all she wants to do is

4:42pm: Molly and I leave a BU parking lot and head out to get her daughter Natalie from daycare, near their house. Normally this is a 25-30-minute drive.

5:20pm: traffic crawling the entire way there, both on Storrow Drive and on I-93. The sky’s been dark on and off for several hours, and thunderstorms were in the forecast, and at this point the clouds are black and boiling. We take opportunities to [photo|video]graph them off the freeway.

5:28pm: we’re on the off-ramp. The skies open up. Truly impressive sheets of water come down.

5:30pm: we’re underneath the big freeway overpass. Whoa, man: we’re at least fifty feet away from the nearest spot under the open sky, and we’re still getting wet from all the rain that’s being blown our way by the wind.

5:35pm: we’re at the daycare. Parked practically right in front of the front doors, and armed with Molly’s hyooge rainbow-colored umbrellas, we still get soaking wet up to our waists in the twenty feet between the car and the building’s front porch.

5:37pm: we open the doors to go outside and the poor child shrieks, terrified of the racket made by the rain and the wind. She’s still wailing when Molly puts her in the car; we make big excited noises about omigods it’s raining SO HARD and isn’t it COOL and we’re all WET and COLD and we should really get home and put on some dry clothing and maybe have tea! And isn’t this fun! Natalie, being a smart human, looks at us sceptically, but we actually mostly mean it. The flooding rain is ridiculous and exhilarating in its suddenness.

5:45pm: we’re at their place. Safely inside, we change into dry clothing – I get to wear her dad’s warm, awesome flannel-lined jeans. Her dad juggles and does other circusy stuff. This is relevant later. There is dinner full of noshing, and leftover beers from a birthday party last weekend. They are cool, and have a warming effect.

7:15pm: Natalie wants me to do bedtime with her. I read her two books, we giggle a lot, I turn out the light, we cuddle and giggle some more, she gets goodnight kisses from me and from mommy, relocates to her big-girl bed, and quietly sings herself to sleep. Bedtime is pretty fun these days, apparently.

8pm: Molly goes off to play Rock Band, as an entire Pixies album (their first?) was released for the game today. That’s why I’m monitor-sitting, you see.

9pm: I’m totally asleep on the couch, with the monitor.

10:15pm: Molly sheepishly wants to know if I’m willing to stay a little longer. I have no idea what time it is, so clearly, the answer is yes. I mumble as much into the phone.

11:25pm: she returns, grinning from ear to ear, the evening a total win. “B and C are waiting outside and can give you a ride, if you like!” Of course I like. B and C are also circus people – aerialist and musician, respectively.

11:30pm: David, whose clothing I’m wearing, returns from his evening’s outing and happily announces that there are circus freaks outside his house! I make a wide-eyed face and ominously declare that they’re waiting for me. Good-byes, a ride, conversation about accordions and a bass and how cool the Pixies album was.

11:45pm: I get home, and receive an offer of whipped parsnips with butter and cream. I swoon, but am not hungry, so this is a useful mental note for later.

11:50pm: I get an irresistible urge to juggle. And do. Must be channeling all them circus freaks.

00:21am: I take echinacea and goldenseal, just in case, to ward off what I think might be a cold. Or maybe it’s just allergies. Or maybe I should be asleep again. Or maybe I should’ve had tea instead of beer.

In conclusion: I love my friends.

long days of summer

At the moment of the summer solstice – at least, it was solstice as far as the internet was concerned – I was washing dishes in a quieted house, after an exquisitely summery grilled meal. A year ago I was in a very different place. The last year has brought with it changes I’d never imagined, not then, not in the near future. I went to the darkest place I’d ever been, and have come back out into the light.

Life is softly humming along. I’ve been getting re-acquainted with how it feels to rely almost exclusively on public transport and my feet for getting from point N to point ΔN. It feels long-ago-homey – more like Kishinev than even my recent experiences in New York and Boston. Maybe it also feels a little like London, where I also took both subway trains and buses regularly. It’s an entirely different pace of life, and (aside from the fact that some things are just not possible without a car) I think I like it better. But I need more audio books.

There are still many, many days left in the season before I begin feeling like they’re getting short again. The sun tends to lighten people, and I’ve been feeling my friends’ burdens fade into the background even as they don’t fall away. My own, too.

Been daydreaming about the Burning Man road trip. Right now I’m thinking something like this on the way out, and maybe a southerly route on the way back. It’s a lot of driving – the way out west as I’ve mapped it out is 11 driving hours more than the shortest route, and the way back – 13, which amounts to two extra days of driving. I don’t know how I’ll afford it, but this is the year of a cathartic road trip, so hopefully I’ll find a way to make this happen. Or, you know, shorten the route. The shortening will likely be on the southerly side, though, because the northern plains and the Bad Lands (thanks for the link, Rosa) are calling me.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some mushroom caps to stuff. Happy solar holiday, all.

satisfaction

Satisfying:

-writing my very first AppleScript, and having it be reasonably clever (for a first script, yo) and work.
-lunch of spicy Thai beef salad and a gingery tofu-veggie dish with Molly. There’s just nothing bad about that.
-decent talk with my therapist earlier this evening.
-lovely time with Colleen, whom I’ve known for ten years this year, and gods, knowing her is one of the best things that ever happened to me. And with her kid Sylvana, a giggly, smart, developmentally fascinating toddler.
-fiddleheads, slices of cheese, and riesling for dinner. As a “picnic” on the kitchen floor. Complete with real wine glasses.
-a garden full of roses that have a scent, around the corner and down the block from my house.
-my house, with its murals and animals and human animals and quiet when I want it.
-summer, even despite the heat wave.
-lying around naked on a weekend morning, underneath a ceiling fan, grinning ear to ear because you just can’t help it.
-being dependent almost entirely on public transport, and finding that to be very pleasant.
-Mac OS Leopard and the upcoming release of the 3G iPhone.
-reading more, as I ride the T to work.
-making a mental inventory of the last week or so, and of the rest of the summer, and realizing just how lucky I am.

excuses and high lights

OK, an hour ago I still had the excuse of long-overdue catching up with a friend. Now it’s just the sneezing and the achy throat keeping me up.

Significant bright sides, both from tonight and from the past weekend: conversation over ginger lemon tea and a hummus plate at Diesel right up until they closed. Coming back home and preserving lemons brought to me by erstwhile Croatian visitors. Tasting the resulting lemon-juice-and-much-salt concoction, which won’t actually be ready for 5-6 weeks, but hey, I was curious; and experiencing a unique taste sensation that is oddly compelling. Listening to Ottmar Liebert, one of my favorite guitarists, whose album “In the Arms of Love” I’ve come to associate with the calm of late evenings.

Last Friday, seeing Mischief in the Machine, incredibly satisfying not least because the musicians have been practicing in my living room for the past several months, and some of the other performers are friends and acquaintances, and oh, also because it was an excellent show.

Food shopping with two friends and a kid, and helping the two-year-old through a comparative critique of two fairly complex cheeses.

Dinner (involving sushi), dessert (involving cherries and really actually unfortunate bacon chocolate) and conversation (involving three of my favorite peeps) underneath the Templet.

Helping a friend move – not under the best of circumstances for him, but satisfying both in a physical sense and in that I was able to participate. I’ve been on a bit of a streak reacting to what I see as empty pronouncements of love and sunshiny feelings towards the world – the only meaningful way I’ve found to counteract that is to invest of myself in my world, in practical ways that benefit it (them) and therefore myself. Hey, it’s not the best of motivations, but whatever gets me up and running, no?

Speaking of up and running, weightlifting is still having a profound effect on my life. Have I mentioned that? Yeah, like, every other post. Well, it’s true. Soon, if Molly and I succeed at mutually motivating, I’ll go check out BU’s gym facilities.

Going from strenuous move to the best picnic “brunch” yet this season. Quotation marks because it lasted most of the day. Molly and Rosa really know how to make a girl happy with food.

And then quiet and important conversation with Mark, one of the aforementioned favorite people; feeding my haptic interface; and an opportunity to start organizing my life – and snail-mail – and other paperwork – that seems to have been just the push I needed to start digging myself out of the piles-of-paper-everywhere hole I seem to get into at least a couple of times a year.

On balance, things aren’t bad. Except, of course, for the things that are. But, as I’ve written for the past several months, that’s largely out of my control.

Aki is sitting guard by my side. Time to go cuddle the cat – if he deigns to assent. Here’s hoping that the echinacea and goldenseal capsules counterbalance the lack of sleep, where my immune system is concerned.

the morning after

Penultimate drum-and-dance of the year in South Amherst yesterday. I brought my drum, even though I don’t have a bag for it yet and it was raining a little – but Molly and I threw garbage bags over the drums, and I’m very happy we did. By the end of the evening my hands were somehow hurting and a little numb at the same time, and I could still feel the just-played drumbeat in my ribcage.

I did better than had seemed possible, given how out of practice I’ve been with things that require sustaining a regular rhythm with my hands (drumming, juggling, playing the guitar which I haven’t done in any sort of sustained way since my first year in grad school). Concentrating on picking out, playing and sustaining relatively simple rhythms for several minutes at a time was great practice.

Molly and Natalie and I stayed over at our friends’ place in Hadley (Inspirit Common), and had breakfast at Cafe Esselon there. Natalie kept feeding us pretend food. The more ridiculously we reacted, the more giggles scattered, sparkling, across the table.

baby it’s cold outside

It almost looks like coffee, but it’s tea – Twinings Lady Grey with citrus added, which is inexplicably unavailable in the States but was so kindly supplied by a wee goddess. Over-brewed because I forgot, with whole milk added, it turned out to be the perfect strength – the kind that needs dairy to cut it.

Today I am catching up on overdue work. Everything, sight and sound, is muted by a thick invisible blanket of gray. It looks miserable outside. But inside, the cats are sleeping on the bed, there’s a book on performance in medieval France at my side, and I’m thinking of digital text scholarship in both its senses. This is good.

31

Thirty was certainly all-encompassing, the best and the worst. My birthday, however, was almost unreservedly fabulous. In fact, the entire weekend was so. It was filled with giggling toddlers, loving friends, conversation that kept dissolving into laughter, high hopes for employment, dance-y drumbeat, blue-green hair, family blood and chosen, and the best that the moon has to offer.

And the food. Oh gods, the food. Homemade pizza with so many different toppings for a second birthday party. Strawberries with whipped cream made with vanilla extract and nutmeg. Duck breasts made in some delicious way at which I could only marvel. Mahon cheese ice cream. Not to mention coppa (like prosciutto, but different), skyr (Icelandic yogurt-like thing) and freshly roasted coffee.

Best present is a tie between massage that made me at once floopy and energized, and my nephew Tesher getting his orange belt in Tae Kwon Do.

Twelve more minutes of birthday left, or none if you count from where I was born. Make that eleven. Here’s to tectonic shifts.

3am comfort food

(Really, this is just a post to test Flickr’s blogging feature. Not much of interest here.)

Came home from a four-hour job interview yesterday and didn’t know what to do with myself. No problem! My body did. I ate dinner – first real meal of the day – and promptly fell asleep, from sometime before 8pm (!) until after midnight.

Then I stayed up until 5am. Around 2:30 I glanced around the kitchen cupboard, saw the mac-and-cheese box and realized I was ravenously hungry. So I made some, tip-toeing through the quiet house full of sleeping foik behind closed doors. Pietro the canary seemed amused and perplexed at my timing, insofar as a canary can seem to have any moods at all.

Interview itself went… well enough, I think. I’m too close to it to tell. Now I wait, and maybe finally de-lame and paint some walls in my landlady’s other house like I’ve been promising for something like a month and a half. And have comfort food at 3am.

mundane details are people, too.

Yesterday I spent about four hours making chicken soup, complete with roasting the chicken parts I got for it. Hey, there was nothing else to do – no job on the horizon, which is wearying – and chatting with friends dealing with random illnesses inspired me to go buy soup makings, including enough meat for two batches. Of course, instead of the intended one-batch-and-leftover-chicken there ended up being more soup. My entire household, and then some, seemed to approve; and I felt close to my grandmother, who’d spend entire days in the kitchen cooking stuff up for the sheer joy of the process, and of feeding people with the results. I joked with a friend that one day I’ll get a dozen friends to make a kept woman of me, and will feed them in return.

(But no, srsly, a job – preferably an interesting, challenging job that pays me enough for me to feed friends anyway – would be way better. You hear me, multiverse?)

Then we drove to the wilds of R’dale with soup, getting astonishingly lost for, like, half an hour within a mile of the place we were going to. Classic Boston adventure. I’d intended to drop off soup and friend, but ended up staying and chatting and laughing with folk in a room painted a pleasing shade of orange.

Last night I dreamt of having a good, loving and kind and familiar conversation with someone I don’t talk to much these days. Waking up to reality is a bitch sometimes.

But it could be worse than a sunny day, ice cream for breakfast (because what’s better when you burned your tongue on hot chicken soup yesterday?), and a small black cat curled up beside me.

V-Day goodness!

I dislike Valentine’s Day with something between deep indifference and red fiery passion. That said, as a member of my household I just got the best V-Day present ever, and am now almost – uh – sanguine about the holiday. From an email by housemate/landlady’s awesome partner: “For Valentine’s Day, I brought you a dozen duck eggs, just laid today.” !! Thanks, Paul!

everything is white and colors.

It’s snowing white all over and so, so quiet outside.

This past Saturday was Frostbyte’s memorial auction. I arranged food for what probably ended up being a couple hundred people over the course of about 24 hours. Didn’t really cook, except in a minimalist sense. Still, it was lovely – several times that day people asked me the requisite how-are-you and I would answer, “in my element.” Providing good food for people, even if I just shop and chop veggies and open cheese and get others to help me, fills my soul like nothing else does. Especially when people I don’t know take note of the food and are pleased with it. Especially-especially when I get to participate in a group effort such as this was, two years in the making (by others: I only came to it within the last month). Labor of true love, it was, despite the complexity and frustrations of the organizing process. The next day, as we were finishing cleaning up, one of my co-organizers smiled at me and said, “You’re a new old friend.” Burners’ spirit of instant community is priceless.

(I don’t actually know whether the person who made the above remark has gone to Burning Man. But he’s old-school TEP, and I gather that’s pretty close in all the relevant ways.)

Saturday evening I sat on a couch in front of Tensor, weaving slow conversation with the human beside me into its constantly changing color-light play. A swing hung between us and Tensor. Its shadow in the bright lights, sometimes swinging empty, most of the time complete with people’s silhouettes, was the narrative of remembrance unfolding. If the mark I leave on my community when I’m gone even approaches Kevin McCormick’s – he died at just 29 – I’ll have done well.

Yesterday I spent a few hours with a sweet, social two-year-old and remembered how exhausting and satisfying it is to live only for the present moment, all the time. I remembered the realization I’ve been coming back to over the last couple of months: the kind of family I want, the village that it takes to raise children and be the change I/we wish to see in the world, is already there. Here. All I need to do is participate in it.

Last night another new old friend, the luminous human with the Tensor-side conversation, brought me a present, a square of squares of color-cycling light. It is making slow progress in its simple programming as white snow layers itself onto the skylight, sounding like grains of sand falling. White cat at my feet, I watch the color cube and feel his still calm.

chicken a la cultural transmission

“Scarborough Fair” is an old one! The Fair itself, a huge month-and-a-half-long trade show, originates in the 13th century, and the ballad appears to have its origins in another one from the late 17th. I, of course, am partial to Simon and Garfunkel’s version (link to YouTube video), because it takes me all the way back to 1993, when I moved from New York to sunny southern California (and hated it). S&G’s “The Concert in Central Park” was one of the first CDs I mail-ordered from BMG, an unspeakable luxury back then. That CD came with the bonus of “A Heart in New York,” which I sang to myself whenever I missed Queens. Which was often.

Come to think of it, I also hummed it to myself whenever I flew into New York to visit my brother (or whatnot). Have you flown into New York City in the dark? It’s unbelievably cool.

But this is a recipe post, of course:

-Take a chicken breast. Preferably a locally-grown, awesomely outrageous chicken breast, like the stuff I get from these folks. Defrost if necessary. (Never ever defrost meat in the microwave: potential health problems aside, it just gets an icky texture.) Preheat oven to 400F (200C).
-Put some salt, pepper, parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme in a leettle bowl. How much? I dunno. It’s hard to over-herb a chicken breast. Mix.
-Put in a couple spoons of mayonnaise. Again, I don’t know how much: enough to coat the chicken. Mix well with the herbs.
-Slather the mixture all over the chicken. Use your hands. Get some under the skin too, if you like.
-Put chicken in a foil-lined or greased baking dish. Bake for 45-50 minutes, or until the juices run clear when you poke it with a fork. Eat, and tell me you don’t love me. I dare you.

By the way: I’m generally not a white-meat person. The meat CSA share has changed that! The Chestnut Farms chicken – as all their other meats – is amazing, and given that I’m not going to give up meat for environmental reasons anytime soon, it’s just about the most eco-conscious stuff to get. We get to eat meat of animals raised humanely, meat that hasn’t been plied with mysterious ingredients and transported the usual long distances. Support local agriculture, and all that.

If you have a chance to support your local agriculture, meat-raising or not, I encourage you to do so. Chestnut Farms’ minimum monthly share (ten pounds) is way too much for us, so we share it among three households. That way, even though the per-pound cost is high ($7 or a bit less, depending on whether they have thrown in freebies), it doesn’t break the bank to get a 3-4 lbs a month. Paradoxically, this arrangement has encouraged me to eat less meat than I normally would: store-bought stuff just doesn’t compare unless it’s really great and thus even more expensive.

Being able to participate in this meat-share thing has made me very, very happy to be back in Massachusetts: there was nothing like it around Providence, although the fruit-and-veggie farmers’ markets there are pretty good. It’s just one more thing that makes Boston feel like home all over again.

Bread.

What’s your favorite recipe for bread, made using hands and an oven but no bread machine, and easy for a bread beginner, and not so time-consuming that it’ll discourage me from baking bread in the future? Not sourdough: I don’t have starter, and don’t like sourdough enough to seek it out.

LiveJournal readers, please to comment using the URL up top and not directly on LJ; I won’t see the latter.

Cheesemas, and directional

Today was cheesemas. Cheeses were bought and brought – drunken goat, mozzarella, robiola, explorateur (?! - hokey name, but most excellent cheese), some other alcohol- (port-)laced semisoft cheese, Valdeon (a Spanish blue), raclette and half a dozen others. Someone even brought raclette ice cream which, really, was much milder than it had any right to be. Add to that fruit, bread, fig-and-vidalia jam, wine, beer, sprakly non-alc cider, fifteen folk or more and two mostly happy and social toddlers, and it’s cheesemas in the neighborhood. My undying gratitude and love to my cheesemas-elf conspirator.

Unrelatedly, I thought some this evening, and wrote down the following:

north is triangular, steady, monument-al

east is rounded, exotic, otherworldly

south is light, scintillating, hot

west is radio, diagonal, big

the center is small, sensitive, reactive

RolandHT, and ask the internets.

I’ve put up the latest version of RolandHT. It can only be viewed with (freely available) Mozilla/Firefox, or another XSLT-aware browser. I don’t know of any besides Firefox, so if you do, please let me know the browser and the operating system(s) on which you’ve used it.

The site definitely needs a help section, and some more intuitive navigation. For now, a few usage notes:

– The links up top don’t do anything yet.
– Pick an excerpt from the list on the left. Mouseover themes/characters/imagery that show up over the sword, and see what happens. Then click on a theme or character or image, and see what happens now.
– Click on the red “reset” at top right to return to initial state.
– For three other nifty features, find the excerpt named “Missionary Work.” Click on the “i” beside the name of the work; click on the quill in the second stanza; mouseover any underlined word.
– Check out also the excerpt, near the very bottom, titled “Battle Near Saragossa.” Click on the image.
– If something seems aesthetically or functionally wrong, it would be lovely if you emailed me to let me know.
– This is a work in progress. If you see the word “check” where you expect information, I’m working on it.

In other news, a couple of questions for the internet. The first, in two parts, is Roland-related – I’d like to know more about two geographical locations. One is Terra Major:

“Could one achieve that Rollant’s life was lost,
Charle’s right arm were from his body torn;
Though there remained his marvellous great host,
He’ld not again assemble in such force;
Terra Major would languish in repose.”

Is TM a region? Is it in Europe? If not, what is it (another name for Charlemagne’s Holy Roman Empire?)?

The other place is a bit more mysterious, partly because it’s in Middle English:

Roulond rod furthe—he wold not rest, I wene—
he sawe wher a Sairsin seche hym wold,
kinge was of Criklond, croun[y]d with gold.

What, pray tell, is Criklond?

And finally, a non-Roland-related query: what’s your favorite slow-cooker recipe? Things I’m trying to stay away from: large chunks of boiled onions (I’ve disliked them since forever), and really heavy dishes like mac and cheese. Meat is great, veggies are great, seafood that’s sturdy enough to survive a slow cooker is great, wacky but tasty ingredients totally get bonus points. Non-desserts is what I’m after.

Solstice and everything after.

We spent Friday-to-Saturday night awake, Ethan and I and Jennafer the Awesome Housemate and friend Dave, celebrating Solstice. There was cribbage and Futurama and coffee with Bailey’s and whiskey and talking and cheese! Omigod the cheese. I’d bought clochette for the first time (not at that site, locally – but isn’t that a nice photo?), and it was all that with bells on. Other cheeses too, St Marcellin and a Portuguese semi-hard goat cheese marinated in olive oil and herbs.

There was so much cheese that, when we had crepes the next morning, I did not want any cheese with my crepes. I’ll wait for the gasps of horrified wonder to subside.

And then we had a really slow and sleepy day, at the end of which some friends from Virginia showed up and we had pumpkin risotto made by yours truly. I love making risotto. If your ingredients are good (and mine included homemade broth, thank you Mr. Chest Freezer), it’s dead easy and deeply satisfying.

Now, I’m taking a headache break while five people finish up dinner – dolmas (oh yes, hand-rolled) and chicken biryani.

To summarize: I LOVE FOODIES.

Happy Light’s return, everybody.

You know what’s really good?

Toasted fennel seeds, left over from yesterday because what you actually meant to toast was cumin. By themselves, nothing else.

Big blog updates, what? So many things I keep meaning to write about, and they just never get written down. Have to start again somewhere.

Oh, all right. Here’s some content: Y: The Last Man is a great graphic-novel (you know, comic book) series. Well written, intriguing in its treatment of gender, beautifully drawn.

Food for thought

Was just talking to Cam Fraser, cool guy I met in Alberta at a graduate students’ humanities computing conference a few years ago. This is sort of a memo to self, but is also a great example of how THE INTERNET has changed the academic life. Multitask by chatting while writing a conference paper, get idea for a totally different thing, record it, go on. I *heart* these moments.

Cam: have you thought about bringing your cooking into your academic work?

me: Nnno. But it sounds like fun. How would you suggest I go about this?

Cam: boy, I have no idea.

me: drat.

Cam: Maybe something to do with bodies…

Cam: I’m thinking of the scene in “Woman on Top” where she’s smelling a chile and ends up cutting herself

me: hmmmm

me: Seriously, though: hm. Maybe I should take a look at how people (the *general populace*) procured and consumed food over the ages. It’s gone from a communal thing to a family thing and back so many times, I wonder if it’s correlated with the amount of cultural transmission that goes on.

Hmmm, indeed. Raw, but interesting.

Nuked organic spinach with olive oil and salt.

Now that’s happiness.

Wonderful spinach, too: soft, moist and flavorful. Hard to believe it had been [flash-?]frozen. Another reason to *heart* Trader Joe’s, where we’ve started going for obscene amounts of food each time, since it’s all the way in Boston. The chest freezer was so, so worth it.

Reconnected with an old friend after a decade’s worth of silence, more or less imposed by me. It’s strange to be in that phase of the email exchange when you’ve already established that you had the right email address, but no substantive conversation has yet happened. I felt strongly about him, back when we were on the same continent and for a long while after. There are some things that I couldn’t take, and so I stopped writing letters; but the memory of him has stayed with me, vivid and inextricable and compelling and good.

And now we’re suspended: how have we both changed in each other’s eyes?

And how will I deal if the answer to either is “no change at all”?

White, green and bike

I like to ride my bicycle, I like to ride my bike…

Today I didn’t ride, but I’ve an excuse. Yesterday I did ride, seven miles instead of the five I’d been doing, and although the total is on the low side, it still feels good. Then, later last night, I went out to take a walk and ended up shoveling out a path from our porch to the road as well as the entire space around and on the car. It felt good! Aside from the fact that the people in whose driveway we parked (long story) were complete asses. But the actual physical work felt really good, and let me tell you, it doesn’t get much better than Peter Mulvey and Morphine on the iPod while shoveling metric %#@!tons of light fluffy snow.

Today, we shoveled again! The snow was much heavier by the time we got to it, and it was a different driveway, the one where we’ll be parking from now on (see above). But we also got to be genial with the neighbors, and although there was no iPod, there were two of us and thus bits of winded conversation were possible.

My back hurts like nobody’s business, and I don’t feel guilty at all for not biking. Will do it tomorrow. Oooh, I’m liking the physical activity gig. Really, really hope it lasts.

Here’s a gift from the green god on a white and sky-blue winter’s day:

Take come crushed coriander seeds, some garam masala and some black mustard seeds. No precise measurements, I went with about a tablespoon of each of the first two and 1.5 tbsp of the mustard seeds at first. Oh, and a dash of good chili powder. Heat up some fat-of-choice (olive oil and a bit of butter, here) and fry the spices until they smell amazing, and the mustard seeds are popping.

Add a large plastic package of frozen spinach, not the square-package kind but the kind that’s already broken up into clumps; dump in a bit of water; stir well; cover. Steam-fry, stirring occasionally, until the spinach looks unfrozen. Take off the cover and adjust seasonings (at this point I put in salt, garlic powder and more garam masala): you want the spinach to taste just a little bit overspiced. Fry some more at higher heat until it’s no longer watery. Let cool.

Open up a package of silken tofu and drain it as much as you can. Dump the cooled spinach and the tofu into the food processor and whirr until it’s all uniformly colored. Taste, adjust seasonings, refrigerate until tomorrow when you can dip carrots and anything else your heart desires into it.

Good night!