Yesterday we had the first snow of the season. When I went outside in the morning, it was foggy and below freezing. As a result, there were several frost-encrusted spider webs around my yard. They were beautiful, so I took some photos.

In a Facetime chat with my friend Maximo Alacar this week, he mentioned they were having “salmon head soup” for dinner. Max is my buddy from the Navy. He grew up in the Philippines and is largely responsible for the predilection that my family has for Asian food.

“You try the fish heads, Bill.” -Max Alacar

Around here, we eat rice probably as much as we eat potatoes, which is an unusual thing in Kansas. I’m kind of picky about the rice I eat. No “Uncle Ben’s” or “Minute Rice” around here. I like to go to the Asian store to get white jasmine rice fresh from Thailand or Vietnam.

But I’ve never had fish-head soup before. Below is the recipe Max said to try. He said it is called sinigang na ulo. I might actually try it.

spinach
tomatoes
onions
Tamarind sinigong soup packet

Max said I could use the head of the trout I caught a while back that is still in my freezer. The vegetables, I can grow in my garden. Since it is all wintery, and I’m out of fresh garden vegetables, it might be a while until I get around to trying this dish. 😉

I have to admit that when I heard about sinigang na ulo, I also heard a theme song for it. The Doctor Demento song “Fish Heads.” But this morning, when I went to look for the song to share here, I was surprised to learn that there is a video that goes with the song. I had no idea! Anyway, here is the Fish Heads song with video. I dedicate it to my dear friend Max.

Yesterday when I was out exercising my dog Daisy, she got really excited and wanted to chase after a creature she saw. It was a fox! There was a fox running through the edge of town! I’ve never seen a fox in town here before. I was on my bike, so we followed it for a while, but wow that thing was really fast!

I’ve been hearing a lot of Barred Owls lately. I didn’t hear much from them during the summer months, but we have been hearing them all winter long for several years now.

According to Wikipedia, these owls haven’t been common on the Great Plains states, but in recent years they have followed the Missouri River and its tributaries westward. This makes sense to me. We live right along the Republican River, one of the Missouri’s tributaries. The barred owls have finally found their way to us. Sometimes I can count six or seven hooting and calling to each other. If you haven’t heard their calls, they are really unique.

This is a recording I made of them calling outside of our house a couple of years ago.

Lynda Barry’s self-portraits using old catalog cards from the library. Computer databases make these obsolete. What a wonderful way to repurpose these.

See some more:

Card catalog series.

If you feel lost, draw.

I thoroughly enjoyed the movie A Dog’s Purpose. It is a heartwarming and family-friendly film. I don’t enjoy going to movies at the theater anymore. I’ve repeatedly spent too much money only to be greatly disappointed. I have a habit of DVRing shows that seem to have potential when I’m scanning through the listings and this is one that I had recorded. This way, if the show doesn’t work out I can just stop and delete it.

I wasn’t even tempted to stop watching this movie even though I’m not a big fan of animal movies. If you are a dog lover, you will like this one. It’s well worth your time.

Artist Francoise Gilot has been an artist for over 75 years. As a young woman, she was with Pablo Picasso for a decade and bore him two children. She was the only one of Picasso’s many love interests to walk away from him before he left them. You gotta admire that.

Her 1964 memoir of Life With Picasso was recently re-released back in print.

In a box of family photos I received during the past year, I found a small envelope full of what appear to be class photos of some young women. Each photo has the name of the person written in pencil on the back. That is all the information I have. I’m not even sure which relative these originally belonged to, because none of the women in the pictures is a relative of mine, to my knowledge.

Interestingly, I have already located two of the women on the Find-A-Grave website, of all places. The one common thread they seem to have is being in or around north central Kansas when they were young.

• Georgina Kanak
• Maxola Tays

As I discover information about the other photos, I will continue to add them to this website.

I found a new dog blog I like. It is called Dr. Jen’s Dog Blog. http://www.drjensdogblog.com/ I came upon this blog by way of social media. I’m always interested in learning more about how to train my dog.

I have a blue heeler dog that is three years old and still a pretty independent thinker. She is a lot better than when we got her as a pup, but I continue working with her and training her.

One thing I’ve done is to train her to run alongside my bicycle.

She’s pretty good when she’s on a leash, but it can be hit or miss to get her to listen when she is off-leash or in the house. That’s why I was interested in Dr. Jen’s post about training with food incentives. She says it is perfectly ok to keep treats around the house to use for training and keep some in your pockets too. I guess I’ve been thinking at three years old, my dog ought to be listening to me better. But according to Dr. Jen, it’s ok to reinforce with food and vary up the frequency of rewards, but always have the possibility that a reward might be in the mix.

We also have an issue with our dog barking at anyone who comes to the house or even walks by the house. My wife has a home-based business so having an excitable heeler greet everyone with enthusiastic barking isn’t the best thing. So I found another Dr. Jen post that discusses the barking-at-visitors issue, and it looks like some distraction training might be in order to see if we can improve that situation.

Here is a related PostScript – this is a sketch I made of our dog Daisy being sweet.

I recently learned about the large collection of e-books available on Archive.org, so I started investigating books on drawing and cartooning. I found a good book published in 1941 on The Art of  Caricaturing by Mitchell Smith, with a chapter on Comic Figures.

If you like e-books, you’ll want to be sure to check out Archive.org.