notes from the wordsmith trenches
Tanner thinks his dad should take
his broken down ole car to Maxwell’s.But in the divorce
I got the mechanic.
It was strange to dream of you once more.
Your crisis rippled through households to me.
Past hurts, anger and duties
now mine alone.
I am submerged
already wet
in a dishpan of daily demands,
washing the plates while you watch,
asking for more
this time I throw one
and break it.
I can fix any toilet
if you don’t mind getting wet
(and it helps if you have a second bathroom because
sometimes it takes me a long time).
I also install shut-off values and new faucets.
I wasn’t going to start
but in the new house
(my house),
the toilet was the first thing to go.
And the plumber
is cute
but expensive.
The No Kiss Blogfest–a scene in which they don’t.
(Links to more non-kisses here.)
From a work in progress:
“Do you want help?” Declan asked.
Julie shook her head. “It’s all done. And I only have the one roller.”
“I can do the trim.”
“The paint has to dry first.”
Dec stopped in the doorway, which blocked her way out of the room. “Am I interfering with something?”
“I don’t know,” Julie confessed. “You’re wearing a suit and you spend all your time doing odd jobs for people. Don’t you want to, oh, take a night off? Go a movie?”
“Cinema’s in Glenkillen.” Read the rest of this entry »
Orange peel boil
I don’t like baking cookies–all that monkeying with the sheets and trying to drop the same amount of dough so they cook to the same amount of brownness. I do like the holiday smells, though, so I put a pot of this on the stove.
Mulled spice
Eat an orange, throw the peel in the pot
Eat an apple, throw the core in
4 bay leaves
A teaspoon or two whole cloves
Half a cinnamon stick
Handful of cranberries if you’ve got them
Pinch of nutmeg or cardamom
Fill the pot half full of water, bring to a boil and then reduce heat to a simmer. Let it simmer as long as you want good smells; you can keep adding water.
“At core, men are afraid women will laugh at them, while at core, women are afraid men will kill them.”
–Gavin de Becker
From time to time, readers who’ve been throwing books get online to complain about a hero who hasn’t made amends satisfactorily. “I needed more grovel,” they might complain. The character has behaved so badly that their redemption arc must include a direct, concrete apology to the heroine to be worthy of a happily-ever-after. Are the acts of repentance sufficient? Does the hero seem sincere? Lists have been made of books with satisfying groveling scenes.
~
‘Tis the season for multiple opportunities to see Love, Actually: a great or terrible Christmas romance. One factor in the wide-ranging attitudes toward the film may be whether you buy the grovels in the several story lines. Read the rest of this entry »
My current TV binge is Arrow, an adventure melodrama based on the Green Arrow comics. A playboy billionaire, missing presumed dead for five years, is finally able to return home. He’s learned things about his city and his family, though, so he’s back with a secret vigilante quest. Back to his family, who also have secrets.
Nicole Peeler recently wrote about her current TV crack, Sleepy Hollow. I submit that you can’t truly know that a new show, with no back catalog, is cracktastic–you haven’t tested the premise until you’re still up at 2 a.m., having watched six episodes in a row and cuing up the next one (“I can stop any time! But first I’m going to finish this season!”)
Pretty sure last week the lower pec scar was two centimeters to the left.
There’s a season of Arrow available on Netflix, which I worked though pretty fast–the faster to return to regularly scheduled life, right?–all the while questioning the appeal. It’s not heavy on the nuance: the actors spend a lot of time shouting at each other, or speaking through clenched teeth, making some impassioned statement about duty to family before throwing sidelong glances at everyone in the room and running off to perpetuate their secrets. Read the rest of this entry »
whole-grain baguettes
I’m a wing-it kind of cook. After thirty years in the kitchen, my stock meals are things like stir fry, where the only crucial chemistry is oxidation. Measuring and procedure can be casual and adjusted to the materials at hand. My introduction to serious baking was in the pages of The Cake Bible by Rose Levy Birnbaum, which I bought for its recipes for wedding cakes and kept using for its analysis of the chemistry involved. It’s baking for wonks as well as cake lovers; one recipe goes into detail about how the cake will brown so you can use it to determine whether your oven thermostat is accurate. Read the rest of this entry »
We baked something recently (probably that rhubarb pie) that means that every subsequent preheating of the oven results in clouds of smoke, bad enough that I swear that this time, this time, I will clean the oven thoroughly once it cools off. Then of course I forget until the next smoke bomb and dinner deadline. Today is perfect weather for sitting in front of the open oven and writing (what to do when you don’t have a fireplace), however, and I am about to embark upon a baking project with Elizabeth Able; time to deal with whatever is in the bottom of the oven.
The foaming oven cleaner works its magic
And lo! I have a tool for this project: a bottle of oven cleaner bought at an Amway presentation I was dragged to many years ago. The label required my glasses to read, but since the instructions comprised about two sentences and the rest of the label was warnings, I decided these would double as safety goggles. I donned rubber gloves. I removed the lid—or tried—squeeze here, twist there, consider the various vise grips and X-Acto knives in the building, squeeze and twist, and bingo, we’re back in business. Read the rest of this entry »
Kid the Younger does some shoveling but also yard art.
Kid the Elder, the one who can do some serious yardage with a snow shovel, and I just devoured lunch. Central Missouri has had its second big snowstorm in less than a week, and we’re dancing out that “Food is fuel” tune. I’ve cooked for every meal, baked cake and panettone, in part to have an excuse to turn the oven on but also because my usual strategy–leftovers for lunch–doesn’t work when you don’t have any leftovers. That’s one part kids home all day due to canceled school, but the other part snow shoveling is hard work–even more effective than standing by the open oven door.
This second snow was not as thick as the forecasters thought it could be, but it’s at least as heavy. The storm started as rain and switched to sleet, then to big gloppy flakes; in the early hours of the morning the temperature was 32, and during my first round of shoveling I was enveloped in a thin Scotch mist. We share a driveway with college-kid neighbors who have had classes canceled today as well. One was up to clear their back stoop–as it turns out, so she could get into the downstairs apartment. Read the rest of this entry »
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