Nasty night leads to better things

Y'all, last night was the absolute worst. A pox on that flu shot! I woke up at 2:00 am on the precipice of full-scale puke, feverishly chilly, shaking and sweating concurrently. For nearly two hours, I just huddled under my comforter, shivering and increasingly wet and trying not to bother T. I think my chills woke him up though because he offered to get Advil, and I said "yes, please." It helped some, and I got back to sleep for a couple hours. When I awoke, I felt as if I were on another planet, and good god almighty, you should have seen my hair. I looked like a wilting Medusa. Ugly!

A few hours later, a good pal came over so I could teach her how to make Nanny's cranberry sauce. It was so nice to spend time together in such a way, not least because we talked without being interrupted the whole time. After she left, I made my own batch and then boogied to school to help sketch the background set for the second grade play. My adobe buildings were better than my forest. Fortunately, my friend, C, was there too, and her pines were totally redemptive. At one point I looked at us, spread out on huge, bright blue, taped-together paper, and thought bemusedly, "we are two very well-educated women, and here we are on a floor, sketching a Native American backdrop at 2pm on a Thursday and kinda stressing about proportion and scale." You just never know where life will take you. It was fun frankly.

Back home, and Ol and I made vanilla fig scones for a breakfast I'm hosting tomorrow. I need to get on the cherry-spelt scone bandwagon too, but first there is the pasta (made the dough an hour ago) I need to roll out and the underlying nausea (still!) with which I must deal.

Who joins me in a shout-out to the Senate for passing the Employment Non-Discrimination Act today?? Finally, it is illegal to discriminate when hiring on the basis of gender identity or sexual orientation. And we've got marriage equality in IL! Yee-haw!

**PS- now taking orders for holiday-time Cranberry Sauce!

Persimmon picking, amazing skies

Today was spectacular. Truly, the skies were absolutely dazzling, turning hourly like page after magnificent page of the most incredible illuminated manuscript on which you could ever lay eyes. As Percy and I rounded the turn off of Fordham, back onto Mass Ave, I looked heavenward and was wowed. It was as if M.C. Escher had gotten hold of an airbrush cannon and gone wild.

Meanwhile, a friend I met through one of my canning classes emailed me a post from her neighborhood listserv: someone had a persimmon tree, pregnant with fruit, in her front yard, and anyone was welcome to come pick. By the time I arrived, the lower boughs were bare, but there were some good knobs and forks offering themselves as a crude ladder. Clad in a silk shirt, cardigan and my trusty Toms, I scurried up that tree like a squirrel.

At the apex, my head was in between two electrical wires, but all was well, and I remembered what youthful fun it is to climb a tree. Getting down is another thing. I plucked six persimmons -the squirrels had already massacred so many!- with the intention of giving most away to my persimmon-loving pal, C. I'll try my annual "can I ever love persimmons" test when the remaining ones are fully ripe. They are a pretty fruit.

Then to school to pick up my munchkins (both of whom threw insanely outlandish tantrums today over NOTHING; is this still the aftermath of stupid Daylight Savings? I could kill it.) and then on and through an after-school afternoon. We witnessed a glorious sunset that seemed to grow more incredible by the moment until suddenly, night raced in and with it a perfect crescent moon. Ol said, "you know what would happen if that moon was a full moon? LUPIN!" Harry Potter reference, y'all. Oh lawd.

I finally got those bozos to bed after a complete #momfail when I suggested a competition: "who can get into bed, head on pillow, first?" BOTH, count them BOTH, kids managed to injure themselves in the simple and, wait for it, done-every-night act of getting into bed. Both were wailing about their pain, and honestly y'all, I just said, "goodnight."

Realizing that the flu shot to which I'd acquiesced earlier today was sinking its flu'y tentacles into me (damn you, flu shot!), I took two Advil and poured a little glass o' red. I roasted some broccoli and also an eggplant, two of my favorite recipes running through my mind screaming MAKE US. So I did. Broccoli with pimentón oil, and burnt eggplant with pomegranate. Aah. Both hit the spot in every way!

Interesting book and review of it

I have definitely NOT had time to read The XX Factor: How the Rise of Working Women Has Created a Far Less Equal World, a new book by Alison Wolf, but I did read and really enjoy this book review of it. Sounds like a real feat of writing, a work that dispenses with some cliches, challenges a number of assumptions and is likely a tour de force to read. I hope to find the time.