NPR Provides Great Fall Recipes

A link for summer garden bounty use:... click here

(all pictures by Susan Chang for NPR)

The garden season will end soon enough, in a fanfare of potatoes and squashes and pumpkins and gourds. As the weather gets colder, they get starchier and more like breads themselves, so it takes less and less effort — a little egg and sugar to sweeten and bind them — to get them to shine in a loaf pan.

Quick Zucchini, Carrot and Pumpkin Breads all found here.

Artist Bloggers and Urban Sketchers

In looking at artists' works on the internet, I came across Urban Sketchers and some beautiful pictures.  You might find some of the artists' work exceptionally appealing.

Urban Sketchers is a web site that features artwork from over 100 invited artists from 30 different countries.  Imaginative, delightful images are found there; it is an absorbing site and a feast for the eyes.

Above is a watercolor from Caroline who lives in Brittany.  Her blog is An English Artist in Brittany, where she shows some of her watercolors.  She says about this piece:

This beautiful 'maison de maitre' at Dinard was built in the late eighteen-hundreds and is called 'Les Roches Brunes'. It was bequeathed to the town and exhibitions are now held here.

 Here is a sketch by Rob entitled Budenfest found here, painted at a train station in Germany on September 10, 2011.

And below is another sketch by Rob from May, 2011, found here on Urban Sketchers where he writes:

It's been a very dry and warm spring in southern Germany this year. I've been zipping around on my little 50 cc scooter with my sketchbook, looking for little scenes like this to enjoy and draw. I pulled off the road at this spot near the village of Hertingen, watching a tractor plowing up the dry soil and enjoying a field of buttercups before me. Warm. Dry. Wonderful! 

Liz on Sketching Architecture featured this picture on Sept. 10, 2011 where she said...

I love the fluidity and forcefulness, the bold 3-dimensionality, adventurous complexity and all the fun games that are played with curved vs flat surfaces and all the crazy decoration. Today while tidying up my study/studio I came across a print out of a photo I took in Rome last year of a building that I didn't have the energy to sketch at the time.

Judy from the Netherlands sketched this on September 9, 2011.  She can be found at her blog where her sketch was featured here where she said...

The room is filled with the colours of the cyclamen. The flowers are totally odourless but when I let their colour "bleed" into the background, I always feel that I am painting flower fragrance.

Below is a scanned copy of my watercolor worksheet.  If you are not familiar with this "painting tool" mixture of colors on a grid, it is merely the original color of a certain named color down the left hand side of the page with its associated color painted to the right of the name.  Across the top, in the same order, are those same colors.  By mixing the colors, one on top of the other (after each color dab has thoroughly dried), the resulting hues are the combination of the two colors listed on the chart, going from left to right and top to bottom.  In using this worksheet, one never needs to wonder exactly what shade will result in the mixing of colors.

This is one of my watercolors from 2001 painted from a photo I took before a luncheon meal outside Volterra, Italy:

This is one of my watercolors from a vacation in Greece in 2001:

(size 11" x 14")

And thus concludes a blog foray into sketch art from various climes and times.

New Jobs? At What Cost?

After almost nineteen years in the restaurant business, the last two in which she co-managed a restaurant of 120 employees, our younger daughter was laid off this week. And are there any new jobs out there in the marketplace for her?  According to The Washington Post:

The Labor Department reported Thursday that jobless claims rose by 2,000 to 414,000 for the week ending Sept. 3. The department said last week that no net jobs were created in August.

(picture courtesy of CBS News)

Last night's speech, in which President Obama said "PASS THIS BILL"  (the $447 billion American Jobs Act proposal) more times than I bothered to count, was disappointing and disingenuous.  In less than 45 seconds:



From this site:

Essentially, the jobs plan is an IOU from a president and lawmakers who may not even be in office down the road when the bills come due. Today’s Congress cannot bind a later one for future spending. A future Congress could simply reverse it.

Currently, roughly all federal taxes and other revenues are consumed in spending on various federal benefit programs, including Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, veterans’ benefits, food stamps, farm subsidies and other social-assistance programs and payments on the national debt. Pretty much everything else is done on credit with borrowed money.

So there is no guarantee that programs that clearly will increase annual deficits in the near term will be paid for in the long term.

The Los Angeles Times this morning said that Obama

... then provided a joint session of Congress with a broadly ambitious list of goals that sounded to many people very much like a lot more spending, like, say, the $787 billion economic stimulus bill of 2009 that didn't stimulate much of anything except that national debt.

I am so disheartened for my daughter Heidy.  She is a hard worker and I have been told by many of her co-workers that she rules fairly and with a velvet hammer.  Hopefully, she can obtain another position she likes and in which she will prosper.

My thoughts are with all those seeking work.

"It's recession when your neighbor loses his job, it's a depression when you lose your own."  Harry S. Truman