What’s Your Recipe

Over at Writers Supporting Writers, Chuck Litka recently wrote a post about the recipe that makes him a writer. He suggested there were five ingredients: talent, education, examples, practice, and life experiences. He then assigned different percentages to each of those ingredients to come up with the recipe that led him to become a creative writer. It sparked an interesting discussion in the comments and then some of us had a chat on Zoom that delved deeper into the concept.

I thought of this yesterday while at work. We recently completed an employee survey. One of the questions related to whether we felt we had opportunities to learn and grow in the workplace. One of the younger employees talked about how important this was. I replied that we aren’t all at the same point in our careers and “learning and growing” in the workplace wasn’t that important to me.

I began to wonder if it was ever that important to me, and that got me to think about what our recipes might be. Not for the creation of art, but just for who we are and how we progress through the world.

I have been saying for years that work is not what defines me. Instead, what I do outside of work is what defines who I am. Work, for me, has never been about who I am, but instead it is the means by which I provide for myself and my family. As a result, I have a difficult time defining work as a key ingredient in my recipe.

But maybe that is a bit of arrogance or ignorance on my part. It’s pretty impossible to claim that what I have done for the last 30+ years is not a foundational ingredient for who I am, no matter how much I want to deny it.

So, work and what I experience(d) there is an ingredient. What else?

Childhood and parents. Friends. Hobbies. I feel like those are the obvious things and they don’t get to something that I think is much more at the core of who we are as people. The intangible things that impact us and make us what we are. What are those intangibles and how to describe them?

I’m not ready yet to come up with my exact recipe the way Chuck did in that writing post, but I feel like these are some of the ingredients for me:

Childhood (and how I was raised)

Becoming a father and raising a family of my own

My creative endeavors

Friends, both old and new and everywhere in between

A sense of optimism tempered by a need for realism

Education and work (To be honest, I didn’t want to include these in my recipe. I went to law school and have spent the last 30 years being an attorney. Something that did not fit with who I really am, or want to be. But the fact is I can’t deny that they are a part of who I am today. For better or for worse.)

Deep conversations and thoughtful interactions

I’m sure there are other things that I’ve missed, so I’m curious, dear reader … what is your recipe? Or at least, what do you think the ingredients are that make you the human you are today?

A Baseball Oddity

Something that has always bothered me. An example:

Last night Logan Webb pitched seven shutout innings and left the game with the Giants up 1-0. Let’s change that a bit and say that the game was 0-0 after seven innings. In the top of the 8th inning, Tyler Rogers came in and pitched one shut out inning. Let’s say the Giants scored a couple of runs in the bottom of the eighth inning and ended the game with a 2-0 win.

Which pitcher would have got the Win recorded in their statistics? Tyler Rogers because, while he only pitched one inning, he was the pitcher of record at the time the winning run was scored. Even though Logan Webb pitched seven shutout innings, he would not get the win. The only way a starting pitcher can record a Win is to pitch at least five innings and be the pitcher of record at the time the winning run is scored.

So, again, in my example, Logan Webb pitched seven shutout innings, Tyler Rogers pitched one, and Rogers gets the win.

It makes no sense.

A newer stat that has come up in recent years is the Quality Start. A pitcher gets credit for a Quality Start if he pitches six innings and gives up no more than three earned runs. Personally, I think the definition of this stat is a bit lenient since three earned runs in six innings equates to a 4.50 earned run average and nobody would consider that to be a good, or quality, earned run average.

For my purposes, though I’ll stick with that definition. If a starting pitcher has a Quality Start and the team wins the game, the starting pitcher should get the win, regardless of when the winning run is scored. No more Wins for a relief pitcher who only pitched one inning anymore. Maybe there are some games where no Win is recorded for a specific pitcher.

While I’m at it, let’s also get rid of the most ridiculous baseball stat there is … the Save. And every pitcher who is in the HOF because of his Save totals should be booted out forthwith.

Oh wait, there’s more … can we also get rid of WAR and all its variations?

Another Trazadone Dream

I’ve decided to play in a tournament in a sport I’ve never played before. Why? I have absolutely no idea. I think in my mind the thought process is “Why not? It’ll be fun.”

The sport is indoor tennis. Not tennis in an indoor arena. Tennis inside a house. And not just any house. Think the Winchester Mystery House or something like that. A crazy house with passageways and nooks and crannies and furniture and paintings and stuff all of the place.

In the first round of this tournament, I am matched against a country club, prep boy, king of the fraternity type of guy. Complete with expensive sweater draped across his shoulders and the arms tied neatly around his neck. He is confident, he has won this tournament before, and knows what he is doing.

I, on the other hand, am not. I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing and find it particularly amazing that one of the rules is that you cannot knock anything over or break anything during play. There also aren’t really any boundary lines like on a regular tennis court. The entire house is in play. There also isn’t a line down the middle that divides the area into his side and my side. Honestly, I have no idea how this game is supposed to be played.

The good news, I guess, is that I get to serve first. So, I do, and with each serve I hit the ball and somehow never knock anything down. With each serve, as the ball bounces, everything moves into slow-mo as country club boy tries to return it and fails completely. The ball bouncing and then slooooooowing down as he flails and can’t reach the ball before the second bounce.

I handily win the first game and country club boy is pissed, but he’s also confident that he will win his serve. Once again, things go into slow-mo as the ball bounces, but unlike for country club boy, I am always able to return before that dreaded second bounce and the loss of a point. After I win a couple of points, country club boy is now in a rage.

He changes his strategy. He comes up within feet of me, because apparently you can do that in this game. His plan is to serve the ball past me, hard enough that I can’t get back to return it. Oddly, each time he serves, I’m able to flick my racket (which is more like a paddle, so is this really tennis) up exactly where he hits the ball and am able to make contact, and return the ball past country club boy.

For a second game in a row, I shut him out and win.

End of dream. I’m a winner.

A Musical Thing

The last few months have seen a lot of music-sharing with Mike from Oregon. We’re of the same age and have a lot of similarities in our continued enjoyment of classic rock from way back when. But there is also plenty of new music we’ve shared these last few months. I’ve turned him on to Hozier and others. He turned me on to Walking on Cars and others.

A couple of days ago, he brought up Van Morrison and shared Give Me My Rapture with me, and told me how the album that song is from, Poetic Champions Compose, turned him onto Van Morrison. I listened to a bit of the song and a bit of the album and decided I needed to go back to the beginning.

I’ve never really explored Van Morrison, but I’ve enjoyed his songs that show up on the radio. Into the Mystic is a favorite (although I prefer Glen Hansard’s version).

Earlier today, via Spotify, I went to his very first album — Blowin’ Your Mind! — released in 1967. The first song on the album is Brown-Eyed Girl. As I listened to it, I marveled at the thing. A song that remains, to this day, a part of the musical canon. I can remember my boys loving to sing when they were kids and it came on the radio.

But can you imagine, being a young musician, trying to make your way and you release your first album that includes a song that almost 60 years later remains so loved that new generations find meaning and value in the song?

Meanwhile, I’m now going through Van Morrison’s albums, one by one, from the beginning. And I’m really liking what I’m hearing. Thanks Mike.

(yes, the lip synching in this is absolutely the worst)

An Experiment in Glass Blowing

In my search for new creative endeavors, I started thinking a few years ago about glass blowing. I didn’t do much with the idea other than to see if there were any classes in the area.

Then, when we were in Oregon last September, we were walking through a coastal town and came across a gallery filled with glass art. Next to the gallery they had a space where people could learn a little bit about the craft. Paying something like $40-50 to make a glass ball that was maybe a little bigger than a softball. There were other things people could make, but most people seemed to be picking the ball. We watched a few people make them and my interest grew.

Eventually, I made reservations at Design With Fire, the only local place that seemed to offer classes in glass-blowing. (There are places that offer classes in other types of glass art.) Yesterday, the missus and I had our class. An all day event with just us and the owner of the studio. The cost was $250 per person.

Here is where the heat is.

To the left is the furnace. This is where the molten glass is. The temperature in that portion is at least 2000 degrees. The owner is only open from September through May, shutting down when the temperature gets too hot. As an example of why … while the temperature outside was 60 degrees, a thermometer on the wall behind me, probably 20-25 feet from this heat said the temperature on that wall was 80 degrees. Inside the furnace, the molten glass appears orange in color.

The heat on the right is the glory hole. This space is only slightly cooler than the furnace, at around 1500-1800 degrees. This is where you put your glass in to reheat it to be able to keep shaping it. In the middle is a smaller space at a lower temperature. It is where the working ends of the sticks and blow pipes are to heat them up in order to gather the glass from the furnace.

The owner took a stick or blow pipe from the middle space, quickly dipped it in water to get any grit off of it and then put the end in the furnace to “gather” glass on the end. After only a couple of seconds, he pulls it out and there is a glob of clear substance on the end that is glowing orange. The thicker the stick, the more the gather can pick up. He said that his blow pipe that is 1 1/2 inches in diameter will pick up about five pounds of glass in one gather.

After the gather you have to work some of the glass off the end of the stick or blow pipe. This is what you work with to create something. How do you do this? You roll the stick/blow pipe on a cold metal table while pushing the glass forward off the stick/blow pipe.

The cold metal surface helps transfer some of the heat from the glass. You can see in the picture above that there is a solid orange piece and then a clearer piece at the end. That clearer piece is what will be used to create something. By the way, any clear glass cam be recycled for future use.

Some glass objects are solid and require no blowing. These are the first two objects I made yesterday. Both solid.

This “snowman” was first. Making something to start with a couple of basic skills. First, the rolling of the stick to work some glass off the end of the stick, and then using jacks (which are basically large tweezers) to make the grooves between the three parts of the snowman. Those jacks do a lot of different things depending on what you’re trying to accomplish.

This is a solid paperweight. I would guess it weighs somewhere between 1 and 2 pounds. The picture doesn’t accurately reflect the colors, which were white, black and yellow. To produce this, after the first gather and I worked some glass off of the tip, I dipped it into white, then put that in the glory hole to melt the color into it, then added some black and yellow, one on each side, and then melted those colors into it. Once I did that, another gather produced another layer of clear glass around the colored part.

After you’ve got the glass and the colors the way you want it, there is more to be done. With the paperweight, you have to shape it into a round form. A wooden mallet, where the head has a round shape is used to do this. You put your glass into the glory hole to heat it up …

One of the things you have to do is constantly turn the stick/blowpipe, particularly while the glass is hot. If you don’t, it will droop. It will … well, mistakes were made.

Here’s what it looks like coming out of the glory hole.

That’s in some serious need of turning.

But if you keep the thing turning and can keep it relatively straight, you head over to the chair where all sorts of magic happens.

This is the mold I mentioned that helps shape the glass into a round object for a paperweight. Another thing that happens in this chair that I don’t have a picture of is the flattening of one end so it can stand and not just roll around. For this, again the glass is hot and you use a wooden paddle to press against the bottom to flatten it out.

Another thing that happens here is using the jacks to make those grooves. You also use them to create a crease at the end of the stick/blowpipe that allows you to knock the finished product off, hopefully in one piece. That’s what I’m doing here …

Again the glass here is hot, having just come out of the glory hole and it is constantly turning while I am going this … or using the mold in the prior picture.

I’d say that every piece we made yesterday had to go back in the glory hole to be reheated so we could keep working on it at least 5-10 times. It is a process.

After I made those two solid objects, we got to blowing. Instead of using the sticks, we moved on to blow pipes. Basically you blow into one end to try to force a bubble into the molten glass on the other end. It’s harder than it sounds. I made a glass and was able to pretty easily blow the bubble into it. And then I made something else. It was supposed to be a vase, but … well, you’ll see the picture in a minute. On that second object, I simply could not get a bubble into the thing.

One of the challenges is that you have to continue to keep the thing turning while blowing. But once you get the bubble into the glass, you just keep working it. Sometimes we would put it in the glory hole and then drop it down and swing the blow pipe, which helps elongate the glass.

Here are those final two objects.

There are plenty of things I’ve left out of this summary of yesterday. I’m glad I did it, to give it a try, but I likely won’t do it again. It’s expensive and just not something I would be able to do on my own. Which is my preference. What I learned yesterday was the bare minimum. I wouldn’t mind learning more but the only way I would do it is if I knew somebody who had the facility and I could just kind of learn by watching and tagging along. Since I don’t know anybody like that, this will likely be it.