Hats

I am trying to make myself wear a hat because it is the ‘right and proper’ thing to do, if I don’t want to get skin cancer and my balding pate offers less and less protections. I have noticed that when I wear a hat I want to wear it on a backwards-sloping angle so that my forehead isn’t covered and yet when I look at many photos of people wearing hats they wear them with the brims parallel to the ground. I am presuming that this is the ‘official’ way to wear a hat because that is the ‘military’ way that hats a worn. What a conundrum. I don’t think that I’ll wear mine in the parallel fashion unless I think that it suits the hat and me.

Spring at Tullycavan

Today I went to Tullycavan to check out how things were going. Of course lots needed doing. I mowed lawns, I checked out the state of the weeds that I'll need to spray soon, I chipped thistles, I added wood to a bonfire and I planted some oak seedlings that were volunteers here at the Rectory. They probably don't have much hope of surviving, but better than here where they'll need to be dug up in the near future. They look so bright and hopeful in the ground and amongst the grass instead of crowded in the shadow of their progenitor.

Iterations of Adalee

A new painting begins. Stretching paper. Drawing in the composition. Graphite in the ground. Rubbing out the ground. Next colour.

A Little Sad

Sometimes

I feel tears

in my eyes

as emotion

pushes out

from within.

When I can feel

the weight

of hurt

mine or someone else's

pushing

into the stream of life

through me

Drawing

Achebe

Close to the finish too.

Adair

Finished almost, I think.

Adeh

Close to finished.

Adair

More work to be done.

Adah

Maybe finished, but probably not.

More on Achebe

Driving home at night

Photos from driving home from Kensington and on City Link on Saturday night. I just enjoy them. Nowadays with digital cameras they are not hard to take, but still. . .

Fridays work

A little more

More on Achebe

A bit more black on Adeqeh.

This is an 'old' painting Achebe that I scrubbed off and came back to and now have finished working over. I've used grey to pluck out the shapes so that the ground is more amenable to changing. I'll gimp it first to work out some ideas of colour, but who knows?

Further to Flat Bread

With the flat bread I have subsequently tried some different things. One is old and one is new. The old thing has been to leave out the golden syrup or sugar which doesn't seem to affect the rising. It just makes the bread less sweet. I made flat bread for years without sweetness. The other thing I took from Poh's Kitchen and this is that when rolling out the bread you should only go in one direction to get a rounder bread. I take this to mean for me not rolling back and forth. So I roll the dough away from me a couple of time then turn it 90 degrees and do the same. Something else I've done recently is flip the dough so that both side get rolled. Now with these changes I came to the barbeque and found that I was getting lot of little bubbles coming up on the first side which means, I think, the the bread puffs up better when I flip it over for the second side. I reckon that this comes mainly from rolling both sides of the bread. Anyway nice balloons of bread are the result.