Kratzke: 2021

31 December 2021

A Couple of Old Pictures

I'm at my parents' house, and my sister and I have been throwing out all our old papers. We ran into some photos in my sister's pile, and I thought these were really cute.

Liên & Blocks

Cô Mai, Lan, Mom, Liên, & Bà

Liên & Grandma

27 December 2021

I know I haven't written in a while. It turns out that the Lovett stuff I wrote about in my last post actually happened these past 4 months, so I've had to drop the ball with my memoirs a bit. Mom and Dad are cleaning out their house so they can start putting it on the market in the spring, and the slab for Snake Mountain is scheduled to be poured in four days. Now that it's the night before I travel back home for the holidays, I'm trying to organize, delete, and back up files on my computer.

I really loved creating this drawing series with hand smudges and watercolor colored pencils. My ex-girlfriend was a cellist, and I gave the series to her. They were thrown out many years ago, and for the past couple decades, I knew they would live on only in my memories. Then my parents ran across these old slides. If you should care to, look out for scrolls, bridges, f-holes, bows & bow tips, fingerboards, tailpieces, and endpins. Old blurry slides drawn by a random teenager aren't for everyone, but this was my last series before I quit art and pursued piano in college, so it's kind of special to me.

Rowboat

Man

Map

Giraffe

Clouds

Tea

King

Fish

Plane

Umbrella

05 August 2021

#LanLovett

I'm kind of old to be getting into instagram. When my sister told me that my bakes are "pinterest worthy" and recommended that I start using my instagram account to help start up a home bakery, I filed the idea away in the back of my mind. Who knows if I even want a home bakery? Would anyone even buy my bakes if they cost more than grocery store cupcakes and went stale more quickly due to my refusal to use mounds of shortening? Besides, there's already a great baker (owner of Simply Cake) in the neighborhood I'm moving to, and I'd never want to step on any toes. But then again, who knows. At the top of my blog, it reads, "First you're another Sloe-eyed vamp. Then someone's mother, then you're camp. Then you career from career to career. I'm almost through my memoirs. And I'm here." Maybe just thinking about a home bakery is my version of moving from career to career.

Fast forward to this week. One of my best friends is throwing a birthday party for her 8-year-old son on Saturday, and I'll be baking for it. The time has come, the walrus said, to expand from my 3 blogger followers to all 45 on instagram. Not to brag, but one of them is a random landscaping business. Just kidding, that one is deleted now.

I'll make my first post on Saturday with #LanLovett. Nellie Lovett is the owner of the bakehouse in my favorite musical. In fact, whatever my second favorite musical is, is a very distant second. If "Mrs. Lovett's bakehouse" rings a bell, good for you. If not, resist the urge to look it up, and focus instead on the the word "Lovett." It sounds so sweet, doesn't it?

Okay, I'm going to publish this now. It will hold me accountable, and some day I'll look back on this post and remember how one time I considered opening up a home bakery. Tomorrow, tune in for a 2.5 layer vanilla cake decorated in American buttercream, golden sprinkles, and cocoa cookies sandwiched with Ghirardelli white candy melts. On Saturday, I'll make two dozen black magic cupcakes filled with marshmallow frosting and topped with whipped cream frosting, cocoa cookies, and white and gold nonpareils. The theme is puppy dogs!

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It's Friday. Today I made the cake and cocoa cookie toppers for tomorrow's cupcakes.