First Surfin' Sunday of the year...

Surfin' Sunday January 6th, 2013

Ok, starting out looking at some great bent wood boxes here: Native Bentwood Chests

Craig is really interested in making bentwood boxes and we've seen people make the box forms on the the beach with campfires with hot rocks & seaweed. Pretty awesome, so I looked around for some online directions because hey, you can find quite a bit of every little thing on the web. I got the bonus of seeing some great new & old art by native artists...double score! :)

Then I went here "Palaeolithic / Paleolithic European, Russian and Australian Archaeology / Archeology Sites" through the links from above (which for some reason blogger will not let me link directly, so use the web link below please).

http://donsmaps.com/indexsites.html

This is like a jumping off point for numerous paleolithic archaeological sites cataloged on the web. Interesting reading if you are into this stuff like me. Good pics on the links, a lot of European stuff, particularly Germany, France (love the cave paintings) and Spain. I bookmarked this page for future surfing, you can go back again and again and always find something new. NICE for the egghead in me, very enjoyable reading and perusing  :) 

Not getting my fill of Northwest Native Art today I went here: Northwest Coast First Nations Index

I can never get enough of this stuff, lol, just love looking and these pages catalog a lot of carving artwork that is located at the UBC Museum of Anthropology (another place added to my awesome Canada trip list). They have a pretty impressive collection that I somehow missed when studying the artwork that has been moved from Haida Gwaii and reconstruction and reproductions located at the Royal BC Museum in Victoria. Click on the picture below for a larger view, this is great, it's detailing the particular crest carvings and their locations in situ on these poles. 

Here is an idea of how tall and large these poles were and are compared to "human size". This particular pole pictured is one of my favorites with the figure on top (running wolf).

In keeping with the native theme today I checked out cooking in bentwood boxes here: Wild Harvests: Cooking in a bentwood box

This pic with the cook standing next to the box gives you a better idea of the actual size of the box:

This blog also gives you a great list of PNW foraging resource links and a lot of great information concerning wild harvests and foraging resource links. It's that time of year for me when I'm counting the months until I can get back outside and I'm working on planning our spring trip. It's fun but of course, I'd rather already be outside doing it instead of planning it! Still working on learning patience in my disabled middle age thankyouverymuch...sigh...

My meanderings also led me over to: Ghost towns of Washington (state) where I had to go look. 

I've been here before and spent a lot of time over at the North Dakota ghost town site when we were planning that trip. I found that Menlo---a small area over by Raymond, WA in Pacific County had been removed but no major updates or additions. I'd like to find a site that gives more info on the little towns on the coast that have become just place names or really close to only being place names. Markham, Bay City etc are two that just came to mind right now ( I always see them on the way to Westport/Grayland and think about this...).  This site led me to these books I want now:

 

and some great old pictures and pictures of old places in Washington :)

This picture directly above is Port Blakely, date unknown...love the tall ships...makes me miss the beach even more...which, leads me over to: westportcam.com so I can watch the live cam feed of the jetty and port and dock area of Westport. The sky looks kind of pink on top of the gray...hmmm....check it for yourself on the livefeed and see what it looks like now, I'm sure it's different, that's the wonderful thing about the shore and it's weather there... it stays constant in the fact that it's always changing. 

And...wrapping up my final post (for now) is my recipe for dinner tonight: Slow cooked elk with mole sauce

over at the Gone Wild-- cooking and game recipes blog. You can also find the link for the recipe here at C4 II - Game recipes . Now I'm off to the wilds of the studio to see if I can carve a path through the post Christmas chaos.

Wish me luck and to you, well...happy surfing y'all!