zaziel
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I'tr�m breit vula�oz�o ye spalla ei�tlin nel�ffnes pieqi aummit su berwegr'ra'ao.

His Name is Meat; First Name's Dead

Wednesday, Sept. 1, 2004 -
Ap�sl�min ida corbalanyrtne 'ls�o rohl'daathi�m v� nen�a iroyss�rd.

We spent last weekend in the Bay Area. I was hoping I could get an entry posted last Thursday, but typical for this summer, nearly a week has been lost to busyness.

This has been one hard-workin' summer and I was working right up to the moment we left late* Thursday afternoon. I was mixing cookie dough, lots and lots of cookie dough. I wasn't planning to be back until Monday night and Sheralyn needed to bake and deliver seventy-eight dozen cookies, brownies and pretzels in the four days I was gone. Seventy-eight dozen. Sheesh. That's more than double our usual output, which is between eight and nine dozen each morning. I mixed, formed and 'frigerated fifteen batches of cookie dough on Thursday�at thirty-two cookies per batch, that's 480 cookies. Jer and the Fiend wanted to help, but the work goes faster if I stick to my routine and do most of the job myself. The only thing I had them do was pack the dough balls into tubs and stack them in the fridge. I don't freeze my cookie dough. Most of our cookies are drop cookies and you can't control the spread if you don't refrigerate them before baking, but freezing doesn't allow them to spread enough. First thing in the morning, I take the dough balls out of the fridge and let them warm at room temperature while I mix the dough for the next day's baking, and make the brownies. The brownie mixture can't be refrigerated; our brownies have to be poured, smacked� and baked immediately after the white of flour disappears into the chocolate. We don't frost our brownies. Frosting our Melt-In-Your-Mouth-Dark-Chocolate Brownies (we're thinking about trademarking them under the name Sinful) would be more than superfluous, more than gilding the lily�it would be a grave injustice.

She-Ra will be taking on the entire job of cookie production this fall. As soon as I'm allowed to drive again (Sept. 12�less than two weeks away! Hooyah!) I'll be spending more and more time working on the Central Coast�in fact, it looks like we'll be moving north this year, between Jer's fall and winter semesters. (Yeah, that requires a big fat pile of elucidation, doesn't it? I'll tell ya more later.) She-Ra was supposed to have help with the cookies this past weekend. We hired a sidekick for the Princess of Power, but instead of a Wonder Girl, we got an invisible one. With only two days notice, she requested time off this weekend for "personal reasons". She does that a lot. She's only a part-time slave, but in the month she's worked for us she has yet to put in a 15-hour week.

But at least the Invisible Girl didn't disappear with my truck and my favorite lawn mower.

Saturday morning, we were in Berkeley when I got two phone calls while we were at the the bar mitzvah of the Fiend's eldest brother's eldest son. (I know, I know�that requires a big fat pile of elucidation. Later, okay?) I have a dislike/hate relationship with my cell phone�the only reason I have a cell phone is because it's a required accoutrement for the twenty-first century businessman. I keep it turned off most of the time. I will diligently check for messages at reasonable intervals, but I refuse to be instantly accessible. When people think you're instantly accessible, they'll try to turn any situation into an emergency. I'm a gardener, fer chrissakes. There are no emergencies in gardening�if you ask me to jump, I'll say, "How 'bout a week from next Thursday?"

After the bar mitzvah, during lunch (both the bar mitzvah and lunch were held in the botanical gardens at UC Berkeley, which were too fabulous for words) I checked my messages. One call was from She-Ra: amazingly enough, the Invisible Girl had turned up for work that morning. Okay, that was a good thing, but it was nothing I needed to know. The other message was from Carlos Lofvendahl (the Inestimable Lofvendahl Bros are my partners in Yard Dogs, Ltd.�but you knew that already, didn't ya?): my Newest New Guy did not mow Mrs. Felnagle's lawn at nine o'clock that morning, nor Mrs. Herrera's at ten-thirty. Not a good thing, but why the fuck tell me? I was more than 600 miles away from the problem. I was eating salmon that melted on your tongue like butter, drinking a nice uncomplicated Zinfandel, and talking to a well-traveled author and his Italian wife (I was told later that she was an artist and a baroness) about the beauty of the California coast as compared to various European shorelines. If one of my minions had blown off work to spend a day at the beach, I was in the mood to find that entirely reasonable.

Later, when I found out he had blown off with my truck and my favorite lawn mower, I was not so well-disposed.

And now, since he and my truck and my favorite lawn mower are still missing, I am downright pissed.

~

* We had to push back our reservations from six to eight at a restaurant in Arroyo Grande where, after almost four hours of driving, we had dinner with our friends Tasha and Clive Endicott. Luckily their babysitter was able to accommodate the change in plans. Their 3-year-old daughter Sugar Magnolia (aka Maggie) has a new baby brother named Tennessee (aka Ten). We stayed Thursday night with the Endicotts. The children were asleep when we arrived at their house around ten-thirty, but Maggie woke up soon after our arrival and the baby started crying a few minutes later. Maggie insisted on getting out of her bed to greet us and the baby had to be nursed. Ten proved to be a big sturdy boy�I don't remember how old he is, but I felt none of my usual trepidation about handling babies when he was inevitably foisted upon me. Good-natured after he was fed, he was alert and active and Maggie was positively antic. She had a new kitten named Dizaliza. She told us, with only a tiny bit of prompting from her parents, that she loved her brother very much, but it was obvious she loved the kitten a lot more, evidenced by how often Dizaliza had to be rescued from Maggie's adoring stranglehold. I like children, I like goofing around with them, but I'm not as fascinated with them as their parents. Especially at the wagging end of a long-tailed day. We managed to wedge a glass of wine and a few words of adult conversation in between entertaining the children, but egads it was after midnight before the darling little angels were tucked into their beds.

� You need to smack the bottom of a pan of brownies before it goes into the oven, to level the mix.

<~>
Ap�sl�min ida corbalan� 'lse nesgla ugar�-cham sa cru ogrulho bat�oltha al�mv�sde.

last eleven:

Resurrection - Wednesday, August 31, 2005
Arts and Letters -
Friday, June 17, 2005
Domestic Obsessions -
Tuesday, April 5, 2005
The Kindness of Strangers -
Tuesday, April 5, 2005
Gone -
Saturday, April 2, 2005
Coming Back, Little By Little -
Saturday, April 2, 2005
Effing Around -
Thursday, March 31, 2005
Explicably Yours -
Wednesday, February 9, 2005
Things Too Innumerable To Mention -
Sunday, January 30, 2005
Mr. Armstrong -
Tuesday, November 23, 2004
The Pope in Our Kitchen -
Saturday, October 2, 2004



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Sa r'ji�o oss�vel meninonceiv �o poshik m�'�nch uscantebatahla o�r musiu o�r muiko.
Copyright � 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005 by gcs

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