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No, not the hippo – tho’ she and her delightful friend George spent much time tickling my fancy when Our Small Person was smaller – Martha Stewart. Say what you will about her business practices*, but that lady can write one fantastic recipe.
On today’s menu, it’s Irish Stew, made with lamb from the little bitty Mediterranean market, and thyme I grew in my windowsill. I like to add more thyme than she does, but whatevs, it’s still her recipe, and my hat is off to her. The pot of nomminess has made it from the stovetop to the oven, and in two hours, we have company coming over to enjoy with us. =D
Click the piccy to go to the recipe.
(that’s the before-oven picture, btw.)
*And those terrible neutral shades she insists on painting every room EVAR.
Weird weird weird morning. I keep the clock in our bedroom set to go off half an hour before we have to wake up, so that I can spank the snooze button for a little while. I also keep the time set ahead for two reasons: 1) if I have to do some calculations, I will be tugged out of dreamyland a little bit, and 2) I’ve never owned a clock that doesn’t run fast.*
So anyway. Our usual morning wakeup involves the not-so-gentle beeping** of the clock, I do some quick math and smack the snooze alarm, then the process repeats until it’s time to get up. Then I nudge Will until he groans and rolls over. Sometimes I take a shower, wake up our small person, and then come back and re-wake up Will. For years, our time for getting up has been around a quarter of seven***.
Well, I stayed up way later than usual last night. Which means that when the alarm went off the first time, this morning, I totally thought I was dreaming it, and paid no attention. Which got Will’s attention. But when he aimed for the snooze button, something bad happened, and he got the radio instead. Which neither of us knows (still) how to turn off. Which led to me furiously pressing all the buttons, and generally beating the clock up in my semi-conscious ineptitude, then turning on the bedside lamp and doing it some more. The noise stopped at last when Will reached over me and slapped the clock. I must find out where he slapped it.
Put it all together, the scary radio noises, the fumbling and bashing of the clock, and the clock running fast, and six-o-five a.m. found the two of us in the kitchen, me trying to operate some frozen soup. Because, you know, who doesn’t want tom yam soup at six in the morning?
Color me bleary and slightly bizarre today.
***
*Yes, even the clock in the car. And I can’t wear a wristwatch anymore – eventually the hour hand starts a slow pinwheel, then a fast pinwheel, and the poor thing dies of a heart attack. I shit you not.
**It sounds like rowdy garbage men are backing up over our bed.
***This will be moved up an hour, come Wednesday, with the advent of Middle School. Yikes!
First, let me give you a good look at the bookshelf:
You can see that the plant there is reaching for the sun. You can also see that it’s nowhere near anywhere that one of the cats can get to reasonably*.
Now look! Look!
Purple string!
I’m telling you, we have tuatha afoot in this house. And someone’s dress is not holding together very well.
I showed Will’s mom this afternoon when she was over to pick up our small person for lunch – she nodded and told me to cut a nicer bit of cloth for our small friends and leave it somewhere they can get to it easily, and they should stay away from the bolt. I haven’t yet put out that bag of scraps that I had been mulling over; I’ll get on that tonight, for sure.
*The cats have set off the camera trap now three times. All three times we knew it was a cat, because immediately following the shutter click, there was a resounding crash, a fluffy blur, and a mess to clean up.
I just spent $26 of my save-ups on a hardcover book. >.<
Already I know it was a well-spent $26. I’m a huge fan of this man’s work – it’s all the stuff that I’m bananas for: it’s totally transporting, it’s smart, and it holds up a mirror to society. I’m excited to start this one – in the first two pages, it already has the linguistic density of the Bas Lag books (Perdido Street Station et al), and I can’t wait to sit down after dinner with it and fall in.
There’s just so much terrible sci-fi fantasy out there, & it’s such a pain in the butt to sift through the awful stuff in hopes of finding something worth reading – to find China Miéville’s work is a capital-j Joy.
I am seriously considering buying a virtual ticket for BlizzCon because I want to see the costume competition – but it’s expensive. I’m kinda putting my pennies together right now so that I can pre-order the collector’s edition of Cataclysm when it comes out, too. So it’s one or the other.
Also, both come with really cute pets:
This one’s from BlizzCon
This one’s from the collector’s edition of Cataclysm
Both equally cute, so neither will be a tipping point for decisions. Most likely, I’ll go for the collector’s edition instead of the virtual ticket, just because I know I can catch the costumes (and the dance competition! I LOVE the dance competition!) later on YouTube.
Oh, decisions!
Oh, holy mother of pearl. It seems I have a knack for walking in on people with no clothes on.
About a year ago, there was a trend of me walking in on Candice in the basement with a beau. First I walked in on her on the couch, then the laundry table by the washing machines, then at the freaking workbench, and then in the storage crawlspace. Poor thing must’ve thought I had some kind of kink on or something. Or she needed the sound of my startled scream as a vehicle for climax. Either way, it was Just Too Much. The last time I walked in on her I walked away, grabbed a bucket of water, threw it at them, and then yelled at them to use the room she paid rent on. I’m a little ashamed about that, to be completely honest. On the other hand, she quit bringing boys to the basement after that.
Then a few months later, I walked in on Zoe and Derek on top of the washing machine. Read the rest of this entry »
This morning Daniel and I were standing in his kitchen, enjoying an early coffee, which we’ve done at least four times a week for the last two years. At least. And this morning we got a bit of a shock.
Let me explain: Our apartment building is a comfy collection of people who like each other – we’ve engineered it that way, much to the delight of our landlord. There’s a common space in the basement where folks who live here and the people we love tend to hang out a lot – there’s a fairly regular Friday night poker game/board game* marathon that happens, I have a Monday night writing group there, Skipper’s down there all the time to hang out and use the wi-fi, Daniel has Thursday night after-club martinis with the Ladies there, Lynnie brings her laundry and her paints, and we all have projects that get done on the big table. In addition to the basement being common space, when we’re home and awake, none of us really closes the inner door to our apartments unless it’s super cold out. Which is to say, there’s a fair amount of wandering between apartments that happens.
Which is to say, we all know each other’s apartments pretty well. Daniel knows all the names of my plants and cats, I know every addition to his depression glass collection at a glance. We know where every piece of plumbing starts and ends** in all the apartments, and just how to track between units, the path of a squirrel that has managed its way into the walls.
Yup. That’s how Will and I met.
They’re about this big:
Apple Tells All 