Creatures and Cornbread

In the midst of putting the final touches on this visual journal page entitled "It sure is crowded in here",

I suddenly got a craving for stovetop skillet cornbread, which is kind of odd since I've never been crazy about cornbread and have eaten it only a few times. I searched a lot for a recipe that fit the bill, and the one that most appealed to me was this one by Martha Stewart.
Of course I modified it and, of course, it didn't look anything like the photo of hers. Instead of 5 Tbs of sugar I used 2, instead of powdered milk and water I used buttermilk, instead of melted butter I used olive oil and instead of baking powder which does not exist here, I used Joy of Cooking's substitution, which is baking soda and cream of tartar.
The center bottom burned a bit, because in order to get a very low flame I had to put it on the smallest burner.

Eh, what can I say? I'm not crazy about it, but I'm eating it.

Got a Touch of the Blues

(click on photo to enlarge it)

My cousin called me today from Italy and we had a long conversation about growing older, life in general, and the feeling I have lately had of being rootless. I love talking with her, because we were very close when we were much younger and both lived in Italy. Now our conversations are fun but infrequent. Life gets in the way.

I've never suffered from depression and don't really think I do now, but lately I have grown very introspective and have been in this trying-to-figure-things-out mode. For some reason the talk with my cousin made me very blue, and only increased my sense of not having roots. When I was a child my father was in the military so we traveled back and forth from Italy a couple of times. I was not quite ten when he retired from the armed forces and we moved back to Italy. When it was time for college I came back to the US and after college I went back to Italy. Three years later I moved back to the US. I think all this wandering in my youth has finally taken its toll.

I decided that even though I often don't see the point of doing a page in my visual journal, this might be the day to do just that. So I started out using Lisa Bebi's paint over technique  from the Spring 2008 issue of Somerset Workshops, but ended up painting around the images instead of over them, for the page on the left, or not even around them, for the page on the right.

I was going to write stuff about siblings and ancestral roots, but instead opted for the tiny strip of paper that has been floating around my chaotic little workspace for about 10 months, and which I thought for sure I would never be able to find when I wanted it. Miraculously, I immediately found it in a little container of odds and ends and glued it

down. Finished.

The children on the left are my mother and her younger brother, maybe 1920, and the woman and young boy on the right are my father's mother and his older brother, maybe 1915.