sweasel.com

To this day, I won’t have a tube of pthalo blue in my paint box. After one use, it permanently stains paint brushes and won’t wash out. Feh!

Blue?
Hard to find?
In the land of blueness itself?

Ahem!

Woad’s the stuff to show men!
Woad to scare your foemen!
Boil it to
a brilliant blue
and rub it on your legs
and your Abdo-men!

http://www.guntheranderson.com/v/data/woad.htm

How do you get the blue from woad?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0dJuZx81fyw&feature=emb_logo

I hope Someveg is doing okay. You out there Someveg?

Ah, but woad is a dye. As opposed to a pigment. Dyes dissolve in their medium, pigments do not. Dyes are inherently impermanent.

An acceptably permanent use of a dye is something like alizarine crimson, where it is precipitated onto a carrier such as aluminum. But it’s still on the low side of permanence.

I was the nerdiest painter ever.

Sweasy – cool! Never thought of it like that! Dye, vs pigment.
Makes sciency sense.
(I wanted to be a history major, not a scientist!)

An AR’TEEST, I am not. Though I can paint an apartment in one afternoon, two coats! (sneaky movie reference).

Weird….

When you were discussing “pthalo blue” I immediately thought of “Psaki Jen.”

It was totally a reflex, I swear! Like sneezing or coughing…

Thanks for checking on me durned Yankee. We are….fine, just fine! Kinda. We have been playing rolling power roulette like everybody – we have been getting two or three hours out of every twelve. Our snug little ranch house in the valley has done remarkably well; the lowest we have seen inside the house is 55 (12.8 C) when the temp outside hit 5 degrees (-15C). I guess all that insulation against the heat helps against the cold too. Still: We have the water dripping furiously from ever faucet and we are doing all the secret incantations against freezing pipes that we can think of. So far so good.

We both got a quick hot splash in the bath for the first time in a couple days last time the power came on and that was great!. It’s been quite the experience. It could be worse though – our friends in Grapevine have been without power for 35 straight hours. They finally abandoned ship when the house hit 44 inside and moved to a friend’s place that at least has intermittent power.

I have learned a few random things that may be of interest:

I got a lesson in practical physics this morning; I decided that I would make urban cowboy coffee by using the side burner on my gas grill. I have half a tank of propane so I’ll heat a pot of water and pour it in my little French Press just like the pioneers did. Except that at 5 degrees the propane is chilled to the point there wasn’t enough gas pressure to light the burner. Okay then. I did bring the tank inside the house and so tomorrow morning I will take it out hook it up to the grill and there WILL be coffee!

Our friends’ $25,000 solar power system is NOT apparently the answer – it seems that they don’t have a battery storage system, and anyhow their panels are covered with ice and snow. So they got nuthin either.

Side bar: Seeing “pthalocyanine” made me think of my late father. Not the word itself, but those first three letters. He would illustrate the utter irrationality of English language pronunciation by asking, “How do you pronounce ‘ghoti’ and ‘phtholognyrrh’?”

For ‘ghoti’, it’s ‘gh’ as in ‘cough’, ‘o’ as in ‘women’, and ‘ti’ as in ‘diction’. Therefore ‘ghoti’ is pronounced FISH.

For ‘phtholognyrrh’, it’s ‘phth’ as in ‘phthalazine’ (U.S. pronunciation), ‘olo’ as in ‘colonel’, ‘gn’ as in ‘gnostic’, and ‘yrrh’ as in ‘myrrh’. Therefore ‘phtholognyrrh’ is pronounced TURNER.

I miss my dad. When I was of an age to be told bedtime stories, he’d make up science fiction tales with math and logic problems in them, off the top of his head, just for me.

And while power is up and there’s nothing to do:

🎵
There’s talk on the street; it sounds so familiar.

Great expectations, everybody’s watching Blue.

Artists he meets, they all seem to know him.

Even your old paint treats him like he’s something new.


YinMn Blue come lately, the new pigment in town.

Everybody loves you, so don’t let them down.



You tell her her eyes are YinMn Blue and the music begins to play.
Hopeless romantics, here we go again.

But after a while they’re looking maybe a kind of gray.

You mixed in some Black 3.0 – and it never blends.

YinMn Blue come lately, the new pigment in town.

Will Weasel still love you if you were to fade just a little bit brown?

🎵

With apologies to The Eagles

“I was the nerdiest painter ever.”

Keep dropping those little nuggets, Sweas. I like getting dabs of knowledge.

@someveg- my nephew lives in Houston and finally got power after 37 hours without. He put solar panels on his house this last year and clucked at me for spending several thousand more than he did for my natural gas whole house generator. He also did not put in the battery storage system so his solar was/ is currently of no use. He let me know he now fully appreciates my investment in my generator.

I’ve been logging it – we’re at about 10 hours of intermittent power over the last 48.

Our lowest temp was just before we got the longest run of 4 hours of sweet electric heroin. 51F inside on the North facing side of the house.
Course being a camper I’ve been running propane heaters off and on every few hours to try and stabilize the temp at 50+.
But I’m kinda about outta small propane bottles.
Got so bad I used the ones I had for soldering rosin lead solder and they don’t work on the new solder anyway.

And worrying about carbon monoxide the entire time….

Someveg – I also discovered what you did when camping last December using those nifty Korean table top butane burners. When the temp is down in the 40’s the butane doesn’t Butte. But they worked well when the temps inside are in the 50’s for making coffee, heating water and scrambled eggs, toast and sausage. Or oatmeal cooked in big old tin cups (Thank you Civil War re-enacting).

Ahh, butane
At 41 F Butane in a closed container only generates about 3 psi. This isn’t really enough pressure to do much of anything. And the nozzle get smaller due to the metal being cold.

@Ben, yes, hard discovery, butane is not a good winter survival item.

Wood still burns though, and a good thing too.

||I was once traumatized by a tragic pthalocyanine raw pigment spill.

If I had a nickel…

||For ‘phtholognyrrh’, it’s ‘phth’ as in ‘phthalazine’ (U.S. pronunciation), ‘olo’ as in ‘colonel’, ‘gn’ as in ‘gnostic’, and ‘yrrh’ as in ‘myrrh’. Therefore ‘phtholognyrrh’ is pronounced TURNER.

I’ve never seen that one. I love that stuff.

‘course, the notion that words should be “spelled how they sound” presents a whole ‘nother rafter of problems.

“When you say jump, we say ‘How high?'”

In certain areas this becomes:

“Wen ye sai jump, we sai ‘Ha ha?'”

When “Can’t” rhymes with “paint”.

and it’s spelled Cockburn, it’s pronounced Co-Burn.

Dalziel is pronounced Dee-El.

RaymondLuxuryYacht is pronounced Throatwarblermangrove.
I’ll give it this, the Durned surname uses every letter properly.
Getting people to put the r’s in the right places is another story.

If y’all live in the country a wood burner of some sort is a necessity in a cold climate. When we renovated we added a wood stove in the great room…best investment ever.

More orthoepical amusements:

St. John == “SIN gin”
Cholmondeley == “CHUM lee”
Ralph Fiennes == “Rafe Fines”