18 April 2004

Yesterday was one of those days that kept making me think, "I love my life." I really do. We went to Rice Paper and I had my happy cilantro-packed Chinese pancake wraps with their happy peanut sauce. I am such a sucker for peanut sauce, you would not believe. (I think tonight I'm going to make a satay with chicken and green beans and maybe orange pepper. Maybe. Mark likes satay and green beans, and he's going to California and won't have any of my cooking until next weekend.)

Then we met up with Stella and Roo at Uncle Hugo's and found books we wanted (more than we bought, even -- of course). Happy happy books for me. Roo wanted to be held, so Auntie Mrissa of course obliged him. Then he wanted to wander around in the front window, and was not obliged in that regard. But he was good tempered about it, and so was I (I remember wanting to get into perfect spaces like that). In fact, despite his clear status as a tiredy boy and despite our lack of meeano on this outing, he was good-tempered all afternoon. (Timprov, too, was tiredy and good-tempered.)

We went to Whole Foods and got cheese and berries, mostly, and a dip that's sort of like the bread dip at Pasta Primavera was, where they take sun-dried tomatoes and olive oil and pulverize them into common goodness. It's not quite the thing, but it'll do; I'll thaw the baguette I made, and we'll snarf. In addition to the berries for eating (because we went through Friday's strawberries and blackberries by last night), I got berries for baking: dried blueberries and dried sour cherries. I'm going to have a go at the wild rice bread from the library's cookbook of some weeks back. Wild rice bread with sour cherries sounds like exactly the sort of thing we would like. Also I got spelt flour, because one of the recipes for the bread machine calls for it, and I don't know if it's nice or not. Also cocoa-dusted dark chocolate almonds, because they didn't have the smooth kind in dark chocolate, and I really wanted dark chocolate almonds. (I had a few last night before bed, and they were good.) They had all kinds of sample cheese and oranges and bread and things for a Robbie-Roo to snack on while he rode in the play-car grocery cart.

And Sebastian Joe's was tasty, and it was warm enough for us to sit out on the terrace with our ice cream and not get chilled, even though I was wearing a short little tank dress. Lovely lovely. Roo could run around and the grown-ups could talk, and more than one of us got chocolate-face, and we went home contented.

Mark attempted a couple of garden stores yesterday, but nobody had what he was looking for, which is to say, plants that were not pansies. (Marks Don't Like Pansies. I'm fine with pansies, and they're good cold snap plants, but I acquiesce on this point.) We want snapdragons and a few other things. We'll see what he can find if he looks today.

And we had leftovers and a quiet evening: C.J. wanted to watch some more of Cowboy Bebop, and I read periodicals: I finished Portti and read Scientific American, Analog, F&SF, and the stack of Omaha newspaper articles the folks and grands had sent along. I am finally caught up on periodicals, which of course means that one will arrive in the mail in the next few days. Just before I went to bed, I figured out that the curious peevish mood I was in as regards my stacks of books was that I didn't want fiction, which is what I was looking at, but nonfiction. Well, we have plenty of that, so I grabbed one.

And I sold a story! "Under the Masks" is going to Monthly Short Stories, so yay for that. Another old short story off my list to market around to the semipros.

I am so tired now that The Soul of the North: A Social, Architectural, and Cultural History of the Nordic Countries, 1700-1940 is too heavy for me, and I've got it on the little retractable shelf on my desk instead of on my lap. I don't know why I slept so fitfully last night, but I did, and now instead of the familiar feeling of dragging my brain around behind me on a string, I've got a body dragging around behind the brain, which is a bit like walking a puppy: "Come on, come on! I'm sure there's something exciting up here, I'm just sure of it! Wait, what's this to smell? Oh, goodness! So exciting!"

Maybe an actual puppy would be helpful for this.

Anyway, I'm going to take some Advil and get a few things done and enjoy the day. It's rainy now, warm and rainy and lovely. It just gave me a great huge clap of thunder, yay! Two of them. Oh, I missed this. So gorgeous, fog through the trees down to the disappearing lake. I do like this life, oh, very much.