I began my Yule celebration tonight. For those not used to my doings, we never have a Christmas tree. Instead, I decorate a wreath with apples, which signify the passage of the seasons. I burn candles each night and hold some simple meditations on the passage of the year.
Rather than buy a wreath this year, I fashioned my own from yew and juniper branches from our garden. The apples are Rome Beauty from our garden. I was feeling a little badly about not getting any decoration before now. I'm very glad I waited for the inspiration to use our own evergreens for the season.
John's been a strong supporter of the African American Museum of Iowa here in Cedar Rapids. He built two benches for the Museum's main exhibition space several years ago. Unfortunately the Museum was badly damaged in last year's floods, and the benches largely ruined.
John built two new benches for the Museum's recent opening. I took a quick snap of the new work before he installed it – just a day before the opening. We were invited to the opening, and had a chance to tour the restored – and significantly enhanced exhibits. Sadly, the Museum's curator, Susan Kuecker, said her farewell at the party; she's joining her husband who moved to Pittsburgh for a great new gig. We'll miss Susan, but John's looking forward to collaborating with the new curator.
We picked up a ham this morning from our good friends at Forest Hill Farms. Their superb eggs and chickens were my initial draw, but we've been feasting on more of their home grown products. They pasture-raise all their animals, and they take tremendous care with all their products. So I ordered half a Christmas ham and shared it tonight with friends: one of the very best hams I've ever eaten.
I braised the ham in a mixture of
1 cup chopped carrots 1 cup chopped onions 1 tsp peppercorns 2 bay leaves handful of sage enough chicken stock to come up about 1" on the ham.
The ham went in a 325F oven covered until it registered 140F on my instant read thermometer. (The house was filled with the most wonderful smells...) The whole operation took about 3 hours.
I let the ham rest at room temperature for an hour or so before serving. In the mean time I filtered off the ham stock for the following sauce:
and add to 1 cup ham stock. Bring to the boil and check for proper thickness. The sauce was amazingly wonderful with thin slices of ham. Alongside I served braised spinach with sun-dried tomatoes and scalloped potatoes.
I took another trip last week back to North Carolina to visit my father and my sister's family. My posting last November told of Dad making it home from a rehab facility after recovering from a broken knee.
Unfortunately that's not all the story. In early November Dad was hospitalized with a bowel obstruction. Surgery to correct the problem (scar tissue) was successful, but he's just not thrived after the second surgery in four months. My sister and I were hoping that he might make it home, but he is still very frail. I thought I'd pay him a quick visit. Along the way my sister and I managed to work through some tax and estate issues - I'm doing a bit of homework with one of my CPA friends on questions that arose.
I suspect I'll head back to see him around his birthday in mid-March: he'll be 90.
This beauty is another new work coming out of the temporary shop space. The black material is a man-made composite called PaperStone: it's formed from recycled newspaper and natural resins. It's so waterproof that it survived being submerged in flood waters for days with no effect at all. John shaped these sensuous forms from slabs of the material, and then mounted a polished wooden ball. It looks unstable and completely improbable, but it's actually rock-solid.
John has a new show at Legion Arts here in Cedar Rapids that opens next week. Legion Arts was severely damaged by the floods last year, but they're now running full-steam.
John created this new eight foot standing sculpture entirely from materials recovered from the summer floods.
So many people helped us in the flood recovery effort. The first project John took on after getting his new temporary shop running was to take selected materials that we recovered from the flood waters and to create sculptures for our helpers. Here you can see an array of the sculptures before he played Santa in January last week. Each work is unique, but all have similar designs.
With the wood moved out of our Annex, John's moved his shop temporarily into the Annex space. Our Annex is a second building - the old garage and a large (800 square foot) addition - that we're planning for media, music, and exercise. John rehabbed the old garage space into our cool gym space several years ago.
The large addition how houses John's shop, minus his new table saw. Because the table saw is so difficult to relocate, John doesn't want to set it up just yet. But he's gotten the rest of his new tools out and running. Here he's using his spiffy Festool sander and vacuum setup. Festool's a premium German tool maker. Their tools use a common vacuum system: the sander, for example, actually pulls dust through vents in the sanding pad, giving effectively dustless sanding. The vacuum is HEPA-filtered, so the place stays clean.
With the wood moved out of our Annex, John's moved his shop temporarily into the Annex space. Our Annex is a second building - the old garage and a large (800 square foot) addition - that we're planning for media, music, and exercise. John rehabbed the old garage space into our cool gym space several years ago.
The large addition how houses John's shop, minus his new table saw. Because the table saw is so difficult to relocate, John doesn't want to set it up just yet. But he's gotten the rest of his new tools out and running. Here he's using his spiffy Festool sander and vacuum setup. Festool's a premium German tool maker. Their tools use a common vacuum system: the sander, for example, actually pulls dust through vents in the sanding pad, giving effectively dustless sanding. The vacuum is HEPA-filtered, so the place stays clean.
The big news is that John's gotten all the big lumber pieces moved from our Annex building (a 1200 square foot structure just in back of our home) to the place where his new shop will eventually be, in the Cherry Building - about ten blocks from our home. The lumber storage area is on the third floor of the Cherry Building where it'll be high and dry if any more flood waters come our way.
John's shop will eventually be on the first floor of the Cherry Building in an annex area that's filled with great light. The first floor of the Cherry Building was completely wiped out in the June floods. As with many projects around Cedar Rapids, reconstruction after the flood is taking much longer than one could have imagined. Because no one knows exactly when John may be able to occupy his new shop space, he's setting up temporary quarters back in the Annex where the lumber used to be. There's 800 square foot of clear work area, and he's assembling the tools he'll need to get going again.
It's the beginning of the return of light! (Though you wouldn't know it here in Siberian Iowa where the wind chill is below -20F.) This is my Yule wreath for this year. Taking an old English custom, I decorate a wreath with apples to symbolize the equinoxes and solstices.
John and his landlord worked out the details on some temporary storage space in the building where he'll have his shop. The first floor of that building was damaged by the June floods, but John now has storage space on the third floor. He'll lay out the new space and then begin moving the stacks of lumber that we've had stored here after the floods.
No word yet on when he'll have access to the new shop space. That space will be on the first floor of the same building - in a very stylish brick annex where he'll mostly be by himself. I suspect the final renovation of the shop space will now run well into 2009, but at least John can begin getting his lumber and equipment staged and organized.
Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday: it's all about food and friends. I love cooking for T-Day, and this year was just a slight variation. Usually I do a disassembled turkey breast roasted per Julia Child's instructions. This year I did one of those and I smoked a breast on the grill with cherry wood. John's brother Jay and his wife Janece came, as did his sister Jane and her husband Roger and kids Jacob and Rachel. Our friends David and Mary Taylor and Rick Hahn rounded out our eleven folks.
We were swimming in food - and I had one surprise: almost all the turkey vanished. The smoked stuff was a real hit!
1. Last summer I tried using the window in my office. It opened fine, but it wouldn't close. John finally pushed it shut from the outside, and we contacted the Pella Window folks to come take a look. Their inspector found dry rot in the windows and conducted a complete inspection of every window in the house. (John will only use Pella windows, by the way.) The inspector said the company would be back to us with quote and schedule to replace the four defective windows.
Turns out there was no quote - just someone from the Pella factory calling to replace all the windows free-of-charge. He did the job in about an hour, and I'm a happy camper.
2. I've sworn by Shure in-ear headphones for years: sonically they're impeccably good, and they're just wonderful for blocking ambient noise. My SE530's developed a real problem: the earpiece cracked so I couldn't put the left element in my ear.
Not to worry: I sent 'em back to Shure under their two year full warranty. About a week later I got a complete new package, factory sealed and perfect in every way.
I've had some friends ask what's been going on: I've not been updating my blog very much of late. Lots of changes have been going on, and our new Teahouse is a big part of that. I've just finished editing video of how the building came together. Now for a bit of the backstory.
Our old shed was ready to fall down when John moved into this place in 1983. John got permits to replace the old shed back in 2001. but with work on the house and work for clients, he's been too busy even to contemplate another major project.
After the summer floods, John had (and still has) no working shop. About the same time I thumbed through a book on Japanese architecture that he had, and I wistfully talked about how beautiful the teahouses were. A little gleam went on in his eyes, and he started reworking the old shed plans with a different use in mind.
After the demolition finished, his old friend and master builder Franklin Hanson came available to help with the project. John and Franklin did the structural work on the renovation of our house, and I was delighted that Franklin could come back and help again.
The video shows most of the story - with a few exceptions. Some of the construction phases, like raising the walls, happened while I was at a client's site during a day. I literally returned to find all the walls in place and sheeting done. Other phases, like putting on an incredibly beautiful metal roof, escaped the camera, too.
John and Franklin buttoned up the exterior this year, and I'm actively using the space as my meditation retreat. Next spring John plans to complete the siding and the interior walls and floor. We've already found a supplier for tatami mats, and he'll build some low tables. We're talking with some of our artist friends about commissioning pieces for the space. One of these artists is a renowned Japanese ceramics artist; the other is a sumi-e painter. I'll follow up this story as the project completes.
Michael Mejia: Scrawny to Brawny : The Complete Guide to Building Muscle the Natural Way When I read this book I thought the author had access to my personal exercise history and problems. This is the first book I've ever read that provided rehabilitation exercises for shoulders and legs before beginning weight training. A fabulous book for gangly types. (*****)
