American short-grain white rice with trout and vegetables










Tamaki Gold California. 


Imagine my surprise to open the bag and see the rice is white, not gold. 

I wanted to see gold rice.

Without using saffron, turmeric or anatto. 

But it's so delicious, why, I could eat ... 1/4 cup of it.

Would you like to hear something otallytay uckingfay upidstay?

Okay, goes like this. 

This is the fourth bag of this rice that I bought. The second for me and the second for my brother and his family. But it's the first that my brother will eat. He told me "they" sliced the bag and there was rice all over the inside of the box so he threw it away.

Oh, how I love my brother so much that I can simply order another bag without making a bfd about it. Another bag will simply show up, and he'll be all, "Oh man my brother sure is ace. He didn't even mention this." 

But that's the thing about loving my brother. All this comes with that. There is a lot of stupid shit that happens. He's expensive. 

This is actually rather common.

I cannot even be cross. Life is temporary. I don't want to mess it up with arguments about this kind of thing. I don't want him to feel bad about something that I wanted him to feel good about. So I'll just try twice.

Some things are not so easily replaced. 

A few years ago I made for him a rather involved birthday card. It was a few pages long. It told the story of Egyptian elite going out to the swamp-like edges of the Nile for hunting / picnic where they encounter a crocodile. The crocodile eats a man. A band is sent out to hunt the crocodile. Models parade around a central pillar wearing crocodile accoutrements. The card is titled "Egyptian crocodile." 


It's all that we've got. 

The card was lost in the mail. It got so far as his post office then it disappeared. 

That was P.O. Box. 

Actually, knowing my brother as I do, he most likely flubbed it. I think he lost it in confusion. Secondarily I think it was sorted into the wrong bin and the person kept it. 

The thing is, I didn't know this until he told me, he and his wife both saved all their pop-up cards that I sent them. He told me one day that he went out to dinner with friends. He and his wife took a rather large bag containing all the cards that I sent them. Along with the new one. I must say, my brother describing his friend's and the wife's reaction was pleasurable. Learning that they kept all the cards together and that they show them was also pleasurable. "Look at the cards my mad brother sent us." 

Would you like to see an index of pop-up cards? I tell you how to make them.

You know, that one near the top #54, geese flying over a field, is a sympathy card for the survivor of a guy who really liked to hunt. 

The page was originally from another multi-page card that never got made. I got stuck on a page. I made some 30 prototypes for a page and never hit anything satisfactory. The page was a goose sitting on a nest. I got close to a really cool page for this. The nest twists into position and a goose rests down upon it with its wings spread out protectively. 

The theme of the card is a farm. A uni-crop wheat farm. A page shows a tractor sowing a plowed field. Another page shows a field of green wheat. Another page shows a family of mice living within the wheat. Another page shows a spider having spread a web across the wheat. Another page shows snakes in a wheat field. Another page shows a veritable forest under the wheat field with short grasses and weeds with snails and mushrooms, lizards, butterflies and centipedes. 

This page of geese flying over the field.

The last page is underfloor devastation. Wheat cut to uniform height and everyone's home torn up. Pieces of snake hanging from cut wheat stalks, spider web destroyed, little mushroom houses leveled and in the background a tractor drives away in the distance with cut wheat on one side, our side, and brown mature wheat on the other. 

But only two pages got made. So I used one page for a sympathy card. This one. 

And the person who received it was deeply moved. Who would even think of this? It worked perfectly.

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