Foggy Ridge Dispatch: December 2, 2024
Vermont Almanac. Woodworking is Bullsh*t. Plaster repair. Hot plates for art. A very flat tire. Sauna season.
Here are the things of note from last week (November 25-December 1).
Hoooo boy, friends. Last week was a doozy of happenings.
First, let’s talk about publications.
Rejoice!: Volume V of Vermont Almanac is hot off the presses and available to all lovers of rural life (no matter your state). When I first moved to Vermont, I fell so deeply in love with this annual publication that I squealed out loud when they invited me to be on their board.
Thanks to the wisdom in the Almanac’s pages, I was able to rid my old Victorian house of rodents in a single night; use an old heating oil bill to calculate exactly how many cords of firewood I’d need for a full winter; and picked up a mean recipe for bear bacon. That’s not the half - or even the 1/10 - of it. It has to be seen and read to be believed. And if you’re a digital denizen, the Almanac is available in digital flipbook form on ISSUU; I’ll be uploading Volume V tomorrow, and Vols I-IV are available now.
For a sneak peek inside the pages of past editions of the Almanac, you can check out this nifty gallery page of high-res images on the Almanac’s website.
Now, for another kind of publication: a podcast.
Last week, I was a guest on one of my favorite podcasts: Woodworking Is Bullsh*t…and y’all - it was SO fun.
I’m super-grateful for the wonderful audience feedback the WWIBS hosts got on the episode. The topic was Increasing PRICE POINT & the Ethics of Doing So, which can be a contentious subject. I feel like this is something that folks in the visual arts & fine crafts grapple with often, and I have some STRONG feelings about it. Luckily, it never got too heated - the three hosts and I all have rowdy senses of humor, so if you tune in, you can expect big laughs intermingled with wisdom. While I brought a more fine art/academic perspective, the three main hosts - Mary Tsai, Paul Jasper, and Erik Curtis - brought their collective decades of wisdom & skill in woodworking & design.
If you’d like to hear the episode, you can listen to it on YouTube or Spotify, or your preferred podcast app of choice. Just be prepared for strong opinions, innuendo, and no small amount of cursing…all totally necessary, of course.
On the home front, progress on the Groundline Studio architecture office is chugging along. It’s my sincere hope that Greg can be moved in and starting to feel settled by the end of December…but there’s a LOT of work to do on the space before it’s ready for occupancy. For example: plaster repair. This vignette of repair-in-progress looked like a piece of art to me, so I had to snap a quick photo.
On top of plaster repair, there’s electrical work, painting, floor refinishing, building custom desks, window treatments…truly a full overhaul. We’re both in for a month of small-biz-owner days and renovation nights…but the final result will be SO worth it. And of course, I’ll share progress photos between now and then.
Speaking of builds in progress: this much smaller-scale project will have an outsized impact on my studio work. What you’re looking at here is a not-quite-finished DIY intaglio hot plate. The readymade ones cost upward of $1,000. This one is made from a $70 hot plate (nabbed on sale for only $50); a sheet of aluminum; and about $16 of poplar. It’ll let me melt etching ball grounds onto copper plates that then get needled, etched in ferric chloride, inked, and printed on an etching press. Yes, it IS as complicated as it sounds - and I love it. I’ll share photos or a video of that process later this month. For now, here’s the hot plate in progress:
Last but certainly not least: Greg and I took a Thanksgiving trip up to Magog, Québec on Thursday/Friday. It’s wonderful to be close enough to the border to have a quick overnight into Canada. We’ve unofficially decided that this is our new Thanksgiving tradition since we don’t really celebrate Thanksgiving.
Our first stop was Marais de la Rivière-aux-Cerises (the Cherry River Marsh), where we visited the beautiful interpretation center. Just as noteworthy as the center, though, was the great kindness of a groundskeeper who helped us repair our VERY flat tire in the middle of a wintry mix. Somewhere between Auberge le Sunshine and the Marais, our rear passenger tire picked up a sizeable chunk of metal…think like, the profile of a square-cut nail, but only half as long. This wonderful groundskeeper’s English was about as good as my French but we made it work! The real hero of the moment, though, was Greg; I’ve never seen anyone patch such a massive tire-hole, especially not in such inclement weather, and especially especially not with such a chipper spirit.
Needless to say, we really earned our trip to Spa Nordic Station. There’s just something about hopping from sauna to sauna and heated pool to heated pool when there’s snow falling all around you, blanketing the ground. We hardly needed to do any cold plunges; just stepping out of the sauna or pool was a cold plunge!
When we headed home on Friday morning, we were treated to a winter wonderland along the highway. It’s always nice to see some lovely dimensional clouds in November instead of the flat grey that we often have. And if this snow is any indicator, I think we’re in for a good powder season this year (fingers crossed)!
Now, a quick note on things moving forward.
Since the Queer Country Wisdom advice-seeking inbox is still empty, I’m taking that as a sign that the world isn’t quite ready for that, or that it hasn’t yet found its best form. With that in mind, I’m sunsetting it for now and shifting the TBAGV schedule around a bit to balance publication days throughout the week. This means that each Monday will still be a Foggy Ridge Dispatch just like this one, but the Being Good Vermonters segment and the If Only segment will now occupy alternating Wednesdays (instead of Tuesdays). If Queer Country Wisdom returns in some other form in the future, it’ll most likely be a standalone Substack that publishes once weekly. If that happens, I’ll be sure to let y’all know.
Thank y’all for reading, friends. See you Wednesday for a little If Only essay.
Warmly,
Jack