dinner with friends

On Wednesday we had a light supper and put the baby to bed and then drank wine on the roof and talked until it was too dark to see each others' faces. This is the good stuff.

(And, hello, summer!)

you always remember your first time

I was searching for something else in my inbox and found this in a message I wrote to Ida four years ago:

Last night there was a terrible accident with buttercream.

Which also means I made some, for the first time ever, and it's wicked awesome. When I started beating in the butter it got grainy, and then smoothed out nicely... and then dissolved into this spongey mush of buttered sugar floating in slimy eggwhite: So. Totally. Gross. I vaguely remembered a recipe that said "Keep beating! It'll smooth out!" and of course I thought that I'd be the one exception and it would never ever work for me, but the clouds parted and all of a sudden it emulsified (emulsed?) into a perfectly smooth cream in this amazing moment of culinary drama. I recommend it.

I tried to figure out how many pounds of buttercream I've made since then but when it comes to butter I go all Watership Down and can't count past four (which happens to be the number of different flavors of leftover buttercream in my freezer right now).

yikes! April?

I'm swamped at work.

Still.

My office window faces west, and some afternoons I want to shove the poor plants onto the floor and take a nap on the sill.

My bangs are growing.

I read a lot. I finished Pride & Prejudice and Sense & Sensibility. Savage Inequalites got a little heavy so I picked up Emma; she's kind of a pain in the ass but I have to stick it out until she gets her comeuppance.

I just got the big green book and I read it more than I cook from it.

I got bonked on the head by a falling worklight last night but my pupils are still MER (thanks John Galt).

There are some blog posts buried in the draft folder and I swear I'll totally finish them like any day now.

Uh, that's about it.

Thanks for checking in.

xo.

Rumpus

Rumpie likes to play fetch the lizard.

photo essay in Ioway

This morning Brynn and I attended John's Art of Theater class to critique his students' acting scene presentations.  John introduced Brynn as a fellow member of the theater faculty (such subterfuge!) and me as a "guest artist from Seattle."  It wasn't until then that I noticed all of the girls were wearing pink and turquoise and high heels and eyeliner, and I had on a tweedy orange wool cardigan and -- yes -- a thermal undershirt.  

my barista/musician boyfriend totally bought

this sweater at the Chicken Soup Brigade

It's a little scary to walk into a strange classroom and start giving feedback.  Will they listen? Will it be helpful?  Do I actually have anything intelligent to say?  

It's a class for non-majors, so the scenes ran a predictable gamut of quality and believability,  but there were some surprisingly present and engaged performances and every single one of John's students was attentive and appreciative in the critiques.  Way to go, Prof. Kaufmann!

lost on the sidewalk outside the Theater portables

Afterward, Brynn really wanted me to see Kalona and the Amish Hardware Store.  Most of the stores in Kalona were closed, but we bought a rhubarb pie at the bakery and then headed out past the Cheese Shop and the Grocery Outlet, down roads lined with clotheslines full of blue jeans and aprons and ever-diminishing numbers of power lines.

There was a horse & buggy tethered in front of the hardware store and an SUV in the lot.  We wandered around marveling quietly at the astoundingly economical and comprehensive selection (bulk beans! kitten notebooks! giant underpants! tiny work gloves!) and eavesdropping on the Amish women behind the sewing counter.  They were speaking a mind-boggling pidgin of English and German -- I understand enough German to pick out phrases, but some of the vocabulary was clearly both and neither.  I bought a canning jar lifter and a gorgeously sharp steel paring knife ($3.39!) (how am I going to get it back to Seattle?) and a chicken handkerchief.

cluck

And then we saved a horse!

The buggy horse had wrenched the hitching rail and the posts had given way, so the poor guy was trapped in the buggy traces with a steel rail and three fence posts dangling from his bridle.  He was reasonably calm but rapidly getting less so.  Brynn stayed outside trying to calm the horse without getting close enough to spook him, and I ran back inside and alerted the owner -- she ran out, untied him while we held the rail (the rope was tied without a quick release; Brynn was appalled), and then retied him on the remaining rail and trotted back in before we made it out of the lot.  Not much sentiment wasted on working animals here.     

We had waffles and wi-fi for lunch.  Potato & dill for Brynn and sweet corn/apple/flax for me; grading papers and editing play post-mortem notes, respectively.  We boggled together at a coed with a wildly mussed hair, a misbuttoned coat, and jeans that were slipping well into her hinterlands.  She seemed sweet and unself-conscious and really enjoyed her French toast, though, so wherever she was coming from, we hope she enjoyed it.

look how fast her pen is moving!  

Brynn's at the gym and I'm playing fetch with Rumpie.  Broccoli soup and rhubarb pie for dinner, fingernail polish and a movie later, and an oncology appointment in the morning.  Hard to believe this trip is passing so quickly.

Yay!

Brynn and Rumpus in the dining room

is this for real?

I just got this audition announcement for an "alternative beverage" via a generally non-corporate-stooge listserv.

What's it going for here? Obama's coattails? Trust fund activists? Chinese dissident poverty chic? Is it a parody? I can't tell.

CHARACTER BREAKDOWN / PROJECT NEEDS:
Project Concept: Looking for performers that can show the juxtaposition of self-importance to sacrifice, self indulgence to poverty, and societal disconnect from the world. The concept will show that the key to cutting through the fog of greed and corporate lust that have orphaned the world’s invisible, is to opening people up to the alternative beverage Tibet@n Tea and the freedom that change unleashes.