Cornbread and a Shell

Recently, I've been baking a lot of cornbread. Here is the recipe I like the best. It's an adaptation of the Silver Palate's recipe for "Crackling Corn Bread":

• Melted butter and oil for greasing the pan
• 1 cup stone-ground cornmeal
• 1 cup unbleached all-purpose flour
• 1/3 cup sugar
• 2 1/2 tsp baking powder
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 1 cup buttermilk
• 6 tbs unsalted butter (melted)
• 1 egg (lightly beaten)
• Around 1 cup of fresh corn kernels

1. Preheat oven to 400F. Grease a 9" metal (ideally cast iron) pan. 
2. Stir together dry ingredients. Then add wets.
3. Pre-heat the pan in the oven, then take it out and pour in the batter. It should sizzle. Then bake for around 25 minutes. 

I like this recipe because it's super dense and moist.

In other news:
I made my first website. It will hopefully be fully edited and we'll get a domain in not too long.
I found a Cher autograph in a $1 record of hers I bought.
Here is a shell I painted that had a bunch of other shells and creatures imprinted in it:

Gandalf and the Alien Attack

Dream Installment #9: Gandalf and the Alien Attack

I was traveling around with Gandalf through the countryside.  From afar we saw a battle between a bunch of gorillas and aliens, and we watched as hundreds of gorillas took back their woods from the aliens who had been burning it down for fuel. The aliens were slowly taking over earth, this was just one skirmish. We went over to the partially clear-cut and destroyed gorilla land where they were re-grouping. I was still scared for them because even though we could see the aliens running over to a different hill, they were only in retreat.  Who knew how long it would be before they would attack again and I didn't know if the gorillas could win a second time. 

As we walked around the turned-up land, we found a set of teeth crusted into the dirt. I didn't know if they were real or not, so I didn't want to touch them. Gandalf decided they were fake. 

Nearby we also found an X-ray of a foot that had little drawings on it and also was made so that some of the toes were stretchy. It was obviously a child's art project, but somehow it was also critical evidence in the discovery that humans had in fact been the ones to start the Alien War.  This was top secret, but Gandalf said that he had discovered it a while ago.  Still, this information was only now being released for public knowledge. Humans had started the war by bombing Mars 4000 years ago. Just little bombs, but it is what started the alien invasion.  

We headed back to my home, because I was worried about my mom. We got there and I was one of the little tiny children at the house, the size of a South Park character.*  There were a couple kids and a couple adults in the house. A man with a bald spot knocked on our door and told us that it wasn't safe on earth anymore, that the aliens would soon attack humans, and that we were being relocated to one of the nicer space colonies.  As he was talking to us he paused to answer a phone call.  When he did, his eyes turned from human eyes to alien eyes, which looked like giant yellowish cat/snake eyes.  When his eyes changed, so did all of the adults' eyes, as though they had been hypnotized.  That's when I knew that he was secretly an alien, that the offer to relocate us to a space colony was a trick, and that adults were easier to control then kids.  As soon as he got off the phone his disguise came back and the parents stopped being hypnotized. We had to tell them that Bald Man was secretly an alien, but it was tricky since he was still standing in the doorway.


(Ender's Game inspired? Lord of the Rings? Battlestar Galactica?)

* In the dream Escape and Disguise there were also characters that looked like South Park children.

Thank Yous

So, in the past four years (or, to be honest, my whole life) I have been terrible about sending thank you letters. Well, I haven't succeeded in sending any yet, but I've spent the last week making them.  I'm feeling very proud of them.  Here are a few:

Most of them are made from watercolored tissue paper, mod podge, and ink.  On the two with larger salmon I watercolored the salmon first. These don't really get the full texture, which is actually what I like best about them.  They are very textured.

Also, I'm reconsidering getting a salmon tattoo. I wanted to get one a couple years ago, just a little one some place discreet  Keep it stylized. Then when I told someone that, they got very negative and critical about fish tattoos in general. But now I'm reconsidering it. 

Repetitive Improvisation

Some improvisation I did over spring break:

Escape and Disguise

Dream Installment #8: Escape and Disguise

The dream (nightmare) starts with William and I going to an anti-war protest in Seattle. I was explaining my opposition to the war to David when I heard that they were rounding up people who were against the war and putting them in terrorist suspect camps.  When we got there they split up men and women and walked us through glass showers that were next to each other, leading into the camp. Before entering the camp they either whipped us or put a noose-like contraption around us to shock us. William went first, and I saw what happened to him. You could see people getting whipped through glass. I was in a small cell with my "family" (I think we were family by virtue of being in a cell together, not my actual family). We were all in cages and emaciated. 

We came up with an escape plan. We hid in an empty shower room and then hopped up onto a ledge and climbed into a vent. At this point, the group was myself, and two others (William was one of them but he'd kind of morphed into a different person). We kept avoiding getting caught. The original escape plan was to climb into a dog's intestines and then have the dog carry us out. 

--- flash of a commercial for a red pill that would make you invisible --- 

A brief period where the vent we were crawling through to escape was underwater (very scary). But mainly it was just really small and hard to climb through. We came out of the vent, but not out of the entire camp, just out of the worst enclosures. We hid in bedrooms while patrols of little girls that looked like they were in South Park walked back and forth. One caught us but we bribed her with a "carbon" sequined head band. 

We finally made it out into the city. we were walking around and we could hear news stories about escapes from the camp (us).  My family and I were all dressed in punk/slightly steampunk clothes to look less like we'd just escaped from a camp and then we picked up a fedora and decided that we should disguise ourselves by wearing preppy and fancy clothes. We were walking underneath the viaduct in Seattle when I saw Molly and Jimmy driving around in a car looking for us. They saw our punk clothes and Molly recognized me, and I knew they would come try to find us. But if anyone found us we would probably have to go back to the camps. 

We came across a little cafe/restaurant. I had  meal with a woman in there in Spanish. I showed her that my tights didn't fit and that I tucked the feet into my socks under my skirt. She gave me something that worked.  My partner convinced me to go back to the restaurant and ask if I could work there. The restaurant people wondered why I didn't want to have another baby before I started working. I said I wanted to have a job for a while again and get a routine before I had my second baby. It was hard to tell what parts I was lying about as a disguise and what parts of my story were real. It was a wonderful job. 

note: Most of this is directly copied from what I wrote down when I was half asleep/still in the dream. I completed some of the sentences, but the reason it's so long is because I was still mostly in the dream world and able to write down a lot of details.

Dream Fragments Part 1

I wanna say how I record my dreams: I've tried several methods. I've tried keeping a pen and a paper by the side of my bed and then taking time in the morning to try and remember them. I've tried telling other people. For example, this winter when I was home I had Maia come into my room before she left for school every morning to wake me up and ask me about my dreams. But she would forget them too by the time she came home. So, since I'm a faster typer than I am at handwriting, and I always fall asleep with my computer in my bed (watching 30 Rock), I just have a running draft in my email that is called "dreams" and it has fragmented bits of whatever I type when I'm half asleep. Whenever I'm lucid enough to open my computer and I remember my dreams I type whatever I can before I fall back asleep.  I think the fragments are sometimes the best, but generally for re-telling it's more intelligible if I complete the sentences and such. But, I don't plan on painting them all, so I thought I'd share a couple fragments (not to be analyzed too deeply please haha).

All in one night I had the dream about the man who said it would all go to hell, the dream about the raining rainbow pepper, and two others. They all took place in a setting kind of inspired by all the Downton Abby I was watching at the time, but it was generally much dirtier and involving the street market. All four are in my drafts, but here are the two fragments (unedited) that I haven't painted: 

"I was a servant in an english home and I was leaving to go on a trip and I barged into a room after no one answered my knocks, even though i knew someone was in there, because I'd forgotten my birth control and pocket book. I got in huge trouble with the snooty woman, who was having sex with her husband whom she hated. Then I talked back and she shouted for help and I yanked a lump of skin between the husband's legs and he helped in pain and then we joke about how weird and lumpy he was, but then she told me to run or i'd get sacked. I was running around the house trying to avoid the mom, and then she caught me and walked me around the house and garden, making me tell her how beautiful it was. Then I climbed out the window and as I was walking down the street I decided i really wanted to drive, but i had no car. I ran into a friendly woman who asked me if i would like to come for dinner. i said yes. I saw a fat baby by the side of the road and went to play with it, then i thought it was giving me flees. I wanted to take it with us, b/c who leaves a baby by the side of the road, but the parents came back right as we were leaving."

and 

"bad talking other butler and little sister the size of a baby and we were overheard"

I have more fragments I'll post later... lots of them are quite funny, also embarrassing  but I think these ones are interesting because that night was so fruitful with dreams, but also there was a certain consistency to them.

False/Start/Fall/Tart

Just a little series of word arrangements my mom and I thought were amusing last summer.