  ZigZag found joy in meeting Sandy, the eight year old golden retriever whose human was the only other human soul out on such a blustery night.  ZigZag found joy as she bounded into the air, nearly taking flight against the wind.

I found joy watching ZigZag frolic, smelling the woodsy aroma of a fire in a neighbor's fireplace and in coming back to a dry, warm, and safe home.   I found joy while sipping hot cinnamon tea under a fuzzy fleecy blanket.

Extended forecast:  wind, rain and possible snow for the next few days with high probability of canine elation.

Note:  I read this again the next day and realized a better title would have been Pup-elation growth!

Field trip

I'm not too keen about sitting behind a desk all day so it's always a little bit exciting when I get to go on a field trip. I've felt a bit like a fish out of water since starting a new job last October - learning new things all the time but never feeling like I have any sort of expertise about anything. Today I spent 8 hours on a video shoot with clients and friends I hadn't seen in year. We constructed and deconstructed a wall, and talked about insulation and air barriers and building science and I discovered I still knew stuff and it was like slipping on a cozy, comfortable sweater and the combination of field trip, friends and being in familiar territory was all kind of wonderful.

-- Olive Koffay

A joyful "opa!"

On Tuesday nights, I have dinner with some dear friends. It's a weekly tradition I always look forward to. Tonight we decided on Greek food at a little place near my house called Zorba's. I love that we always begin with flaming Kasseri cheese. I also love that nobody else likes beets on their Greek salads so I get 'em all. Tonight it's cold and drizzly, so when our server flamed the cheese, we rubbed our hands near the flames for warmth. And after the cheese and salad and a bowl of avgolemono soup, I was too full for my Grecian chicken. That means leftovers tomorrow!

Some other dear friends (I am blessed with so many!) taught me how to make this impressive appetizer last year. It really is fun to do. Since I was too busy warming my hands to take a picture tonight at dinner, I just spent an hour and a half trolling the Web looking for a good video to post. I found lots of recipes, but very few good videos. (Lots of funny ones, though.) I learned that there was a terrible Bananas Foster incident this past spring and that many restaurants are rethinking their flaming menu items as a result so I wonder if a lot of how-to-flame-your-food videos have been taken down. I did find this really nice recipe on the GreekFood TV YouTube channel - but sadly, it doesn't include the flaming step.

I found a variety of ways to prepare Saganaki:

• Many recipes call for dipping a firm, rubbery, "squeaky" cheese (Kasseri, Kefalotyri, Feta, Haloumi, etc.) in warm water before dredging in flour
• Some specify milk or beaten egg or milk and beaten egg
• Emeril marinates his cheese in two cups of brandy (BAM!)
• Olive oil, butter or a mix ...
• I found one recipe where a thick block of pink Himalayan sea salt was heated over a flame and used as the cooking surface -- now that was extremely cool
• Some add seasonings to the flour - salt and pepper, red pepper flakes, dried herbs
• Or to the cheese while it's marinating
• Or to the top of the cheese just before it is flamed - or just after
• One chef tops his Saganaki with a selection of pestos just before flaming
• Metaxa, Ouzo or any old brandy for flaming (in a warmed ladle, in the pan or in a flame-proof baking dish)

So many options!

How did I not know about this whole Himalayan salt block cookware thing? 

Opa!

--Olive Koffay

Looking for joy

Looking for joy in my photofiles, I found this dude who seems to be on his own quest of some sort.   Do you think he found what he was looking for?

-ICR

Signs of joy

My church is known around these parts as "the church with the signs." There is one man, a retired engineer, who has been in charge of changing the thought-provoking message for ... decades. I guess some of the messages get recycled, but generally he meticulously creates a new one every few weeks or so.

Some years ago, I was chairing some committee or other, and I asked this man if he could show me how he updated the signs so we could potentially train one of our young people to take on the job someday. He was most eager to have an apprentice. As I recall, he approached the task with mathematical precision - writing out the message on a smaller piece of paper and taking carefully measurements to determine the optimum length of each line and height of the letters so it would fit the larger sign perfectly, all in his neat and fuss-free printing style. And finding the messages themselves? This was something he and his first wife, now long deceased, used to do together, as an act of prayer and a labor of love for our community. After her passing, he continued. An avid reader, I'm sure he has always found the little nuggets of spiritual wisdom in printed materials as he has told me he is just "too old" to mess with computers. An engineer. Shunning technology.

The apprentice idea never really took hold. I know a few people here and there have done the signs but I can always tell when this man is back on the job, patiently and lovingly carrying on a ministry to the thousands of drivers who pass the signs each day.

He is now 81 and still almost as active as ever. I think he stopped running a few years ago but still plays on our church softball team and on a local vintage baseball team, in addition to having a busy social life with his second wife. Two photos of him, both taken about six or seven years ago, are imprinted on my brain. The first was of him straddling the top of a wall and hauling trusses for the roof of a Habitat house. (I helped with lower-level tasks like insulation and painting.) The second was on the front page of our local newspaper, showing him shoveling snow for his elderly neighbors. Ahem.

The message on the sign today: A heart full of gratitude has no room for despair. Oh, how I need to remember that on my dreary, scavenger-hunt-for-joy days. I have so many reasons to be grateful. So many reasons to seek joy. So many reasons to pray.

--Olive Koffay

Enough is enough

2 photo projects:

I need to select
12 images for a desk calendar to give as a Christmas gift
3 photos to frame for submission to a faculty/staff art show

I have several thousand images- probably 2000 from 2011 alone.

This shouldn't be hard.

But it is.

Let's see....

1. Scenic shots?  Pretty.  Yes, but too ordinary?  Everyone does those.
2. Portraits of glass?  More interesting to me, but does anyone else want to look at those?  Especially for a whole month if I use them for the desk calendar.
3. Flowers?   Oh my, have I got a lot of flower shots!   Does everyone else too?
4. Peace cranes?  Well these are cool, but again, is it just me who thinks so?
5. Architectural shots of buildings and windows?  Are these self-conscious, self-indulgent attempts to be an artiste? 
6. Crazy angles on ordinary things?  see # 5 above

A mixture of all of these?  What no theme?

Why do my photos seem so cool until I imagine someone else looking at them? Why do blog posts seem interesting until I imagine someone else reading them?
Are real artists and writers arrogant enough to  believe that their audience will be interested in what they produce or do they not care so much about audience?  Or are they bags of insecurity too?

Ok. Enough already.  Time to get back to those images.

-ICR

Window on Joy

Sometimes finding joy is like a scavenger hunt--requiring creativity, attention, time, focus. Other times it is just outside my window.

-Sheila Collie

Remarkable, indeed.

Book recommendation:  Remarkable Creatures by Tracy Chevalier.  This work of historical fiction addresses a number of themes: the role and expectations of women in the early 19th century, science, women in science, science and religion, and a fascinating (partially true) record of how two unlikely but remarkable creatures found several other unlikely but even more remarkable creatures.

-ICR

Run-on sentence

I was enjoying the beautiful weather and tromping around "the back field" (an enormous, still-undeveloped area out behind my niece's subdivision) this afternoon with Sammy and Ashton so much that I didn't even mind it when mid-sentence Sammy stopped and wiped his runny nose on my sleeve.

--Olive Koffay

Sleepover

I'm having a sleepover at my niece's house with my sister so we can watch the boys. If anyone is a quart low on energy or needs some extra happy, we've got a surplus here.

--Olive Koffay

A cold hard drink an a frosty morn

On this morning's perambulation with the doggie, the Zigmeister would stay snout to the ground for 30 to 40 feet drinking in the frost on the grass of this cold and frosty morn, eventually coming up with ice crystals on her nose

WOTD

Word of the day:  Quean

The lean mean quean
told the keen clean queen
"Never be seen
eating  beans in jeans
in Aberdeen.
It's just obscene
if you are more than sixteen!"
It's a very bad scene!


-ICR

Really old art

In Dei manibus mea est vita

I went to the Film Fest tonight and saw Cave of Forgotten Dreams - a documentary about caves in Chauvet, France with 30,000-year-old paintings in pristine condition. My neighbor and her husband sponsored the film and gave me two free tickets. I'd planned to go anyway with my friend Kay but the freebies were a nice bonus. The film was shown in the "Leopard Lounge" or something like that. We sat in uncomfortable ladder-backed gilded chairs for niiiiiiiiiiiinety five millllllion minutes.

Maybe I'm exaggerating.

It's astounding to think that more than 30,000 years ago, people painted detailed depictions of horses and rhinoceroses and bears on cave walls. They didn't live in these caves - they went there purely for artistic and ceremonial purposes. They went deep into the cave interior and painted by the light of torches.

So even though the film was rather long and repetitive and not especially well done (in my unprofessional opinion), it was fascinating and I enjoyed giggling over the cheesy bits with my friend. I think our favorite part was watching and listening to the pony-tailed French archeologist who used to be a circus performer.

And then we got to go put our handprint-pictographs on a giant painting that will be installed somewhere so in 30,000 years pale, hairless archeologists in shiny silver bodysuits can analyze the spiritual implications of our seemingly random array of handprints.

--Olive Koffay

It was 3 a.m. This is where my brain was.

I pray because I am so small.

I am one person in 7 billion on a planet that revolves around one of the 300 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy which is one galaxy in about 170 billion galaxies in the universe.

I pray because I am so small.

I contain about 63 kg of the estimated 3.4 x 10^54 kg in the universe.  As a percentage, that represents 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000018% of the mass of the universe.

I pray because I am so small.

My mass is so inconsequential, my existence so unlikely that if I were a statistician I would say with great certainty that I don't exist.  But I do.  I breathe.  I love. I laugh.  I work.  I play.  I find joy.

I pray because I am so small.
And so very grateful.
-ICR

Joie de vivre

From the lunchtime plenary speech at my conference in Montreal.

"The future is a foreign country.  Passports are mandatory and the passport is an education grounded in the liberal  arts and sciences."

I like the metaphor.

I also came away from the plenary wishing I could be bilingual.  Is it too late?

I also came away from lunch wondering how I could replicate the layered chocolate mousse cake we were served.  It had a wonderful sweet crispy bottom crust with two layers of lovely chocolate mousse with a vanilla custard cream sandwiched in between.  I guess the conference organizers were celebrating international sandwich day too.

-ICR

Pentacle of ponderings

Fuzzy's folded chicken sandwich, grilled, with side of

ranch dressing

1. Nov. 3 is International Sandwich Day.

2. To celebrate, I enjoyed a folded chicken sandwich at my favorite local eatery with a delightful friend and her three delightful children.

3. I think starting with hot chocolate, followed by pizza, and ending with Triple Chocolate Overload ice cream also counts as an appropriate observation of International Sandwich Day. (Someone at our table may have done this.)

4. It is really fun to watch children eat ice cream.  They are fearless - especially when they bite the pointy ends off their ice cream cones.  

5. You can never have enough napkins.


-- Mo Choklit

going to the top

Crowded elevator.  Buttons pushed.  Three get off at the fourth floor.  Two get off at the seventh floor.  One on the eighth. One on the seventeenth.  Alone, I ride to the twenty first and highest floor of the hotel.  Lonely in the elevator by myself.

I guess when you go farther than others, it gets lonely at the end.

Bai bai fall-ku

scrunchy crunchy leaves
spindly twindly limbs - skyward
bai bai, dear fall; sigh

Words, words, words!

I hope this can count as today's observation, because it is SO cool. A self portrait made out of words. That's almost like writing, right?

Thanks to the American Heritage Dictionary, you can go make your own portrait now!

And I thought I was fresh out of words today. Phew.

What did you expect?

Today, on my way to a meeting, I stopped by the campus Starbucks for a little caffeine. As I approached, I saw a pair of students who had just left the coffee shop.  Each was carrying a drink.  One of them had a frozen cappuccino-type beverage.  As I walked by, she was taking a sip.  She grimaced and said in apparent disbelief and disgust, "This drink has coffee in it!"

Really?  You're kidding! Who'd've thunk it?

How often we all do that-- discover something after the fact that should have been glaringly obvious before.

What did you expect???

-ICR