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Cake day: October 7th, 2025

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  • Lots of kids in the neighborhoods across town wherre the families now live. In the part of town where I am where it is all rental units filed with childless professionals and retirement homes for affluent snowbirds, there was no trick-or-treating. My husband grew up here and in this part of town it used to be crawling with kids in the 60’s and 70’s. Then again, that was before rich people “discovered” our city and snapped up all the affordable rentals and converted them to luxury condos.





  • More to the point, in America, the USDA regulations allow for hard pack ice cream to have up to 40% of its volume expanded with air.

    WAAaaaay back in the early 2000’s after Unilever bought them, I bought a pint of Ben & Jerry’s Vanilla ice cream and got home and it sat on the counter and melted - much to my dismay - (It ended up under a towel and did not get put away.)

    When I opened it, the level of ice cream in the container had dropped down by almost a quarter. What the hell? So I got another pint and at that time noticed that it was easier to scoop - a sign that there’s air being incorporated.

    Yeah… nope. Done.

    Haven’t bought Ben & Jerry’s in over 20 years. (besides, there’s a real homemade ice cream shop around the corner from my home - it’s what I get now and I support the woman that runs it.)











  • If you ever get a chance to see any of his works in a gallery or museum… do it! The colors glow like nothing you’ve seen.

    When I was little, I had an aunt that had one of the prints called Ecstasy - from 1929 - in her home.

    Faded and of course stained (even though it was under glass) from the chain smoking she did.

    It was one of her most cherished things, so I learned everything she knew about Parrish - she had an encyclopedic book on his technique which I read from cover to cover and as I got older, I tried my hand at glazing - a fierce technique of layering transparent and translucent color onto panel or canvas.

    Each color separated by a clear coat so you look into the image, like stained glass, layers deep.

    Years later, there was a comprehensive show of his pieces that came to the Currier Museum in New Hampshire (early 90’s IIRC) and I got tickets for myself and auntie…

    I got to his most famous image - Daybreak - and the colors in it are beyond anything that any online photos show.

    Not even the NY Lithographic Society that initially had rights to the image come close.

    Pinks and magentas in the trees that frame the image that take your breath away. I stood in front of that painting for a good 15 minutes and have the colors burned into my mind.

    At some point, if I can find a good enough high-res copy, I’m going to try my hand at doing a CMYK color separation of the image (with Photoshop or GIMP) and readjust to what it actually looks like. No one’s gotten it right. I’ve always been a bit of a colorist and zoom in on tint, tone and shade, so this challenge is one that hits my artistic monkeybone, big time.

    I won’t even get into the landscapes of the New Hampshire winters and the evening light he recreated in those images. You can fall into them.

    Definitely, again, if you ever get a chance to see a real Parrish… do it. It’s absolute magic.