A fact that everybody in the known universe seemed to know except me and the people who printed my calendar, where today has printed on it "Superbowl Sunday." This calendar has all kinds of holidays printed on it, and I am now wondering if any others of them are wrong.
So here I am planning a party and making menus and pestering the RLA to let me buy a widescreen, big screen, HDTV to watch the big game... a game where I am forced to admit I haven't a clue who's playing, but you need all that for the commercials.

It's next week. Next week. February. Since when does football season run all the way up to spring training?

Oh well, it just gives me that much more time to work on my menus.

I'm planning on making orange marmalade sometime this week, since the sour orange tree in the front yard has outdone itself with fruit this year, and I can only marinade so much chicken, and even my housekeeper is giving me the fish eye when I ask if she'd like any more sour oranges.

Either the meds are working, the weather is conducive to creativity, I've turned a corner on my depression, or my naturally ebulient personality has finally quit hibernating.

For whatever reason, this week I have been bursting with energy and creativity.
Yes! It's true. I've been cooking up a storm, and just for the RLA and myself. It started with chocolate chip cookies to take to the (spit, spit) art show, continued on to yellow pepper soup (from the Silver Palate Cookbook, the one book that all cooks should have in the kitchen, in my not so humble opinion) accompanied by two loaves of Irish Soda Bread, and on to a delicious concoction of marinated chicken breasts last night.

The chicken dish is one of my own inventions, and I never make it the same way twice. Yesterday I marinated the chicken for a couple of hours in a mixture of fresh sour orange juice, chopped garlic, some of the mystery spice from Israel, olive oil and thyme.

The mystery spice from Israel is just that. I have no idea what is in it, exactly. One of my friends who was living in Jerusalem used to bring it to me when she visited the states. She'd buy it in a street market, and had no idea what it was, either. I've since found it in a Middle Eastern market locally, but they can't tell me the ingredients, either, and I found it by look and smell.

I'm pretty sure it includes cardomom. Maybe a little cinnamon and dried ginger. Maybe not. It's savory, and goes well in anything, especially brewed with coffee. I get this little frission like I'm drinking spice coffee from Dune. But that's just me.

Anyway, back to the chicken. I sauted onions and garlic in olive oil and butter. Added the chicken breasts and browned them. Added the marinade (I know, bad cook) and water to cover. Then added a little saffron and a little chicken stock granules. Covered and simmered until tender. Halfway through I added a handful of green olives. Served it up over a big heap of brown rice.

In addition to the cooking, I have finished a quilt for the RLA, and am finishing up another that's been in process for half a year.

I have two commissions in the pipeline for tallitsim.

I think, and it couldn't have happened any sooner, that I'm over the hump and into a new cycle of creativity.

Yippee.

The RLA did a street show this past weekend. It wasn't on a street, though, it was in a garden. Specifically, Pinecrest Gardens, or, as it was formerly known, Parrot Jungle. The parrots are gone, as are the flamingos and cockatiels, but the giant feral iguanas are thriving. It is mating season for iguanas, because they were turning bright orange. Nothing like a six-foot long bright orange lizard to make your day. No, I do not have photos. Please.
The RLA sold three pieces of work, to R&MJ, which we could have done without the additional cost of a booth fee. The hottest seller at this show was Cuban art. Each artist was more Cubanisimo than the next. We were between a woman who painted very vividly colored canvases of Cuban coffee makers and conga drums, and a man who painted Cuban markets and cigar-rollers' houses.

Mostly they weren't selling their original paintings, though, they were selling prints of their paintings. Not just any prints, mind you, they were selling Giclees. I kept hearing the patter, as one or the other explained to their buyers that Giclees are like modern lithographs, or serigraphs.

For the sake of clarity, I'd like to give you dictionary definitions of those three terms.

Serigraph: Silk-screening, which is also referred to as serigraphy or screen printing, is a centuries-old process that originated in China, It is, in essence, a refined version of a hand stenciled process. The image is divided, as it were, by a color, with a screen corresponding to each shade of ink that will appear on the final surface-paper, canvas, fabric, etc. The ink is applied to a screen, transferring to the paper only through the porous segments. A separate screen must be created for each color. On average, it takes between 80 to 100 screens to create a serigraph. The elements are hand-drawn onto mylar and photographically exposed onto each screen. Inks are matched to the hues of the original and custom mixed. Each edition takes approximately eight weeks to complete: four to five people handle the several stages of the process, and 80 to 90 percent of the production time is devoted to making color separations and the screens.

Lithograph: The process of printing from a small stone or metal plate on which the image to be printed is ink-receptive and the blank area is ink repellent. The artist, or other print maker under the artist's supervision, then covers the plate with a sheet of paper and runs both through a press under light pressure. The resultant "original print" is of considerably greater intrinsic worth than the commercially reproduced poster which is mechanically printed on an offset press. Color Lithography or Chromolithography is the process of using several stones or plates (usually one for each color). The result is a color lithograph, which differs from a print which is hand-colored after printing.

Giclee: A computerized reproduction technique in which prints are created using a very high quality inkjet printer. The word Giclee itself is French, and means spurt or squirt, however the spray is more like a mist, each droplet being the size of a red blood cell. The inks come in various grades of water-based dyes. It is very important to use UV glass with these prints, because being printed with dyes, which historically are not very colorfast, they can fade quickly.

Do you see the difference? Lithography and Serigraphy are both hands-on, labor-intensive techniques requiring time and skill. Giclees are INK JET PRINTS people. INK JET PRINTS!! Like, from that $99 Epson printer on your desk. And most of these guys don't even use archival inks or paper, which means that that reproduction you just shelled out $250 for is going to degrade and fade.

Unlike, say, the $90 original, hand-drawn, ink on paper that the RLA did and had framed in a museum-quality frame which you did NOT buy.

I started getting a little snippy about it by the afternoon of day two, telling prospective buyers that everything in the booth was an original, never reproduced, no Giclees, and once it was bought, it was the only one of its kind, period.

Nobody got it.

There was one guy who came in to the booth, and just raved about the RLA's work. He spent a lot of time looking. Then he went next door and bought a painting of a conga and another of a cup of Cuban coffee.

This was going around on the internets the past couple of weeks. The concept of not spending one damn dime on inauguration day as a means of protesting the war in Iraq and the Bush administration.

While I applauded the idea, I fell to the side of Snopes.com as to the effectiveness.
In the event, however, I managed to go the whole day without spending any money, so I did participate, not that anyone or anything would have noticed.

I also managed to watch not one damn minute of Bush2.0's inauguration. At least, not intentionally. While I was at the home visiting Mummy, the TV was on, and I was subjected to the sight of "this is NOT a coronation" his new, multi-bajillion dollar, fully armored, 2006 Cadillac limosine. Even the loonies at the home were unimpressed.

Which reminds me of a story, possibly apochryphal, possibly not, where in mentally ill persons were shown silent footage of Ronald Reagan speaking, and they all laughed at him. It had something to do with lying, but I don't remember the details.

Anyway, RJ is spending the night watching the first three seasons of The West Wing, or, as she says: a REAL president. I'm going to visit the sistergirl and her new puppy.

I go to the gym several times a week, to work out with the Marquis de Steve AKA Nic Cage, my trainer. The gym has a very small area for parking, and so people end up around the corner, down the street, whatever.

But some people are too good for all that, and so the gym has a valet. A valet, people. For the gym. Where you go to work out. So, like, doesn't that mean that you could hike your skanky ass a block or two to get into the gym to work up a sweat?

Am I missing something here?
Something else that I don't get is how women with no body fat anywhere else, can think it looks natural or even remotely attractive to have two huge canteloupe halves on their chests. You can't have tits without ass. Not naturally, at any rate.

For more information about that and why you should have a hand lift if you are going to have that many face lifts, go to one of my favorite guilty pleasures: Awful Plastic Surgery.

I have been noticing more and more of those damned W04 bumper stickers around. Before the election, nobody seemed to want to state out loud that they were going to vote for that goober. All I saw were Kerry bumper stickers. Believe me, I was looking and seeing what was out there, because it was my own sort of market research. To go by bumper stickers, Kerry was a shoo in.

Now that the fix is results are in, everybody and their dog has a Bush sticker somewhere on their vehicle, be it gas guzzling Hummer or rust bucket piece of shit.

Beats me.