Tartine is a bakery in San Francisco that is know for their wonderful bread. They wrote a book giving out their recipes. Today, my girlfriend and I tried to make their walnut bread. This is not a quick bread to make. We started at noon and took it...
Fires can be traumatic and stressful. If you are renting a house or apartment, you should learn from my mistake and get Renters Insurance!
Lately I haven’t knitted much more than charity hats and bears, which are all well and good, but I started to feel like I was in a rut. A quick trip to Imagiknit and casting on a few new projects helped.
I left with some Malabrigo Merino Worsted and a skein of Madeleine Tosh Twist Light. At knit night I casted on and have been knitting happily since.
It’s nice to be well enough to have the strength to knit a bit throughout the day! Another bear has flown off my needles! Here’s Clara, named for Clara Oswald.
And here she is with Boe, posing under the bear print where the finished bears line up until they’re sent off to Minnesota.
I’m making a concerted effort to use up every last tiny scrap ball of yarn in my bear stash- it gets so messy and tangled! It’s going very well and my yarn storage is much neater. ☺️
On the day after the election, my husband asked if we wanted to go see some huge waves. I couldn’t think of anything I’d rather do at that moment, so off we went to the Marin Headlands, where the waves were very, very big.
We visited guinea pigs to distract ourselves from more serious matters than how to get them to make that happy, purry sound.
A little brightness in contrast to the…errr…. challenging week we’re experiencing here…. One of my bears has been spotted in Africa! Here’s Quill Bear, named for Peter Quill from Guardians of the Galaxy.
Join us at the Art Boat outside the Maritime Museum for FREE art activities every Tuesday from 2pm to 5pm.
Bring your family, dust off your creativity, make some art and have some fun! We’re welcoming local artists such as Asa Nodelman, Iain Keith Murray, Peter Lockerbie, and Ben Jeddrie throughout the summer to lead children’s art activities in puppetry, mural-making, drawing, and more.
While you’re here for Artist of the Day, you can also visit the Museum, grab some tasty treats from Waterfront vendors, and even stay for Tuesday Night Tunes!
A very belated happy new year to you all! What a slacker I’ve been – last November was my last update. Since then I’ve reached the grand old age of fifty (yes, I know, hard to believe given my youthful exuberance and good looks) and also celebrated thirty years of being in the music business. Christmas and Easter have been and gone and although much beer was drunk over the festive season I managed to avoid the other brown devil that is chocolate.
It’s been a strange start to the year in terms of gigs. A trip to the USA with Sons of the Delta to play at this year’s Juke Joint Festival in Clarksdale was cancelled due to a clash of commitments for some of the guys, a mini-tour of Spain was put on ice due to the major recession over there and here booking gigs has been harder work for the same reason, apart from our favourite regular venues who know a good thing when they see it and continue to re-book us.
What do musicians do when they are not gigging as much? No, the answer is not ‘starve’ thankfully (not yet anyway!). They write songs and record, so it’s good that both the Sons of the Delta and the Jigantics are both working on new albums. Because of the different styles of music in each band, the approach to the recording process is a little different. For the Jigantics it will be our debut album so everyone in the band is keen to make it as representative as possible. That means it needs to highlight the strengths of the band – especially the great arrangements and lovely harmonies. In light of recent changes to arrangements some of the tracks currently recorded will be remixed, others may be re-recorded and a few newer songs in the set will be recorded for the first time. So although things are well on the way, it may be a few months yet until the album is finished. The Sons of the Delta album will be our third and will have a mixture of duo and band numbers, representing both aspects of the Sons. The first two albums were pretty much all original numbers and although album three will still have plenty of great originals we are planning to record some of our audience’s favourite covers. I’m finishing some demos of the new originals so that I can distribute them to the rest of the band prior to us putting in some hard work on learning them. Then it will be off to the studio to spend a solid weekend recording the band songs – none of this ‘we were in the studio for two months’ malarkey! The duo numbers are less demanding of everyone’s time and so Rick and I will work on and record those on a rolling basis.
I’m looking forward to the summer now – recording, various festival slots for both the Sons of the Delta and the Jigantics and my great friends the Myers Brothers are coming over from Ottawa late July to play at the Upton Blues festival, the Gloucester Blues Festival and several other dates. Can’t wait! I will try to keep you updated a bit more regularly…