Seasonal ambition re: slug draft stopper

We had one cool day and I am having my traditional seasonal ambition to make a draft-stopper for the one drafty door.

I have already made unprecedented progress by choosing a design and even buying a pattern, because how could I resist this perfect soft sculpture of a slug by Clare James?

Photo of a large greige corduroy slug perched on the back of a couch against an off-white wall. The slug has a realistic shape, with a mantle and four eye stalks. The couch is covered in a green patchwork quilt and cushions with earth-toned prints. There is an abstract blue and orange artwork on the wall above.

Inspired as always by my friends’ projects, in this case a pal who made this sardine as a draft-stopper for her mom who loves tinned fish.

Now I am torn between using generally sluggy fabric I already have, or buying something to make a perfect banana slug 🍌

Background info for today’s small pleasure: a friend and I recently started a soup swap, which just means we drop off soup for each other whenever we feel like it.

So today’s small pleasure was texting my friend “HOT SOUPS IN YOUR AREA” to find out whether she was home

Red Nation on trusting white people

Loved this take on how to organize across differences in privilege:

“One of my favourite organizers in history is a guy named Witold Pilecki, who organized a resistance cell inside Auschwitz… He said that the people he chose for that cell were the ones that he saw do an action that helped another person and harmed them. Help another person, and gain nothing.

You wanna know if you can trust the white people you organize with? Put them in that position. Do it over and over and over again.”

From this episode of The Red Nation Podcast.

Reminds me of the classic Real Ally Shit zine— finding the difference between pretty words and dependable people:

Making pink ink from radishes

You would think by now I would have one moment of hesitation before I started boiling 3 bunches of radishes that had been in the back of the fridge too long. It makes #WeirdSmells but will it make ink?

Photo of a small stainless steel pot full of chopped radishes and water. On the surface there are bubbles and foam. The radishes are pale pink, having released some of their colour into the liquid.

Surprisingly solid pink ink once it gets concentrated enough! Seems more stable than things like raspberry or red cabbage.

Photo of a stainless steel pot with about 2 cm of dark pink liquid in the bottom -- radish tea

Photo of four strips of paper that have been labelled and dipped in ink at different stages. radish: very pale pink radish + 10 min: still very pale pink radish + 15 min + salt + alum: noticeably darker but still pale pink radish + 20 min + salt + alum: even darker but still light pink that could possibly be legible for writing

Can’t decide whether to add gum arabic for a drawing/dipping ink, or filter it better and add a bit of glycerin to try with a cheap fountain pen 🤔

No one way works…

The whole set of Revolutionary Letters is lovely, but this little section is on my mind the most.

Photo of an old, orange, pin-backed badge with black text from a poem by Diane di Prima: No one way works, it will take all of us shoving at the thing from all sides to bring it down.

I’m going to misquote and probably misattribute this, but I remember Simon quoting some political theorist (Bill Connolly?) saying that we had been doing politics for millennia and all we knew for sure was that no one had ever gotten everyone to agree. Thank you Diane di Prima for giving me a little litany for remembering that can be a positive.

Poets, man.

food, fish, parenting

Turns out you can make baked salmon, sauteed kale, and wild rice pilaf the most exciting meal a child has ever eaten by adding a side of fresh blueberries and calling it Bear Dinner.

Gotta say it made the adults happy too 🐻

Art is when everyone else makes money

I have been watching documentaries about art forgeries, and I keep being struck by what an unstoppable economic force art is.

You fund a fringe festival and the entire city or even region makes money even if all the plays are bad– restaurants, taxis, hotels, venues, bartenders, poster designers, print shops, and then later maybe youtubers and critics and fan conventions…

This is probably the wrong take-away from art forgery stories, but even criminals are making millions of dollars in secondary activities because of the original art, which then means these filmmakers are making money talking about the forgery, which means cinemas and festivals can make money showing the films… Unstoppable.

This is the worst test for whether art is “real” but the way AI-generated content leaves a bunch of economic destruction in its wake is probably telling.

They invented a type of content that has zero cultural capital lol

Related/unrelated I would like to visit a museum of famous forgeries. Probably cheap to set up.

The Colour of Ink

Today’s little pleasure was this ink documentary and a heating pad. Recommended if you like artists at work, foraging, history of pigments and dyes, diy, or ink in particular. It features several inkmakers, cartoonists, calligraphers, artists, tattooists, and even a paleontologist.

Streaming free on CBC: The Colour of Ink

I yelped out loud when the film cut to Thomas Little in a pawn shop. He is a gentle soul who makes truly haunted iron-gall ink by dissolving guns in sulfuric acid. Very cool to see part of his process.

I make iron-gall ink too, using rusty bits of junk, vinegar, and the beautiful native oak trees in my neighbourhood. Amazing how different the vibes can be for similar recipes. I have some of Thomas’ gun ink and I haven’t been able to bring myself to open it, it just sits on my desk and whispers

Anyway I do think the documentary conveys the profound pleasure of making tiny batches of ink out of weird things you find out in the world

At one point Jason Logan from Toronto Ink Company makes black ink for a tattooist out of charcoal from a recent forest fire in the area. Part of what is so moving to me about this kind of poetic or haunted ink is the scale– you can make a bottle of ink out of a couple of grams of carbon dust, which leaves whole mountainsides of charcoal behind. Something about reasserting human scale is such a relief

Mulder and Scully and the Unacknowledged Magic Hospital

I am used to spotting docaganda on medical dramas, but it has been awhile since I watched a show where the propaganda comes from the patient perspective. I’m comfort-watching old X-Files and the Hollywood Healing is so shameless and funny. Gunshots, housefires, novel virus, hit by cars, left for dead in the desert, dehydrated by magic salt? Just get to a hospital for a health reset 😂

Weeding for sickos

Photo looking down on a section of garden bed. The ground is covered with a thick layer of dry cut grass, like straw. Four bamboo poles are sticking up, with bean seedlings growing next to each. A few isolated green weeds are visible

This was my first time trying a cover crop for weed suppression in the garden, and I think it’s been a success!

My lazy method was to let some volunteer grass grow tall here over the winter and strim it when it had green seeds, around the end of March. Then I covered it with a tarp until it was time to plant beans in mid May. This spot previously had frequent mullein, herb robert, and grasses.

There are a few things coming up through the mulch, which I pulled after taking this, but way fewer weeds than in the parts of the garden that got mulched with compost.

I’ve been researching different ways of coping with weeds, especially around annual veggies, trying to find something more sustainable for my energy impairment / dynamic disability / chronic illness situation.

I got a lot out of the various videos by No-Till Growers on cover crops, mulch, etc. They have a book too, that my library had.

Old friends

I remember herbalist Kelly McCarthy suggesting that good herbs for perimenopause are the ones you already have a long relationship with. To just find ways to incorporate your plant friends into your life a little more, as a starting place, whether that is a digestive bitter, calming tea, moisturizer, good-smelling garden plant, or whatever.

That seems like a good approach for general times of stress or illness too, to start by turning up your existing support.

This random herb thought was brought to you by me running a pain management bath at 4am, and deciding to add rose water and make a rose tea. Rose is not an herb for pain, and yet it is nice to be with my plant friend when I am sore.