Reality? It’s Tuesday, the peaches are too soft for this, I think, and we’re already making scallion cakes tonight. Maybe next time.
Instead I’m going to try this Bittman sorbet recipe because it sounds delicious, but also because it means I can just slice everything up and freeze it until I’m good and ready.
Unless I come up with another idea between now and later. Like… grilled peaches with lime and maple syrup, peach pie, roasted peach halves with cinnamon crumble on top, stewed peaches with cinnamon, lemon and cardamom, peach salsa, savory peach-lime chutney, or…?
I’m feeling a lot better today, less exhausted ouchies and more “It’s cool, I’m good.” No naps today, no wishing I had a sling for my mostly incapacitated arm, just chilling and learning things.
Like using words to generate color palettes. Let’s see what we can do with that, shall we?
Using the Unsplash photo database, this site retrieves images related to your search term, combines them into a single image, then extracts a color palette. One nice thing is that you can deselect some of the component images, darken or brighten the palette, or zoom in to highlight just some of the colors in an image. I do find that the results tend to be a little muddy (“summer” is a lot duller grey and brown than I expected) but the tweaking helps.
* * *
Then what? I decided to learn how to color grade an image. Essentially, grading is a technique that lets you take the palette from one visual and apply it to another, often changing the tone and emotion of the image. A photo can go from warm summer afternoon to dark and stormy without a lot of fuss.
There are a lot of ways to do this but here’s a handy tutorial explaining the process in Affinity:
PhotoChrome has a link to download the composite image but it didn’t work for me. Instead, I used the “copy HEX” option for the color palette, then copied the darkest, lightest and middle colors into the Affinity photo Gradient Map / RGB Hex Sliders window.
What’s the color of cool? In my version of this exercise, this:
#4b5c74, #656778, #767482, #718694, #80949d
Here’s what that looks like when transferred onto an image.
The other day, a twenty-something told me I was cool. I don’t say this to brag (ok, maybe just a little), but because it surprised the heck out of me, and also gave me an extra shot of hope for the future.
Why?
Because this particular twenty-something doesn’t know much about me personally. And let’s face it, we’ve already established that I’m not that great.
* * *
What’s cool?
Well, I do have the US Army Survival Manual on my bookshelf, next to Tolkien and Bill Bryson, Ann Patchett, Dava Sobel, Jasper Fforde, Ilona Andrews, R2D2, a lucky cricket, and Edible & Medicinal Plants of Canada, but he doesn’t know that. Or that I can dye wool with the plants in my yard then design and knit it into a sweater, write science fiction and fantasy, have circumnavigated the globe, perfected chocolate cake and hybrid sourdough sandwich loaf recipes, turned my own wooden rolling pin, or any of the other things that you, dear readers, know about my sojourn on this planet.*
This particular person is a day-job colleague. What he knows about me is that I care about society, inequality, the environment and how we live in it. In short, he knows that I’m trying to make a positive difference.
That’s what he thinks is cool.
And that gives me just a little bit of extra hope for the future.
This is an entry from my book of beginnings. It’s fiction, but inspired by my grandmother (yes, the whippersnapper).
She was loving and kind and sweet. She also lived through an alcoholic father, abandonment, and the Great Depression, and was a lot tougher than she looked. She and my grandfather were enthusiastic travelers. The family story was that she kept a series of journals about their trips, starting with their honeymoon. In Cuba.
If I’d ever found those journals, it would not have surprised me if she was also a spy.
* * *
Cuba 1937
I was 24 when my grandmother died, the same age she’d been when she got married. My father called to give me the sad news. She’d been sick, but she lived a full life. She was the neighborhood bridge and poker champion in her neighborhood circle for most of the half-century she lived there and she led the women’s golf game every year. The next day I went to the house, to help my father sort through her things.
She was my favorite grandmother, and not just because she was a fantastic baker. My brother and I would sit at her kitchen table, eating pound cake and cookies while she told us stories. That’s what I liked best, the stories. She and Grandpa were travelers, starting when they got married and only stopping months before their deaths. That’s what they lived for, and listening to Grandma talk about souks, the Amazon rainforest, the glaciers of Alaska and the mountains of Italy, I thought I knew why.
“She left you something.”
My father had opened the door in a T-shirt, dressed for what was sure to be a messy task. Sorting through the remnants of eight decades would take us a while. I followed him into the kitchen and poured myself a cup of tea. I stood at the table waiting for the hot liquid to cool, and wondered what minor treasure I might receive.
“You’re lucky. The box they were in was sealed up nice and tight.”
The bundle was solid, and heavy. I set it on the table and unwrapped the musty fabric covering.
“I didn’t know anyone used oilcloth anymore.”
“These go back a long time.”
Inside the oilcloth envelope was a stack of books. They were different sizes and shapes, starting with a school notebook and progressing to leather-bound hardcovers. Each one had a short title written on the cover in my grandmother’s elegant script.
Looking over my shoulder, my father smiled.
“She knew how much you enjoyed her stories, so she wanted you to have her travel journals. This should be every trip she took over more than fifty years.”
Treasure indeed. Realizing that the most recent accounts were on top, I re-stacked the journals to uncover the oldest, her first trip. The black and white cardboard cover was grayed with age and blank except for her name. The pages were stiff, and for a moment I was afraid that the paper had completely fused together. A little work at the edges, though, and I was able to gently open it to the first page. Yellow with age, the corners cracked but the ink was still dark and bold.
She’d put the title inside, as if unwilling to announce it on the book’s cover.
How are stars made? You know, those celestial bodies illuminating the sky, happily burning until they get tired of that and become star dust, the components of which we are made.
“The cosmos is also within us. We’re made of star stuff.”
— Carl Sagan
Check out this simulation of a star forge.
If this is the forge, is dark matter the anvil?
How do stars form? Most form in giant molecular clouds located in the central disk of a galaxy. The process is started, influenced, and limited by the stellar winds, jets, high energy starlight, and supernova explosions of previously existing stars. The featured video shows these complex interactions as computed by the STARFORGE simulation of a gas cloud 20,000 times the mass of our Sun.
I’m also making today, although nothing as dramatic as stars. More like yogurt, a project that required the sewing machine, and a hack for our leaky dishwasher (yes, another appliance is on the road to obsolescence; they really don’t make them like they used to).
I’m also heading into the workshop to make things out of wood. Well, to remember how to make things. And find my tools. And my respirator. And my wood turning clothes. It’s been a while (thanks, Covid)!
My projects won’t be as dynamic or lovely as a star (or Chopin’s music, for that matter).
I’m still thinking about history, and how even when it’s gone it really isn’t.
I came across a series of reconstructions (by a travel insurance company, who knew insurance could be this interesting?), showing a selection of UNESCO heritage sites as they are, and as they were.
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