I mean, uh, it’s horrible and cold and you wouldn’t like it. Yeah.
Well, none of the tourists believe me, either, and all the attractions (Barbara’s Fish Trap, for example) are very crowded.
The sky is blue, the air is warm, I’m wearing a tank-top. Ben and I went for a walk at the Point, and I took my fleecy off. I *never* take my fleecy off while walking up there, it’s too cold. So this, today, is one of the five beautiful days we get per year. In a month it’ll be foggy and cold, but for now the flowers are amazing (we counted 30 different types of flower blooming in our backyard), the sun is warm, and it’s just like summer.
We had Ben’s family over for brunch today, and we had all different yummy food. We decided to make all the food ourselves, not do a potluck, so we picked yummy simple things. Homefries, a frittata* (gruyere, mushroom, and scallions), braised greens (chard** and kale), a fruit salad (strawberries, mango, orange, and grapefruit), a bean salad, and something Sunset Magazine calls an “apple oven cake”, which I’ve made several times now and is super yummy (butter and brown sugar, apples and a little cinnamon, with an egg/flour/milk mixture to hold it together). It was all a big hit, but the apple stuff was the biggest hit, and was definitely the easiest to make. :) Oh yeah, and mimosas. Except a bunch of us had orange juice-free mimosas, aka champagne. Mmm, it was good.
We managed to prepare a lot of stuff last night, and get everything chopped and ready this morning, so we could just compile everything and cook it at the last minute when they were here. The homefries took longer than we expected, and we were waiting for them to finish before starting everything else, but everything came together perfectly for us to sit down with all of the food ready (except the frittata, which was a little slow, so I guess it was only nearly-perfect). It was so yummy. And even though it seemed like a lot of food, everything was finished off except the homefries and bean salad. And the ingredients for a second apple oven cake. So we’ll have those for breakfast tomorrow!
None of Ben’s family have been over since Ben finished my office, so I straightened it all up (no extra papers or boxes anywhere in sight!) and we showed it off. It’s so nice and comfortable in there. Everyone was very impressed with Ben’s handiwork.
Last night Ben and I thought to pull out the two of my mom’s paintings*** that I have, and we discovered that one of them looks wonderful in the room, so we’re going to hang it up. The other is too dark (lots of black), so I think maybe I’ll trade it in for a different one, because there’s plenty of space for two on my wall. And it’ll be nice to have Mommy art hanging in my office. :)
Other than that… I started writing a vampire story the other day. I don’t do vampires, but I had a title that included vampires, so it had to be about vampires.
Recently I’ve noticed that I have trouble distinguishing between “I must continue working on story x so that I’ll finish it some day” and “I must only work on story x, to the exclusion of all other stories or writing”–the latter of which is incredibly stifling to me. And then I wonder why I don’t want to write. So, I’m trying to ease up on myself and write whatever I want… while keeping in mind that I have Story X which I’d like to be working on if I’m so inspired. In other words, I must write in order to write. BIC.
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* How do you spell that? Firefox doesn’t like fritata, frittata, or fritatta. How about frittatta? No, that can’t be it. Google + wikipedia tell me it’s frittata.
** I’ve discovered I really like braised chard, whereas kale tends to be more tough even when braised.
*** You can see her art at her website, but neither of the two I have are up there so I can’t show them to you specifically. My mom is so prolific that the website doesn’t even contain a tenth of all of her art. If we included all of her drawings, it might not even be one percent. So, the likelihood of me having one of those is pretty small. :-/
†And with a new update, WordPress + LivePress will properly cross-post daggers (†) to LiveJournal, so my footnotes should go more smoothly. Yay!
