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Archive for the ‘Low Tech’ Category

Seeking Simplicity

Posted in Culture, Low Tech, tagged , , on 12 Dec 2012| Leave a Comment »

Simple LivingThese days, with so much on my mind, my natural inclination is to retreat, pull the blanket over my head, and hide. I want to shut out the world, shut off my brain, and think of nothing nothing nothing.

And some days I do just that. Returning from my mother’s bedside, I binged on the DVR’s  stacked up episodes of “Storage Wars” (both versions) and immersed myself in the mindless violence of “Borderlands 2” and “Call of Duty: Black Ops II”. Through the judicious application of Islay whisky and long bouts on the elliptical and treadmill, I’ve kept my body tired enough to sleep through the night (as long as I have to get up at 5am, that is). I’ve read nothing but posts on Facebook and emails.

In short, nothing of substance has entered my brain. I haven’t had a decent thought in days.

Enough of that.

Simplicity doesn’t come on its own. There isn’t a back-alley entrance to serenity. Peace comes from acceptance and understanding.

I must think, to accept. I must think, to understand.

k

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Gear Up

Posted in Food, Low Tech, tagged , , , , , , , , on 09 Nov 2012| Leave a Comment »

And for the Foodies…a couple of gear recommendations.

First, a great stocking stuffer idea.

I’ve made a bit of a study of corkscrews. I’ve tried a ton of them, of nearly every type. There’s the old-school helix-with-a-handle jobs; turn the handle and pull with all your might. There are the standard wing version (or, as I always thought, the little man who raises his arms when you twist his head). For a decade or so, the two-prong slip-n-grip models ruled the world; they were good, too, but they’re not as popular now. Most recently, it’s the “rabbit” type that’s in vogue; a gripper and a handle that plunges the screw down into the cork in one clean shoop, and pulls it out on the pull-back.

(more…)

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In Defense of Letters

Posted in Low Tech, Writing on 05 Nov 2012| Leave a Comment »

Kurt R.A. GiambastianiA quick swing through this blog-site or just a brief glance at my gravatar (what a stupid word) to the right will clue you into a fact: I like old, low-tech things. As an old, low-tech thing myself, I feel an affinity with the slower pace, the more thoughtful process they require. A clock requires winding. A pen requires filling. A letter requires consideration and preparation.

Letters…I know. How 19th century! But I write letters. I have always written letters. I communicated with distant cousins with letters. I wooed women with letters. I have built friendships with letters. To this day, I write letters to pen pals, to my father, and on occasion, to my wife. Letters take time. Letters make me slow down. Letters make me think about what I want to say before I put pen to paper, because you can’t backspace through a handwritten letter or cut-and-paste your way out of an awkward syntax.

In our world of instant communication—IMs, emails, tweets—even a phone conversation can seem old-fashioned. To set aside ten minutes or an hour for a chat is just too much effort for some people. Why? Why is it so much work (or too much bother) to plan some time with a friend or relative? How superficial do our relationships become when we reduce our interaction to 140-character bursts? (more…)

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So Long, Election Night

Posted in Culture, Low Tech, Politics, Seattle, tagged , , , , , , on 30 Oct 2012| 3 Comments »

Obey the Kitty!The world changes quickly, and as I get older, I start to feel the current move faster than I am. Slowly, inexorably, I’m being left behind. This is something I work hard against; I try to keep current, but I never was “edgy” or “cool” and I sure as hell don’t expect to start now. I suppose this makes me a member of the Curmudgeon Party. I’m pretty happy over here. I can rant and rave, piss and moan, and no one is surprised when I do it. So, don’t be surprised. I’m going to do it again.

Last night—on an October night—I voted in a general election. My wife and I sat in the living room, discussed each of the initiatives and reviewed the candidates, colored the little bubbles on our computer-ready form, and stuck them in envelopes to go out in the morning’s post. Washington State now has a wholly mail-in election system.

And I hated it.

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Consommé

Posted in Food, Low Tech, tagged , , , , , , on 26 Oct 2012| 8 Comments »

Obey the Kitty!(All the puns I could have used to title a post on stock, consommé, and au jus are terrible, so I refuse to pain you with them. Besides, you’re hearing them all in your head right now, anyway.)

Egg whites and I have a long, antagonistic history. I don’t “get” them, and they don’t do much for me. It all goes back to my attempt, at the age of about twelve, of making an angel food cake, from scratch, while my family was out for the day. “Whip the egg whites until they form peaks,” the recipe said. So, bowl in arm and whisk in hand, I beat them until my wrist was ready to crumble. What’s a “peak” anyway? How does one judge”peakiness”? I poured the resulting froth into the cake pan, presuming it would rise during cooking (don’t all cakes rise during cooking?) I took it out of the oven just as my family arrived home. The resulting half-inch high hard-pan custard…jerky…would forever be known as my Angel Food Flop. Egg whites and I have never gotten along, since.

One of the things I’ve always wanted to be able to make is a nice, flavorful, crystal clear beef stock. A consommé, to be precise. Years ago, I went to my copy of La Varenne Pratique to find out how to do it. Great. Egg whites. I tried again and again, and all I got was cloudy stock and a couple of wasted eggs. Or worse. Enter Julia Child.

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A Wing of Plovers

Posted in Low Tech, Seattle, tagged , , , , , , , , on 18 Oct 2012| Leave a Comment »

They don’t have a cool collective noun like “a murmuration of starlings,” but they were enthralling nonetheless.

Yesterday, I stood on the beach while a wing of plovers gyred and swooped around me. I stood transfixed, my feet freezing in the cold water, watching them, hearing the whispers of a thousand wings surround me. They flew as one creature, sides flashing like a school of fish in clear water, black wings, white bellies, gyring and twisting as one, creating shapes in the air above the sandy waves.

They rose in a mass, split into two amorphous shapes, each one moving around the other, until they merged like droplets of quicksilver. They spindled into a long roll and swept across the sand before piling up again into a heap, a mound, a pillar fifty feet tall.

As the wing spun and eddied, individuals would fly off from the body, peeping as they shot outward, slate-winged rockets ejected from a massive, living firework.

And then they settled, falling like heavy leaves back down to the sand, the rustle of wings replaced by a piping chorus that drowned out the roar of the surf. The wing of plovers in the air, now a congregation on the shoreline, dipping each black beak into the sand, searching for food, skedaddling back and forth in time with the waves until the ocean sent another big roller to make them take wing once more.

I stood there for the better part of an hour, rapt, giddy, grateful.

k

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We Have a Winner

Posted in Food, Low Tech, tagged , , , , , , on 21 Sep 2012| 5 Comments »

Note: This post originally discussed stoneware versus porcelain. I’ve since learned that the “stoneware” I have been purchasing for decades is really “earthenware,” despite what it said on the box. Earthenware and stoneware have some qualities in common–like weight–but stoneware (real stoneware) is stronger and more durable. I’ve updated this post to accurately reflect what it was I owned. Be warned, though: a lot of the “stoneware” dinnerware sets you’ll find out there are probably just earthenware. With that in mind, here’s the updated post:

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While I am stuck in the spin-cycle that is “The Typesetting of FC:I“, let me share the results of a test I have been conducting.

A year and a half ago I asked the question: Which is better/more durable, porcelain or earthenware?

I got many responses, I read many posts/articles, but nothing… nothing …gave me a definitive answer. I mean, you’d think I was asking about the relative air speed of swallows or something.

But then I had a stroke of luck. I had my 20th year anniversary at the place where I work (yes, Virginia, some people still work at the same company for decades), which entitled me to a “thank you” gift. Now in the past, these have been cheesy tie-pins or cheap wireless weather stations, but this time, they actually had something I could use: porcelain dinnerware.

I leapt at the chance, and so, a year ago, we began our experiment. (more…)

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