Intersection Logs

I was stripping the bed preparatory to doing laundry, and I heard something fall, so I went poking around between the bed and the wall. I found no less than five hairslides/barrettes, some of which I hadn't seen in quite a while. I have quite an extensive collection of the things; I like to co-ordinate them with my outfits or jewelry. The thing that struck me, contemplating that small pile of long-lost friends, was that three of them were in colors other than brown, whereas all but one of the ones I've bought here in the last ten years are either brown or metallic. I like brown -- I wear it a lot, in fact -- but I do wear other colors as well. Is it that the colored hair-ornaments are purely a European notion, or are they just hopelessly old-fashioned?

I opened the Behemoth 47 file last night, read through most of it, and did a bit of minor tidying up on the first few sentences by way of easing myself back into it. I think the whole business with the Shipwights' odd attitude to performing artists is going to have to go; it was something that grew out of a minor character's casual remark, but it serves no real purpose. Once I'm back on the thing_in_150 bandwagon, I won't want to cut anything, so I may do that before I start.

I've done some tidying up in the study; the desk is tidier now than it's been since before I got the desktop, which may or may not be conducive to sitting down and writing.

This evening, I found myself wondering about rearranging the living room. I'm not much of a furniture-rearranger as a rule, and much of my furniture hasn't moved since it was delivered; the last major reshuffle was last time I bought bookshelves, a couple of years ago. It is an ongoing slight annoyance that my nice couch doesn't face the TV, though, and the couch itself can't really go anywhere else even if I could shift it, which I'm not sure I could. In principle, I think I could move the TV to the other end of the window wall, put the small armchair where the TV is now, and the recliner where the small chair is, and be able to watch the TV from the couch, but considering what the recliner has done to the carpet under it, I'm a little reluctant to move it. Perhaps if I put down a couple of cheap area rugs ...

Oatmeal baked up with flour and sugar and eggs and raisins, on the other hand, is perfectly edible.

On the gripping hand, the gorgeous new plates may have been designed for people with larger kitchens than mine. My dish cabinet is a foot deep and two feet wide, but it has double doors and a wide batten down the middle, so that the openings are 8.5" by 9.5" or thereabouts, and it turns out that rather deep, 11.25" diameter dinner plates will only go in three deep, and the third one is a tight squeeze. They can go in the other cabinet, which is a single-opening one, sixteen inches wide, but that means shuffling up the other stuff -- miscellaneous containers, placemats and coasters, a collection of candles and candle-holders, and a couple of goblets -- that lives in there. Also, the mugs are too wide to fit anywhere but the middle aisle of the dishwasher rack, and I have no idea where they are going to end up, though I should really retire a few of the oldest pre-existing ones.

They are gorgeous, though -- rich red crackle glaze on the inside and dark on the outside.

If my heating doesn't get fixed tomorrow, I'm seriously thinking about taking a hotel room -- and maybe sending the apartment complex the bill -- until it is.

It's survivable -- about 60F indoors -- but not pleasant for someone who's lived in Arizona for ten years. I'm going to bed, I think, before my feet get any colder.

I wish I could get my sleep cycle set to something more in tune with community standards, but it's not easy. I'm not a morning person -- never have been, I suspect, though that was mostly masked by externally-imposed schedules until I left home. Mostly, these days, if I'm mobile before 8.30 it's either because I have somewhere non-negotiable to be or because I'm not feeling well, and I'm seldom asleep before midnight. This isn't too much of a problem in summer -- Tucson summers being what they are -- but at the moment, when I'm ducking out of work at 5pm sharp because I'm nervous about coming home after dark, it means I have to bring work home every night, and that isn't conducive to relaxing evenings, let alone writing. (Hah!)

So last night, in the name of trying to nudge the body-clock back towards sense, I was in bed before 10 -- and felt tired enough to do it, too. Lights out at 10.30, and then ... and then I lay awake, tossing and turning, until well after midnight, which is a long time even for me; I usually reckon on something around half an hour to forty minutes. It didn't help that the sprinklers outside have been very noisy lately; one of them is broken so that it shoots a six-foot jet into the air and splashes down on the concrete path. (I don't find white noise soothing; in fact, if I get too much of it I have to drown it out with music or the BBC to relax.)

In other news, I made beef stew again --- with a medium-sized yam, red pepper, and more onion, this time. I also stewed up ... something lumpy and sweet and purple ... from some leftover grapes and the seeds of half a pomegranate. I am now pondering white sauce, but I think this may be a non-starter; the stuff looks impossibly fiddly to prepare in single-serving quantities, and seems unlikely to keep well, so if I want a chicken casserole with opaque liquid I may have to resort to canned cream soup.

I went over to Target this afternoon in quest of kitchen bits and pieces, but chickened out when it came to acquiring actual good knives -- much too finicky to look after. Maybe in a month or two, if the cooking craze persists. I also looked longingly at some lovely red dinner plates, but decided they were too heavy and bulky to carry. (I once carried home a whole dinner service from central Birmingham, but I was a lot younger then, and I think a taxi may have been involved. Those plates are still with me, but after seventeen years they're starting to look a little tired.)

I went a little overboard in the produce section of my local grocery store today: four plums, four pluots, a peach, a couple of pears, three different squashes, a bag of baby potatoes, and a bundle of asparagus. No frozen junk or canned fruit for me this week! Dinner tonight was dover sole (baked with a good sprinkle of tarragon and basil), boiled baby potatoes, and asparagus nuked for ninety seconds in a little water. (My philosophy of cooking, given actual ingredients, mostly amounts to 'cook until done, with minimal or no added fat and no salt, then eat;' lately I've taken to sprinkling on random herbs before the cooking stage.)

My other accomplishment for today was to rearrange the computer desk ... yet again ... so that the main box sits under the desk; with the enhanced antenna sitting in front, that's a viable arrangement. At the same time I set up the new external drive and started running a full back up, which is still in progress as I type. (I'm using the Behemoth laptop today; it's been a while since I actually had the thing on my lap, and its heavy.)

As I've said before, holidays are great for catching up with housework. I spent most of the day dusting and polishing and tidying, and the apartment is in better order now than it has been for a while. I'm not -- as regular readers may have noticed -- particularly domesticated, but sometimes it's oddly satisfying to make things neat and shiny again, to make the place feel like a home rather than just somewhere to camp out in when I'm not traveling.

And now, I'm watching Superman Returns (which is not bad, but the Christ-imagery is a little weird, not to say disturbing), after a dinner that actually involved using the stove. It feels ... like coming home.

Next time, laundry first, then mall. You know it makes sense.

Also, next time should probably be in about five years, maybe ten. If it wasn't for the jacket problem, that is. Oh, and shoes. (Sigh.)

I declared today an honorary holiday -- I might even be able to count it as time-in-lieu of Memorial Day, when I'll be working. In Honolulu, but working.

So I pottered around the apartment, and tagged the last five months of photos, and changed the filter on the furnace and turned the furnace off for the summer and realized that there's an awful lot of black soot on the control panel, which it's never done before. Time to ask management to get it serviced, I think, but no enormous hurry as I shouldn't be needing it again until October or November. In the afternoon I went down to my local Bookman's 'Entertainment Exchange,' a used-book store that also does media and general bric-a-brac. The intersection it's on is under threat of serious upgrading, which means that the whole area has been suffering from planning blight for a while, and I wanted to spend down my trade credit while the place was still in business. It still seems to be going strong at the moment -- now with Wi-Fi -- and I found a selection of mostly paperback books and a couple of movies, and promptly fell headlong into an Elizabeth George mystery set in my favourite part of Derbyshire.

Oh, and I think I can add baked salmon fillet to the list of things that are improved by a good dusting of black pepper and basil leaves. The salmon was as good cold today as it was hot yesterday. Black pepper is good on avocado, too. (Black pepper and basil leaves are what I have, so they tend to get sprinkled around when I'm in a vaguely culinary mood.)

Also achieved words, but not in enormous quantity, just a modest 539 to keep things ticking over.

The new shredder and I have been making significant inroads on what seems to be a couple of years' accumulation of useless envelopes with my name and address on them, and numerous payslips and paid or nothing-due bills have been shucked out of their envelopes and filed. I also trotted up to Trader Joe's late in the afternoon and picked up various goodies. I really ought to do that more often; it's not much farther than the regular grocery store, and the food is much nicer.

Now I'm supposed to be writing, but antihistamine fog is not exactly conducive to this. (I did transcribe 499 words of written background notes on the Behemoth novel earlier, but I don't think that really counts.) Everything's blooming at once this year, it seems.