Just a progression of an image I was playing with this evening.

Converted to black and white, adjusted levels and added noise. Kind of Ansel Adams-ish.

Added frame, more noise, sepia tone and a handful of other effects.

from kk_ct

Why Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day? Literally five minutes of effort. Throw the ingredients together, mix, pop the dough into a bucket and then into the fridge. After a couple hours of rising, I have enough for three big loaves. The dough keeps very well in the refrigerator for a couple weeks (and tastes noticeably better the longer it’s been sitting, though mine rarely makes it that long). When I want fresh bread I pull out a bit of dough, get the oven heated up and bake away. There are plenty of no-knead recipes about, but Jeff Hertzberg and Zoe Francois perfected a process that works for me.

Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day
by Jeff Hertzberg, Zoe Francois
2007, 242 pages
$15
Available from Amazon

Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day
Jeff Hertzberg,Zoe Francois
2009, 336 pages
$15
Available from Amazon

Jenna from Cold Antler Farm has released a neat little video covering her last few years… Cute!

OK, so the inspiration for this is many fold. I was thinking about it and then saw a post on a site where a couple did the same thing for a time.

I like the idea of forming this as a weekly theme, tradition, whatever you want to call it.

The basic concept is this – For one night a week, we’ll give up a lot of the modern conveniences in order to tie ourselves to the past and in a way, to our future. During this night our activities will became more family focused, no computers, no real housework or other things to distract us. I’d like to just sit around and talk, play games, read, plan, dream and maybe sing?

For us (as with the other couple that I read about) Thursday evenings works well. If it’s not too cold (or hot) we can turn off the heat or A/C and the lights. Start a fire in the fireplace (once inspected) and light the condo with old fashioned oil lamps and candles. Dinner could be simple leftovers or finger food of some type requiring no real energy expenditure.

Anyone care to join us? Create a Pioneer Night of your own? Local friends could join us.

Ideas behind it – togetherness, energy conservation, learning to do without, enjoying what we do have and realizing the value of what we have and the luxuries it provides, realizing what life is like without those “advantages”.

Gallery update with a few new photos. Go see the gallery.

We’ve completed staining, primed and gotten the first coat of paint on. Unfortunately it got too cool yesterday to put on the second coat of paint or put poly on the stained parts. So we built a mock up of the bed box (or at least the top anyway).

Hopefully we can warm the barn up enough to do the final coat of exterior paint next weekend. Then I can start on the door, windows and window cover. After that it’s the bed box that gets built.

Looks like we’ll make Thanksgiving weekend to at least spend the night in it. Granted it will be in the barn where we’ll be building it since the Vardo is not on wheels yet, but it’ll still be cool!

We also bought the Reflectix insulation on Sunday since it was on sale at nearly 50% off. Now we need to decide on the inside cloth as well so we can pick the inside paint color so that it plays off of that.

More soon

I know some of the readers like Futurama and other cartoons… Amazon.com has some really good discounts on a variety of hugely popular American cartoon miniseries box sets. Most start at $20, but the more you buy, the bigger the discount gets. If you buy 10 box sets, the normal price would go up to around $200, but Amazon will cut off $120 when you check out. So each set will cost you about $8 at the end. Not bad!

Available: Futurama (Season 1 to 4), Family Guy (Season 1 to 6), The Simpsons (Season 1 to 12), King of the hill (Season 1 to 6).

Very Cool! Offer ends November 22, 2009

Awesome Savings on Cartoon Series at Amazon!

Got some more done this weekend. Sorry for the crappy cellphone images!

It was driving me nuts in some ways that we sold our teardrop to P&P so I was looking for something to do that wouldn’t take a lot of time, was easily built (and hence easy on my back) and unique.

While researching my dad’s side of the family a few weeks back I stumbled (once again) across the families original name on a site about Romnichels (gypsies). Hmm, serendipity?

The Gypsy Vardo is the project! Timothy Lemke (and crew) have put together a great book and plan set to build one.

More soon!