Gomming & Yowing

All about eating and talking and life in the South and anything else that strikes my fancy…

Archive for the tag “summer”

15 Jan 2013

Jeanuary: A Reason To Celebrate

What’s it all about?

There’s a certain time of year when all the excitement of the holidays has faded, the New Year’s resolutions are dead or dying, the weather is generally wretched, and the bills for your Christmas presents are just beginning to arrive.

This time of year is known as January*.

I was born in January.

Summer Birthdays–ha!

For all you summer birthday-types who celebrate with pool parties and barbecues and cookouts and ice cream, I laugh in the face of your festivities. You have it so easy–you can wear flip-flops on your birthday instead of socks and boots. People give you beach towels and floppy linen hats as gifts. The Januarians peer out from under itchy wool caps, trying not to let their mufflers catch fire from dangling over the birthday candles.

Reasons to celebrate

I’ve had enough of watching the bright butterfly birthdays of summer float past. I’m here to eat cake, to open presents, and to make chilly, depressed, listless January thaw out a bit and perk up a little:

  1. Holidays are over? Good–less stress and more time to plan a decent birthday celebration.
  2. New Year’s resolutions failed? That’s okay–just resolve not to make any next year.
  3. Weather is wretched? Ha! Banish sleet and snow and drizzle and howling winds with the cheerful glow of birthday candles. Make a wish and then make like the big-bad-wolf and huff and puff the daylights out of them. Bonus: if you splutter while blowing out the candles, you’ll probably get ALL the cake!
  4. Bills arriving in the mail? No worries–lots of good stuff is on sale in January, and you can buy yourself whatever you didn’t get for Christmas.

Are you with me, Januarians? I say, let’s take back this grim, gray month in which we arrived in the world and make it worthy of our celebrations. There are 31 days to work with–if you’re a Baskin-Robbins fan, that’s a different ice cream flavor for EVERY day of the month. January also has enough days to lose a bad habit or develop a good one.

Wrapping it up…

The point of all this? January is a month that gets a lot of people down. It contains “the most depressing week of the year,” according to some studies (although the studies were more of a marketing ploy for a travel agency, according to other studies about the initial studies). Whatever. If you have a January birthday, make the most of it. Consider candle-blowing an aerobic event and wrapping-paper-ripping a workout for hand-eye coordination. If you receive flip-flops as a gift, wear ‘em with socks until the snow melts.

They’ll be perfectly broken in by the time those summer party invitations began to arrive.

*Forget January–I celebrate “Jeanuary” all month long!

Posted in Birthdays and tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment
14 Jun 2011
2 Comments

How To Get Your Creative Groove Back

I’m a creative person, I suppose, but it’s easy to lose sight of that, at times. I have a job that allows for some creative thinking, which is great, although sometimes it reminds me of a crouching cat, licking the cream of imagination off the top of my brain and leaving me with skim milk–blue john–for my own use on my own time.*

Anyway, another interesting thing about creativity is that it also resembles a good, deep well: there are times when you draw off too much, but if you wait a little while, it wells up again and you can get on with things.

In 2005, I spent two weeks near Bordeaux, France, at a watercolor workshop with Asheville artist Ann Vasilik. I was not (and I’m still not!) very accomplished with watercolors, but it was a lovely trip, nonetheless, and a great pleasure to learn a few things from Ann, whose work I admire very much. We visited five or six small towns in the area and had an opportunity to paint local scenes along with Ann as well as explore the towns themselves. That experience, of course, deserves its own series of posts, which I hope to get to…someday.

A watercolor of rolled hay bales in the late afternoon sun...

When I got home, I thought I’d be inspired to keep painting, but I closed up my easel and stuck it under the bed to get it out of the way, and it didn’t see the light of day again for the next six years. Lawsy!

Last Saturday, I pulled out the easel on a whim, dusted it off, and set it up on  my front porch. It looked quite handsome there, if a bit lonely:

My easel, still in great shape, after six years in exile under my bed!

 So I added a sketch of Teddy that I’d done the night before (with a nearly-dried-up fabric paint pen, because I’m always lacking in the correct tool or supply that I’d like to have, so I use what’s close at hand) :

A hairy little sketch of my hairy little hound!

Next, I rooted through my house and my dubious-mostly-also-dried-up stock of paints for something that would work. I found a pint of blue acrylic enamel and a handful of acrylic craft paints that still had a little life in them and set to work. (My other favorite tools are a Bojangle’s dirty rice cup to hold water and a disposable pie tin for a palette. )  So armed, I began to “rough-in” the sketch of Teddy, working the background (very creative blue swirls, reminiscient of water rings on a tabletop) in behind his funky fur:

Teddy all "roughed-in" and looking a little roughed-up, too!

It was a little challenging to find a way to bring out Teddy’s features without just having them fade to black–he has a good bit of white in his coat, but I wanted to show his face without resorting to white outlines. Lucky for me, he has a very red tint to his eyebrows and moustache–especially when he’s in the sun–so I used a reddish-copper metallic craft paint to bring out the hint of ginger in his otherwise black coat:

Teddy: Portrait of a Bad Little Dog!

What fun to spend time capturing my little Tedward on canvas–and what a nice way to get my creative groove back…at least for one summer Saturday!

*Yes, I know the good ol’ Urban Dictionary, in all their vulgar glory, lists a secondary meaning for this term, but that’s hardly the definition I have in mind, so don’t bother to comment on it if you can help yourself!

Posted in Creativity and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
07 May 2011

Smellovision 2011

It’s been blackberry winter for the last couple of days–cool, gray, overcast, and too chilly for comfort without a sweater and socks. Not the merriest May weather, but today was definitely better–much warmer and lots of sunshine.

 Regardless of the weather, the time of year–and the addition of a spry little terrier into my life in September 2009–got me thinking about “smellovision” and I decided to revisit a post from June 2008. Teddy, the aforementioned terrier, lives in HD (High Dog) Smellovision, snuffling up scents as though his life depended on it (which on occasion, it might). It’s a grand thing to see him soaking up a world of smells and a great mystery to wonder what visions he gets from the odorous whorls whirling by.

To paraphrase the late great Wilson Pickett:  “Ride, Teddy, Ride!“

Teddy

Posted in summer, Uncategorized and tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment
14 Sep 2008

A "Fur" Piece

I can always tell which season it is by petting my dog Penny, a shepherd-chow mix. Her coat is a sort of seasonal barometer, if you will, of what’s happening in the natural world. Here are the basics:

Winter: It doesn’t even get that cold here, but Penny’s fur thickens as if she were destined to spend cold, lonely nights on the tundra, far from any sort of shelter. Winter always finds a few leaves determined to initiate dreadlocks in her fluffy “pajamas”–the long hair on the back of her hind legs. Her heels are always damp in winter, too, and she seeks out piles of frosty leaves (or snow) for napping.

Spring: For some reason, Penny finds what appear to be praying mantis hatchlings–tiny, perfectly formed, and just the color of new grass. She’ll have any number of them caught in her tufty spring coat and I have to very gently remove them and put ‘em back outside. A little later in the season, she’ll return from a walk in the woods covered in what is known as “beggar lice.” These small seed-pod type plants* are as verdantly green as the praying mantis hatchlings and shaped like a triangle with rounded edges. The outer husk is sort of sticky, like Velcro, and will firmly attach itself to pants and shoelaces and socks and dog fur. Inside, there’s a single green seed (pit? drupe?) that I suppose wants to set up shop in new places, and that’s why it hitches a ride on whatever passes by. Penny loves the taste of these things, and will snap up every one I pull out of her fur.   

Summer: The season of grass clippings, green field burs, and even the occasional swatch of blackberry briars snagged in the long hair of her tail. I find the occasional tick, as well, wandering around in her dense and impenetrable double-coat like a dazed Legionnaire stumbling through the desert in search of water.

Fall: Fur was made for fall! It traps the scent of burning leaves, elevating the standard “eau de dog” to something that could be bottled and sold as cheveux du chien fumeux pour homme. Delicious! In addition to her smoking habits, Penny has a knack for locating spiny, urchin-sized burrs and allowing them to set up housekeeping in her ruff and haunches. It takes quite a while to work them loose, and one false move can cause the brittle burrs to shatter, sending each separate little barb deeper into the forest of fur. While performing this much-needed groomage, I tell Penny she has “burrs upon hers” in honor of Dr. Seuss’ star-bellied Sneetches who had “star upon thars.” She’s never really thanked me, but it’s got to feel better to lay down when there isn’t a needle-pointed burr digging into your hip.

Occasionally I wonder what it would be like to live with a house-bound hound whose fur remains sleek and unsullied between baths. No seasonal flora and fauna to contend with, no particular smells other than Chinese take-out or scented candles. Oh, well…

*If you want more info, this site offered a very nice description and photos of beggar lice: http://www.hiltonpond.org/ThisWeek040908.html

Posted in Autumn, Dogs, Fall, memories, spring, summer, weather and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment
26 Jul 2008
1 Comment

Bele Chere 2008

Asheville's City Building wears a Bele Chere banner

The City Building, all decked out for Bele Chere.

It’s that time again–Asheville’s biggest party of the year, and one of the biggest outdoor festivals in the Southeast: Bele Chere. Asheville’s been throwing this shindig for 30 years, believe it or not, and folks are still packing the place to wander the streets, eat strange foods, and gawk at others.

I remember the first Bele Chere three decades ago, and if memory serves, it took place a little later in the year–maybe September? Haywood Street was closed to traffic and there were a few booths near Pack Memorial Library (it had recently moved from its original location on Pack Square), and one stage featuring a bluegrass band. We wandered around for a few minutes, but there was nothing much to see or do. What I really remember? On the way downtown, we stopped at Wendy’s (there was only one then, on Patton Ave.) and tried their new chili for the first time.

Fast forward 30 years, and Bele Chere has become a massive free-for-all of street vendors, artists, crafters, hucksters, informational pitchers, meat-on-sticks, deep-fried-candy-bars, sponsors, fight-to-legalize-hempsters, mendhi painters, locals, tourists, sunburns, late-summer-downpours, brewers, local restaurants, funnel cakes, sunburns, panting dogs, crying children, men-in-dresses, aging hippies, blaring music, armadas of port-a-johns, kiddy rides, semi-naked teen girls, dancing, drumming, grooving, tattoos, piercings, pay-to-park, blocked streets, sell-your-mama-for-a-seat-in-the-shade kind of festival. And those are just the highlights!

For some, it’s a wide-open-anything-goes kind of weekend in late July. For others, it’s a huge hassle that renders downtown Asheville impassable for three days. The city always declares each Bele Chere more successful than the previous one, and supposedly it attracts about 350,000 people to town each summer. There are a lot of local businesses that shut down for the duration, preferring to lose potential cash flow rather than face the hoardes and their endless search for bathrooms because 1) they’re too desperate to wait  or 2) they’re not desperate enough to use the portable facilities that have been festering in the sun all day.

Bele Chere signpost at College St. & Lexington Ave.

I work downtown, right in the heart of Bele Chere, and though I still enjoy parts of it, it’s definitely lost some of its luster for me after all these years. Getting to work on the opening Friday is an exercise in futility. For example: yesterday, I had to back halfway down a city street and take a weird route through an alley and a parking lot, then rely on a (surly) volunteer to hold up a yellow caution tape barrier and direct me through a crowd of vendors and on-lookers to access my building. Leaving required the same process in reverse, but at least I could drive the normal direction and not worry as much about backing over anyone (or their handwoven hemp-and-crystal dog collar booth).

Patton Avenue view

Oh, well. If you’re an Ashevillain, you know you’re here to stay. And whether you love it or hate, it looks like Bele Chere is here to stay, too.

Posted in Asheville and tagged , , , , , , ,

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