The first thing I did upon returning from Sunriver was to take off my sweaty shoes and socks. The second thing I did upon returning from Sunriver was to go outside to water the lawn. The third thing I did was to step on something hateful and sharp. And invisible. Now I have a thorn in my paw. There's something small and unfindable embedded in the ball of my left foot, causing me intense pain. And I'm only making it worse with my endless prodding and prying.
I was complaining about my sore paw to Kris this morning as we got ready for work.
"Our poor corn," she said. "That's the sad thing."
I went to the window to see what was the matter. Kris and Toto were looking down at the yard.
Kris was looking at the two bent corn stalks, at the three ears of corn scattered across the yard. Coon-sign.
Toto was watching her brother, Simon, who was standing in the middle of my wading pool, creeping ever-closer to a cat that none of us had ever seen before. Simon wasn't being aggressive; he was being coy. "I think he likes her," I said. In reality, he was trying to scare the new cat from the garden.
"He's like the watchdog for our house," I said.
"Yeah," said Kris. "Too bad he can't scare that raccoon away."
Today marks the start of the sixth week on our scheduled three-week bathroom remodel. I'm beginning to think the project will be done after seven weeks, but I don't want to get my hopes up.
I took the day off work yesterday to catch up on life, a task at which I was only moderately successful.
In the morning, the contractors laid the flooring: Marmoleum #707 — Barley. When the floor was finished, I headed out for errands. I did some shopping at Trader Joe's and New Seasons. I ate lunch at Cha Cha Cha (some delicious — and cheap! — tacos). I returned some library books and borrowed some others.
Our recent discussion of You Are What You Eat, combined with Craig's spectacular Sunriver meal, has me contemplating Slow Food, so I borrowed a number of books related to the subject:
- Slow Food: The Case for Taste by Carlo Petrini
- Coming Home to Eat: The Pleasures and Politics of Local Foods by Gary Paul Nabhan
- Cooking by Hand by Parul Bertolli
- Learning to Cook by Marion Cunningham
- The Elements of Taste by Gray Kunz and Peter Kaminsky
- The Man Who Ate Everything by Jeffrey Steingarten
- It Must've Been Something I Ate by Jeffrey Steingarten
To that end, I made an Asian soup for dinner: Khmer-style Rice Soup from Hot Sour Salty Sweet. In many ways, this is simply an Asian stew containing ground pork, fish sauce, lemongrass, dried shrimp, ginger, jasmine rice, peanut oil, garlic, thai chile, shallots, basil, bean sprouts, scallions, and lime.
Kris' review of the soup matched my own: "This would be okay except for the dried shrimp." I think it has potential, but needs some tweaking before it's something I'll truly enjoy.
At bedtime, I couldn't fall asleep. For the first time since I stopped taking my melatonin two weeks ago, I was unable to drift off immediately.
On this day at foldedspace.org
2004 — A Well-Earned Rest After seven weeks of hard work, we finally said enough yesterday, stopped what we were doing, prepared food for a few dozen friends and family: held our Open House.
2003 — Scuttled In which my desire to blast the scurvy French from the sea is thwarted by a bug.
2002 — Piss and Pain Middle-aged over-weight men who have not been exercising regularly ought not play team sports. Such as soccer.
Why did you stop taking the melatonin... and how's the St. John's Wort working?