Lookit there! “Foolproof Gravy,” it says! That sounds not-scary. I opened to the table of contents, where I was pleasantly greeted with this:

I can shake a jar! And she said, “Promise!” Martha wouldn’t lie to me. So I bought the magazine and went home.

A couple days before Thanksgiving, I actually took a glance at page 82 with the gravy instructions, expecting them to be relatively simple and uncomplicated. What greeted me was, sadly, quite the opposite.

What the hell, Martha? I thought we were cool! I don’t have seventeen hours and a staff of ten to make frikkin’ gravy! I don’t even own a whisk! You suck so hard, Martha.

However, I would not let this gravy situation ruin my Thanksgiving. I took out a bunch of steps that I found unnecessary, and sho’ nuff, my gravy was delish and everyone was thrilled. Here’s my recipe.

1. Buy a box of organic chicken stock from Costco’s. Make sure you get stock, not broth. Also, get organic stock because otherwise they add secret naughty things into it, like dextrose and MSG.

2. Put about a two cups in a clean take-out soup container from a Chinese restaurant. Add about 1/2 cup of flour to it. Put the lid on tightly and shake like hell until there are no lumps of any kind. Your arms will feel like Rosie the Riveter. This is a good thing.

3. Take the turkey drippings and pour them into one of those gravy-separator thingies. Wait about ten minutes. The grease will rise to the top. Pour as much of the non-grease-juices as you can into a small pot on the stove (about three cups). Add the contents of the Chinese soup container. Slowly low-boil the mixture over the stove, stirring constantly until it reaches your desired thickness. For me it took about seven to ten minutes of boiling until it got to a pleasantly festive viscous consistency.

4. Add a tiny bit of pepper maybe. Don’t add salt. Some people don’t like too much salt. Some people have high blood pressure. Let people add their own salt. Serve. Done.

It was delicious, everyone was happy, and I didn’t have to interact with giblets. A win-win, I think.

Addendum: A few hours after I wrote this, I saw a pertinent blog entry on mimismartypants.

Thanksgiving at my house was awesome, except for the part where Martha Stewart was a lying skank. That thing about soaking the cheesecloth in butter and wine and draping it over the turkey breast results in nothing but a shrieking fire alarm, frightened cats, and an oven full of smoke. Luckily this all happened before any guests arrived, so LT just pulled the whole cheesecloth mess off with barbecue tongs and threw it in the sink. Quit trolling, Martha. People (me) actually believed that cheesecloth nonsense. I’ma gonna get you back, lady.

I had a very pleasant yesterday, when I gave my very first lecture to a group of librarians on simple design techniques. They were not mean to me and had good questions, it was all lovely. I got home where my computer was in sleep mode. I wiggled the mouse and tapped the spacebar and wiggled the mouse and tapped the spacebar and…nothing. So I shut it down, gave it ten seconds and turned it back on again, where it promptly went into sleep mode and could not be roused. I then looked around for seven dwarves because clearly I’m sharing my home with Sleeping Beauty (B’doom CHING! I’m funny!). I called Cricket and informed him of my woes, so after work he came over and took the side off my Tower of Power, tinkered around in there, and sadly informed my that my hard drive has Teh Computer Deaths. So until my new hard drive arrives in a week, I have a sculptural element in the corner of my bedroom. The screen, it taunts me with its blackness. “I could play music or surf the web, buuuuuuuuut I don’t think I will. Neener neener.”

Finally, I came back to work today to hear a tale that chills me to the very core. Here is the story as told to me. Upstairs, an employee came into their office to find a poopy smell and two hefty piles of crap on the floor. I was like, WTF?!?? I mean, I’ve seen the rats outside the building and they are big, but really? When the employee called office services, they found out that we have bedbug-sniffing dogs that come through here, and one of them must have just let it all out in the office. All my co-workers were like, Oh isn’t that just a hoot? NO. IT IS NOT A HOOT. I don’t want to have to deal with that kind of thing, EVER. If I wanted a job where large animals took dumps in my workplace, I would have become a park ranger. I am not a park ranger. I am a graphic designer. NO LARGE DOGS CRAPPING IN MY OFFICE.

Also, allergies.

Because they’ve changed the parade route, they performances no longer happen right in front of my building, but around the corner, so the only way I could see the dance routines was to watch the reflection in the mirrored building across the street. If you look above the Foot Locker sign, you’ll see the reflection.

Pokemon went by and he had a really great preceding float. I believe all of the balloons had little floats before them or following them. I thought this one was shnazzy.

My favorite float was the Jimmy Dean Breakfast Food Items float. While I actively dislike his breakfast food items, specifically his sausage, I am enamored of the commercials and this float. Damn you, Jimmy Dean, and your sub-par product! You taunt me with rainbows and solar systems! You are like the Lisa Frank of pork sausage!

There were two castle-type floats that caught my eye. One was the Office Max float. Why they picked a Foster’s Home of Imaginary Friends-type house as their float, I do not know, but I thought it was great. Then there was the pink castle. Now, I am a female, I have always been (despite some rumors to the contrary) and I like girly things just fine. But this pink castle, it was just so, PINK. I was overwhelmed, like I had been slapped in the face with a uterus. Filled with glitter.

There were two costumes/floats I desperately want to be on or in some year. One was at the base of the Murakami balloons. Here are the Murakami balloons.

And here is the costume.

Maybe they’ll let me borrow the headdress part and I can wear on the weekends while I run my errands. I think that would be super.

The other thing I wanted to be a part of is the small following float of Spongebob Squarepants. There was a very nice mermaid riding a lobster.

I MUST RIDE THE LOBSTER. I would wave so hard, my arms would fall off. Mayor Bloomberg, let me ride the lobster please!

This girl had a hell of a job, walking in front of the Big Apple float with Kanye West on it. I wonder if people threw stuff at her.

And here’s Kanye.

Following the Big Apple/Kanye float was a herd of people dressed like cops and robbers because…crime in New York is up? Or down? Maybe Riker’s Island paid for the float? I don’t know.

The other bizarre combination was a Statue of Liberty float (okay) covered with the little minions from Despicable Me (huh?). My father has not seen the film and insisted they were salt shakers. What was neat about them is they were all little people in there, but I don’t think there was any way for them to see out, so the ones on the float were fine, but the ones wandering around the street waving each got their own handler who would hold their hand and gently steer them around.

There were two balloons I had never seen which looked like the die (dii?) from Dungeons and Dragons. They weren’t really near anything else recognizable, so I wonder why they were there.

I was really excited about this float: you all know that I painted a piece based on the story of the world being on the back of a tortoise, and then there was this! And I was there with my dad, who told me the story! I felt like singing “Circle of Life” from The Lion King.

I also loved the Ukrainian ball balloons.

And that’s about it. I’ve spent the rest of the weekend so far working on my own artwork, so hopefully soon I’ll have a cool post about that. In the meantime, I hope everyone has a healthy and happy Thanksgiving weekend.

Addendum: The person in front of the Murakami float was, in fact, Takashi Murakami. So the chances of me getting to wear that costume are slim to none. Someday, though, I would like to be as happy as he is in the second picture. So. Happy.

(These two photos of Takashi Murakami are from slamxhype.com.)

I feel like I’m turning into the nerd version of teenage girls who plaster their walls with their latest crush. Here, a helpful example.

On a different note, I found out about a man named John Kenn from Denmark. He does illustrations for childrens’ shows. When he has a little free time, he draws on Post-It notes. I love his drawing style so so much. I want Post-It to call him right now and give him lots of money and put him in their commercials.

Addendum which has nothing to do with anything: My former co-worker Nelly has a lionhead rabbit named Rose Nyland. She is a super-cute little guy (the rabbit, although Nelly is pretty cute too). Here is a picture.

This was the design on the very first bag I painted six years ago, and the original looked like this:

As you can see, in the new purse, I did some slightly different variations on the stars. It’s subtle, but I think it’s an improvement. My co-worker always says, “Don’t make changes just to make it different. Make changes to make it better.”

http://www.doverpots.com/crystalline/article.html

Short version: The glaze has little flecks in it – zinc, I believe – and in the kiln SCIENCE!! happens, and twelve hours later, crystals. Luckily, small pieces of crystalline pottery aren’t that expensive, so I’ve collected seventeen over the years. I’m going to show some of my more special ones.

This is that first one that I mentioned. As you can see, the top bit broke off, but I don’t care. The crystals, they are so large and circular. I display it proudly with all my other pieces.

I believe the glaze was invented in China, so I bought a piece made in China. It’s nothing spectacular, but I felt I should reprezent (gang sign here).

These are my two largest and most expensive pieces. They’re by the same artist, Robert Hessler, who might be the nicest person I have ever met. What a delightful fellow. And he does wonderful work. The tube shaped one is pretty spectacular, the way the colors change from top to bottom. And you can’t really appreciate it from the picture, but the teapot is coppery/shimmery, with blue crystals.

This is my cheapest and crappiest piece that I bought on a street festival in Africa from a German potter. Even though the crystals are not-so-great and the dish isn’t even remotely circular, I liked how it looked like frost on a window looking out on a night sky. This is a perfect example of even if something is not well-made, it can still be evocative to the right person (that would be me).

Sometimes the crystals end with a totally different color at the edge, and I like that look very much. This vase is a good example of that, with the dark edges.

This is an ikebana holder. I bought it because I thought the top looked like creme brulee. I don’t claim to be fancy. Sometimes I buy art because it resembles a favorite food of mine. This is one of those times.

The same artist who made the ikebana holder, Joe Lorber, made the three pieces below. Also a really nice guy. He makes the stripes in the crystals by raising and lowering the temperature of the kiln every fifteen minutes. The last piece there is grainy because he fired it twice and copper started to come to the surface.

And this piece is my newest. I think it might be my new favorite. It’s also by Joe Lorber. He did something different with the temperatures on this one, and I think it’s a different glaze at the top and the bottom. It’s just stellar. I find myself staring at it sometimes, lost in thought.

2. Some mornings I come out of my apartment building and Lawrence the cat is there. I love Lawrence. His owner takes him outside on a leash and and lets him sniff around, eat the grass, barf the grass, whatever he wants. And every morning that I see him is a good day. I pet Lawrence, he ignores me, and I go on my merry way.

3. I walk past a Sephora on my way to work most days, and they are selling some kind of makeup airbrush. Unfortunately, this picture makes it look like they’re selling the face-stretching thing from the movie Brazil.

4. Last night I saw Peter Gabriel in concert. And when I say, “in concert”, I mean it. He had a sixty-piece orchestra behind him. I didn’t especially want to go, but Cricket insisted that I have a life for once, so I went. And I totally didn’t regret it. Well, except for the guy sitting on my left. He looked exactly like The Dude from The Big Lebowski, and as soon as he sat down, a down comforter of pot funk encircled my head and muffled my breathing. It was so pungent, and it reeked of herbs and skunks, or maybe burning tires. It must have been phenomenal weed, because The Dude was clearly having a different experience from most everyone else around him. He was doing a great deal of closed-eyed appreciation, with accompanying hand gestures, like he was conducting. It was hard not to giggle at his earnestness. Anyway, Gabriel is promoting his new album, an album of covers called “Scratch My Back”. He did a bunch of the covers for the first half (which was great). He also performed a song that I knew from somewhere and poked me right in the heart and made me tear up, called “The Book of Love”. The first thing I did when I got to work today was try to figure out where I knew the song from, and it’s from the series finale of Scrubs. I loved Scrubs, so when I watched the finale, I cried like a kid whose large and impressive baseball card collection just fell in a creek. It’s a touching song. See for yourself. Then he took a break and Lou Reed came out and played “Solisbury Hill”, and ruined it. It was loud, and in the key of grungy, and tempo wasn’t his primary focus, and Lou kinda just hollered the song (“Boomboomboom!”). At one point, Cricket turned to me and said, “This is terrible, right? It’s not just me, right?” But then Peter came back out and played his hits, and that was killer. He did “Digging In the Dirt” and “Red Rain” and “Solisbury Hill” (CORRECTLY) and “Don’t Give Up”, all of this with this orchestra playing (so, so good) and then the orchestra started up on something that sounded familiar and then Gabriel walked up to the microphone and sang “Love…” and I flipped out. It was super-great. I cannot wait for the DVD of this tour to come out so I can have this version. So, even though I didn’t get home until 12:37 a.m. and had to go to work the next day, it was still worth it. Just a closing note:

Dear Other People In The Audience,
Peter Gabriel has a set list. He’s not gonna go all rogue with a 60-piece orchestra behind him and play whatever you scream out. So please stop shrieking “BIKO!!” between songs, it’s annoying. Thank you.

The guy who built it put in an extra wire piece in the inside of the trunk so I can turn it into a lamp. Giant glowing baobab! Hooray! I got it from the same store that had the GIGANTIC baobab lamp with flowers.

When I set up the cords and lampy bits, I will take a picture and we shall all enjoy the glowing beaded tree together.

Here’s the logo to his website:

A pic of the man himself in his studio:

An album cover for Aesop Rock:

A magazine cover for Juxtapoz:

A hotel room Jeremy Fish painted (I must stay there one day):

Some pics from his Rome exhibition:

And, apparently, he even designed a marital aid:

He is also famous for designing skateboards, shoes, pillows, vinyl figures, etc. You can check out his work on his website, silly pink bunnies.

The other artist I wanted to share is Pete Fowler. I learned about him when I went to Kid Robot for the first time. I fell in love with his vinyl figures, and that was the beginning of my collection. He does these computer illustrations of woodland-dwelling oddities that look like they belong in a suburban basement with wood paneling and brick-colored shag carpeting, so much are they a throwback to the late ’60s slash early ’70s. I just find his work charming and delightful and sweet and eccentric.

Here is a flyer he designed, I assume for the series of vinyl characters “Pets and Their Owners” (which I really need to get):

A wall mural he designed:

And album cover for the band Super Furry Animals:

Some other vinyl characters that I do own:

And look! Someone has made an animated something-or-other with his work! Yay!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1Q5umX4ioI

Once again, while his work is not for everyone, it is really fun and sweet. Pete Fowler’s website is Monsterism.

In fact, here is a picture of my living room with both artists’ work in it.

Unfortunately, it’s too big for the display space, but when the CCO says he likes something, you best produce that thing or something very close to it. So I had about a week and a half to make another one, which I did (clap clap clap for me). One this one I decided to go with one color family and focus more on the pattern. So I bought a case of Fresca cans (they have a nice pattern, go look at one one day and you’ll see) and made a pattern loosely based on an ornate faux-rococco frame I saw online. I hammered all the little bits of tin onto plywood, added a mirror, and poof! A mirror is born.

Now my bedroom is covered with little bits of sharp tin can, which is awful, and if I didn’t walk around barefoot all the time and have good callouses on my feet, would also be very painful. But the CCO came down from his pretty swanktastical office and saw the display and said he liked it, so it was all worth it.