Shelf Improvement, Taxes and a Russian Chemist

(listening to Louis Vierne's Symphony #4)

Our little hallway closet had shelves of stained pine, which we replaced with tidy, white MDF. I glued some corks onto one of the old shelves and hung it in the den.

I'm sipping a glass of The Reverend. It's chilly outside (by the standards of this unusually mild North Carolina winter, anyway), and it's nice to drink such a rich, warming beer indoors.

It's been a pleasant weekend of putzing around, not being broke, and going out for a bit of social activity. Thursday was payday, which always puts a spring in my step before bills and expenses suck it all up.

Friday evening, I chatted with my mother for a while over the phone. It's an unfamiliar thing, to hear her talk about her parents as people who actually exist. I really don't understand the reasons behind the schism that existed for so many years, but perhaps my grandmother's stroke was enough to at least partially break down that wall. Mom did say that Grandpa is an odd old man, and not altogether likeable. It's weird to hear anything but silence on the subject.

After the phone conversation with Mummy, I went out for take-out Mexican food. We have a very respectable place near us (no ground beef to be seen, and they have multiple salsas which all have flavor and texture!), and we ate wolfishly when I brought it home. We washed it down with RedHook IPA, and all was right with the world. We had some tasty Dagoba chocolate afterwards (Xocolatl, with cayenne pepper, and Eclipse 87%, the darkest dark chocolate I've ever had).

Saturday was grey, but I got a few things done. I bought new printer ink cartridges, so we could print out our TurboTax forms. We get to pay the government quite a few bucks this year, much to our chagrin. I wouldn't be quite as annoyed if our money was actually getting used for anything good. Conservative? Is that what Republicans are? What the hell does that mean? Fight an expensive, ill-informed, strategically idiotic war and just let the deficit keep growing? Is that the platform that the Republicans stand on? Brilliant. Here's my check, Bush, you incompetent, backward moron. Even the staunch Republicans among my coworkers have run out of excuses for you. The fact that I have to pay for your mistakes infuriates me.
{deep breath}
Anyway, in addition to reading a bit and doing some grocery shopping, our Saturday evening concluded with drinks at a bar in Durham with an old friend of Lindsey's, the friend's sister, and the sister's boyfriend. It was a pretty well-educated, well traveled group, so the evening was stimulating. The boyfriend, Dmitriy, is a Russian-born PhD who is a chemist at UNC Chapel Hill. Among many other things, we talked about graduate studies. Perhaps it was the two pints of Allagash White talking, my something inside me, again, told me that I need to be done with the menial shit that I'm doing and earn a PhD in English. I'd rather be teaching and writing than shovelling bullshit for Big Pharma. At any rate, I think I'm too much of a pain in the ass to not be an academic.

The next morning, I swilled down a pot of coffee as I made scrambled eggs with cheese and rosemary roasted potatoes on the super duper quantum leap of potato technology pan. I was pleased with myself. I went out and wandered around a couple of stores for fun. At HomeGoods, I got an Emile Henry pan for only fifteen bucks. It's a fun store, if you're a dork like me. I went next door to Total Wine and got a couple of my favorite $10 reds, J. Vidal Fleury's Cote-du-Rhone and Tenuta del Portale Starsa Basilicata. I also got The Reverend there.

For dinner, Lindz cooked a very tasty gnocchi/meatball/red sauce dish out of a Rachael Ray cookbook. We really get into a groove of enjoying the weekend just before it ends. Bummer.

Extreme Makeover: Orangewino Edition

The duvet cover in the guest room is a turquoise and brown item from Anthropologie. I like the color combination, so I chose it for my blog. I took a black and white picture of my maple cutting board and merged it with html color #00CCCC, and it is now the background (complete with knife marks).

I'm Still Here

First, the food. I made this salad of spinach, arugula, julienned carrots, red bell pepper, red onion, toasted almonds, shaved parmesan, flank steak and blood oranges. We dressed it simply with olive oil, balsamic vinegar, coarse salt and pepper. It was pretty durn good.


I've been lazy about posting here. Sometimes I don't feel like I have much to say. Days in the cubicle farm trudge along like clones in grey suits marching off a cliff's edge: all the same, all fruitless. Well, not entirely fruitless. The paycheck serves its purpose. Work is work, whether or not one applies a dreary metaphor to it. Life away from work has been just fine. But...

My surviving grandmother had a major stroke. She suffered a very serious medical incident, but, when I take the long view, things are good. She is in a better nursing home than we hoped for. She and her daughter (my mother) are speaking for the first time in years. Grandpa is being looked after by the family more than previously was the case. As my sister aptly put it, a giant alarm clock has gone off.

I liked it better when my family and I were immortal. The years have slithered by stealthily, and now they grip my heart with an iron fist. I am fat, stiff and slow. Family members, whom I once viewed as eternal and immutable, wane and yield their lives. Members of my wife's family suffer various maladies as well. All I can do is get busy and live more.