The Day that Almost Never Happens

Happy Leap Day! To mark the Day that Almost Never Happens, here's a recipe for sweet potato cornbread that we Almost Never Make, even though it tastes great with veggie chili.

Vegan sweet potato cornbread

1 c. flour
1 t. baking powder
1/2 t. baking soda
1/2 t. salt
3/4 c. cornmeal
1/4 c. sugar
scant 1/4 c. molasses
1/3 cup canola oil
Ener-G equivalent to 2 eggs
3/4 c. cooked, mashed sweet potato or yam
1/4-1/2 c. soy milk

Mix the dry ingredients, add the wet ingredients (using just enough soy milk to make a cake-like batter), and mix until just combined. Don't stir it too much or the cornbread will turn out tough! Spoon the batter into an oiled cake pan (I like to use a round one so we can cut the cornbread into wedges). Bake at 350 degrees for twenty-five minutes or so.

She skips!

If you like cartoon characters who skip, or if you
appreciate low-quality Quicktime conversions,
watch my first character animation here. I can't
explain the weird flashes that appeared when I
uploaded it to You Tube, except that everything
looks shitty on You Tube--even happy, skipping
cartoon girls that take 3 weeks to animate.

Animation is so much work!

Left: cute skipping girl for
my animation class (no, she
won't skip just yet... no matter
how many times you click.)

Okay. Everyone knows that animated films require a mind-boggling number of frames. What I'd never really considered was the amount of work that goes into each individual frame. Oh my God! For a "walk cycle," for example, an artist makes eight to twelve repeating frames to bring to life a runner, walker, saunter-er, whatever. But each frame has to be sketched, refined, penned, scanned, Photoshopped, inversed (that's when you render the character's background transparent so that the figure can be transplanted into the setting of your choice), and colored. And that's just the figure! Then you still have to make the background, although don't even ask me how. We haven't covered that yet.

But it's fun.

Remember these two?

My school is hosting a digital valentine contest; here's my entry. You can send it as an e-card here. Happy valentine's day!

Tofu Haiku

To read poems about tofu, go here. I've never written a haiku about tofu, but I've eaten plenty of it--including the pictured dish, a savory, delicious one that Ben makes. I love it!

A loppet and a caucus

Having attended both a loppet and a caucus this week, Ben and I are going for a record: highest number of strangely-named events in a four-day period.

The loppet, which is a cross-country ski race, was held by candlelight on the icy surface of a frozen lake near our home. There were a couple of ice spectacles (not sculptures exactly--think pyramid of ice bricks) and, allegedly, free coffee. We couldn't locate the latter, but it was still fun. Some bad photos of the Luminary Loppet can be seen here.

Caucus is a Latin term meaning "totally disorganized." Just kidding, but our caucus was all but mayhem. The doors opened twenty minutes late, they ran out of ballots (which, by the way, were basically yellow Post-It notes), and the ballot box itself was a copy paper box with a hole cut in the top. The Dems, God bless 'um, were completely unprepared for the unprecedented caucus turnout in Minnesota.

A sketch of Ben

Here's a quick one I did for class. Some of you might recognize the classical Greco-Roman "watching TV" pose.