Salmon On The Doorknob
If you can’t open the front door because there’s salmon residue smeared on the doorknob, you’ve been living up here too long.
Got a couple bags full of salmon carcasses — filleted backbones, clippings, etc. — and have been smoking and/or microwaving them.
Dan can’t really eat the smoked stuff, as much as he loves it. Too much fat. Salmon is like fresh pork — dripping oil. So I’m micro-waving it to strip off the meat and use for salmon patties. Those he grew up with. Those he can eat.
Now we’ve got plenty of salmon for Spuds, who prefers raw bottom fish. But he’ll take cooked salmon.
Back From San Diego
Whew. What a show it was.
My art — at least the peculiar treasure called the Black Manuscripts — and a heck of a lot of sketches, originals, fan mail, costumes and video tapes of old routines and plays — went into San Diego State University’s Special Collections.
My collection caused quite a stir at SC; they’d never seen such a thing as the Blacks, because there’s nothing else like them on the planet: twelve ornate — nay, obsessive — embroidery-bound manuscripts, about 150 pages long, each.
The collection and its cataloging are to be the legacy of Jossie Chavez, who is retiring from the university this year.
Once the word got around that the future of the collection would be colored by the books it received from the convention this year, tons of cool stuff poured in, including Bento Box, by Deb Aoki. Neat Hawaiian comic strips. We learn that never, ever do we give macadamia nuts to Hawaiians, because that would be like giving avacadoes to a Californian. Coals to newcastle, so to speak.
I did my best to translate between the drawn book and academic worlds. It was tough going at first; two completely different languages. But then the walls went down and I got to go see other neat things at San Diego.
Met Melinda Gebbies, Alan Moore’s colleague and partner and got to check out the new Lost Girls collection. WOW.
Found out once again that my peers are my biggest fans. Sometimes this just floors me, like at this convention.
Three Witches…
Salmon and Eagles
Went down to the Sekiu docks the other day with a plastic bag and my ulu knife.
Picked up some more salmon filleted by people who don’t know how. Just whack off the heads, guts and tails, take them backbones home to smoke in my Monster Smoker.
Lying on the old marine blanket in the front yard with Dan, and this year’s hatch of very young eagles floated over the house and came low to see if they could eat us. Then floated back up over the ridgeline taking whacks at each other. Look like a male (small) and female (large), having fun practicing for courtship and hunting.
The geese that had 6 babies earlier in June still have six great big kids down on the river.
Mergansers followed by a huge flock of kids.
The fat little harlequin duck who learned how to roll in the surf on the pebble beach picking up beach fleas (crustaceans like potato bugs, up to an inch long) during the derth two years, when so many other birds starved, and who taught one of her ducklings last year how to do it, was back this year with a whole flock of grown ducklings rolling in the surf with her. It looks like a bunch of footballs being popped around on the pebbles. Feet in the air, heads gobbling. Funnier than heck. This is what we call adaptive behavior.
Spuds needs meds
Poor old Spuds – and our other cat, Belle — need lots of med help.
We do all right with me as artist and writer, but animal med emergencies are tough. It’s gotten tight, here.
To help out, head over to Paypal and send to barr@stinz.com
Spuds and the other kitties thank you!
Dead
Baby dolphin on the beach.
Teeth like strawberry flower petals.
Carcass dry as jerky, graceful as a fossil
ten million years dead.
So young, never older
and already so old.
Julie at Clallam Bay
Julie Sydor, my intern from Minneapolis College of Art and Design, with Buddha and me.
Pretty Clothes
Saudi Arabian lady’s dress, with the owner, Lauren, posing in Udjat Beads and Belly Dance, her shop in Port Angeles.
Usually these gowns are covered with sewn-on jewels and pearls. Lauren says she only glued on the sparkly bits. It’s still pretty.
