JanerBlog

Raven sketches

Here, have some lovely ravens. Nothing like scavenger birds to make the season festive.

These are all fast brush-pen drawings from photos taken at Denali National Park in 2006. Only the last four birds had any pencils underneath them; the others were just exercises that turned out nicely. Enjoy! You may be seeing more of their cousins, soon.

I should clean out the fridge more often.

I just made one of the best leftover recipes I've ever eaten. As I mentioned in the last post, we've got about a hundred pounds of doe meat headed for the freezer, so I made up one of our chuck roasts from last year to make room for it. I was out of pretty much everything that goes with chuck roasts, like celery and carrots and mushrooms, but I *did* have a frozen bag of leftover cranberry sauce from Thanksgiving.

So I cooked the potroast with it. Potroast with cranberry-red-wine-balsamic sauce, served with roasted sweet potatoes. No recipe, just eyeballed it. And holy crap, was it good.

Meat harvest!

Looks like we're not going to have to buy a beef share this year -- my dad lets a bunch of guys hunt on his land, and they just brought him a nice young doe. I've paid for processing, an we'll have venison all year long. Yay!

Link dump

I read all three of these articles within about a 12-hour span. They all kind of tie in to the same theme, so I'm grouping them together:

"Fuck Them": Times Critic On Hollywood, Women, & Why Romantic Comedies Suck (h/t to Rich Watson for this one)

Why James Chartrand Wears Women's Underpants

Marvel's Girl Comics Announced -- The lineup sounds great, and I'll most likely be picking up the series to support all my friends and acquaintances in the book... but dang, I'm with Johanna on this one:

I dream of a day when a comic created only by women doesn't get tagged with a stupid title like Marvel's Girl Comics. In fact, I dream of a time when it's not even special enough to remark upon, instead of being some kind of attention-getting stunt that ends up resembling a plea for charity. "Please pay attention to us -- look! we're letting the women do superheroes!" But we're not there yet, still.

Also, I saw two good articles describing hipster racism today, in regards to crafters. Anyone who's stood within earshot of me knows that I'm all in favor of both DIY projects and art-for-art's-sake -- but these articles serve as a reminder that art (including your art's "branding" and your own self-presentation) doesn't exist in a societal vacuum. In addition to being responsible to our "artistic vision" or "muse" or whatever hackneyed metaphor we use to describe our inspiration, artists have to consider how our art affects those who receive it, no matter how cute or clever we think we're being. (And yes, I'm feeling especially pricked by this article, because I used to think stuff like this was cute and funny, until I started looking at it with a more critical eye. So now it is my duty to spread The Gospel of Pants.)

Makin' Bakin'

Finished the holiday baking today. I skipped out on the annual German Pretzels for the first time in four years; I was feeling too exhausted to go through the whole process, so I opted for more smaller recipes instead -- which, ironically, turned out to be pretty much the same amount of work.

I'd been feeling like trying some new recipes, and so I decided to have a look at a cookbook my mom gave me for Christmas last year (*cough*Martha Stewart*cough*). This year's roundup included:

• Peanut butter cookies with peanuts and chocolate chips


• Butter rum cookies


• Gingersnaps


• Dark chocolate-orange-espresso cookies (I think these were the best of the bunch, by far)


• Tart cherry liqueur truffles

I scored some cute little tins this year, and all I have left to do is pack them up and deliver them. Yay, baking.

Skiing the Nature Center

Spent a lovely afternoon skiing today. Went to the Kalamazoo Nature Center with my buddy Dan, and got in at least two hours' worth, maybe a bit more. The sun was shining, the snow was just perfect, and we arrived back at the car just as the last pink light was fading from a mackerel sky. Saw lots of birds, starting with a big blue heron hunkered down by an open stream. We flushed an enormous hen-turkey -- probably a good twelve pounder -- and marveled at the heavy thump of her wings as she got off the ground. A large flock of Canada geese went past, low and loud enough that we could hear the whistling of their feathers. Best of all, I saw my very first Pileated woodpecker. I've been wanting to see one since I first read a story about them in Ranger Rick magazine when I was about seven, but have never been lucky enough until today. They're enormous, just a bit smaller than their more famous (and likely extinct) cousin the Ivory-billed woodpecker, and really impressive to see in flight. They have a lovely laughing call that we heard several times as we skied through the woods.

The mice were busy on the prairie preserve, and there were plenty of footprints with little tails dragging behind, moving between switchgrass and wild rye to harvest seeds. The deer were out -- we didn't see any, but did see plenty of fresh tracks, and the turkeys had been following the freshly-broken trail left by the snowshoers and skiiers (They're no dummies, Dan remarked). As we left, we passed three young guys in Carhartts, armed with snow shovels and sleds heading out to get in some crazy night sledding, which reminded me of all the crazy night sledding we used to do in Ypsi: sled shrapnel and stolen Taco Bell trays and Russ up to his shins in the Huron chasing after his saucer sled and Eric getting three seconds of hangtime before coming down right on his coccyx.

Good times.

And then I came home and made three kinds of cookie dough, for the big annual bakefest tomorrow. More on that, later.

Not dead, I promise

... Just haven't had much pertinent stuff to say, lately. There's been a lot of work going on, both at the dayjob and on the comics. Not much to tell, though, as it's all behind the scenes. Had two very nice Thanksgivings with the families. Read some good books, watched a few movies. Looking forward to having enough snow to go skiing again.

How've you all been?