This winter's fierce storms affecting friends in the East and Midwest have brought a blizzard of memories. Oddly enough, one chilling memory comes from my mid-1990s meltdown phase at the place where I'd loved working for 18 years, from the first season we arrived in Vancouver.
It was the era of so-called "re-engineering" and a gaggle of consultants, each with secret knives out for the others' backs, inflicted the Cult of the Team on our previously happy and well-managed workplace. As the company wordsmith (oh, how I hated that word -- especially in the verb form, "to wordsmith", always used so casually, as if it were a mechanical skill no more intellectually demanding than...oh, polishing silver maybe), I was tapped for the Information, Communication and Education team. I.C.E., get it? The Cult Manifesto luckily did not require that we come up with a song and dance routine, but each team had to have a motto. Trying to play along, I won rave reviews for, "Have an I.C.E. Day!" and became the official dispenser of ICE® chocolate bars, awarded to any eager beaver who sent us an "idea for consideration," no matter how hare-brained. The writing on the wall couldn't have been larger or more threatening, and the rest is personal history. With much angst, I bailed outtathere as soon as I could.
But for someone who grew up in snow country, there are much happier ice memories than that. Can children today still be as enthralled as we once were by frost pictures on winter windowpanes? Many years ago, I read about an art technique for reproducing these lacy landscapes by placing absorbent paper and a colouring agent in a shallow tray of water and freezing it. My success rate came nowhere near that of Jack (...Frost...), but yielded some vaguely promising bookmark-sized results, which I found in my recent studio revamp:
I'd tried the article's suggestion to place leaves in the shallow liquid, but this as close as I came to the nifty illustrations accompanying the text.
Well, why not try again? I first used some diluted acrylic paint as my colouring agent, with indifferent results:
Maybe ink would work better? Emptying the last of some waterproof India ink into a small tray, I had my best luck:
Well, ink seemed to be the answer but the only ink colour I had on hand was red. What the heck. With a salute to friends who survived the Polar Vortex and all the stress and emotion that must have gone along with it, I poured it on, with this result.
Pretty cool, eh? But meanwhile, the best ice cube story of the season comes to me courtesy of my oldest friend's (AND a Polar Vortex survivor) remarkable food-and-fascinations blog -- scroll down in her New Year's post to see ice cube trays like you've never seen before.
