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 We're pretty
sure Blake is insane, and that's fine: it gives him something more in
common with me. The latest manifestation is this bag thing. He happily
spends large chunks of time in it. He'll emerge when the phone rings or
when I get up--he doesn't like me peering in the mouth of the bag at him
but also doesn't think I should get up to pee or get a glass of water
and since he notices I'm gone he's clearly peering out the mouth of the
bag at me.
At some point this afternoon he turned into a foot boy, so I covered
my feet with a blanket, until RDC told
me his new thing is that he loves the blanket as much as he does feet,
socks, and tie-dye. Great. So I shoved him in his cage for time out, where
he whined and paced and begged so piteously that I let him out, whereupon
he promptly fell asleep on my knee. Such a good boy. All he wants is to
be loved. By a sock.
I cannot believe
this day. It is the first time in almost four years that I have seen it
rain continuously, all day. I've seen rain pour down in passionate, two-
or three-hour tempests; I've seen snow in white-out, day-long snowstorms.
This gently persistent rain is new in my experience in Denver and reminds
me why the populace of Denver is, in general, in better shape than that
of Connecticut: better weather. I have sat sluglike reading and writing
all day and doing nothing. I have griped more than once that it's hard
to be a couch potato in Denver: there's too much sun for that. Today I
revisited my inner potato.
I also ate my inner
potato. We made Andrew Weil french fries. (Is all this Weilism is getting
boring?) Take three medium baking potatoes, scrub and blind them, and
slice them into eight wedges. Combine olive oil, rosemary, garlic (he
said two cloves but we used five), and salt and pepper (and we added Tabasco),
toss the wedges to coat them. Bake for 45 minutes. You don't think I'm
going to get up to get measurements or temperatures, do you? You forget
I'm a potato.
The thing that cracked me up is that RDC, being the cook, read me the recipe because I was supposed to help cook (a rare occurrence). So I did the manual stuff like scrubbing and blinding the 'taters and grinding the salt. Then I read the recipe myself. "Bake for 45 minutes?" RDC said he had left out that bit because he figured I wouldn't want to wait. This was at 3:30 on a Saturday afternoon. Neither of us is patient when hungry. Then I read the statistics. Per serving: 115 calories, 3g protein, 3g fat, 20g carbohydrate, etc.
Only 115 calories per serving? But how many servings? I flipped back to the beginning of the recipe. "Makes six servings." Six? Well, our little snack for two packed 345.
(You'll notice I got the statistics. I had to start Buddy's supper.)
It is so wet that
the Persians from the apartment across the way are sitting between the
banisters of their deck railing instead of muddying their paws in the
wet grass. We should have put the deck furniture in the yard for a shower.
Someone asked me
about the division of photographs, remarking that there are no photographs
of RDC, that he's cropped out of the Hallowe'en shot, waah waah waah.
How do you spell the baby's cry kind of wheah waah? I spell the slang
for yes "yeah" and the exultant exclamation "yea" because I am way too
old fashioned to spell it "yay," although not so old fashioned I don't
use "way" as an intensifier.
Talking about the photograph album, wasn't I? It could have been my imagination or the particular phrasing of the question, "May I ask why?" that made me laugh, like there was some big Mystery behind it all, some inner working of lisa. I scanned in the new jpegs on the Mac (of course) and then later in the day worked on the pages on the teensy-screened laptop. I wanted 'em up and I didn't care how they went up if caring meant I was going to have to work much 14" PC screen instead of a 19" Mac one.
But I'm not surprised that someone asked about RDC or rather, RDC's absence from my pages in general, considering he's my roommate and husband. There are three pictures of RDC on our site: on the index page with the monster Blake and two on Rich's index page. I don't have much about him in the journal or elsewhere because he's asked me not to. He'd rather represent himself, and I've mostly honored that request.
I asked him about the photographs on the way back from supper last night and he doesn't care about those. So whenever I remember to turn on the scanner before the desktop system, I'll do some more of RDC. Further reports as events warrant.
Supper
last night. When will I learn, when will I ever learn? We went to Le Central,
which is about our favorite Denver place. I like a restaurant that I can
both afford and place the reservation and my order in French at. We were
trite and married and ordered the same entrée, une melange. A tenderloin
and a stuffed quail with wild mushrooms, after splitting an appetizer
of escargots en brioche. Garkon asked how we wanted our tenderloins, and
RDC claimed medium for himself and predicted I'd ask for rare. "Walking,
actually," I asked. "Bleu," Garkon clarified.
Is "bleu" rare? Why not "rouge"? Apparently because there's a difference
between rare and bleu. I didn't remember to ask what "rare" is but "bleu"
rhymes with "moo" for a reason. Actually it doesn't rhyme. Anyway, extremely
rare beef does have a blue tinge, and that's what I ate. I believe the
rarer a piece of flesh is, the more its own specific--as in species--taste
is evident. Raw tuna is much tastier than cooked tuna; why shouldn't raw
beef be tastier than cooked beef? I keep thinking that the ideal meat
situation would be more than that of The
Restaurant at the End of the Universe: the cow walks up to you
and recommends its various cuts but then instead of nipping off to shoot
itself and get cooked, it painlessly excises a slice of muscle and drops
it on your plate, still faintly pulsing.
Naturally I want the Douglas Adams, willing version, because I am so hypocritical about my food choices that I doubt I could face the slaughterhouse. I have never even caught and killed and cleaned a single fish I've eaten. I think one of the problems of industrializing food production is that in distancing the consumer from the consumed, the consumer's conscience isn't assaulted with the bloody, gory, intimate details. And I'm as removed as the next person and as blissfully ignorant, and this could be a tangent but not now.
This is what I
actually have to learn: When we were served I reminded myself never to
order quail again. Even Cornish game hens are a little too small. The
problem is not with the dead animal on my plate as such but how much its
diminutive size is reminiscent of a cockatiel. I have never seen a plucked
and roasted cockatiel and hope I never do, and as small as a plucked quail
is, it looks about the size of a 'tiel with full plumage. So my first
thing ever to learn is No More Quail. (I did eat this one, though. RDC
suggested it was more the size of a pigeon, which eased my qualms about
that quail.)
My second
thing to learn is about dessert. A difficult concept for me to grasp but
one important to my health is that if I don't eat this Oreo now, Oreos
as a whole will not go extinct and I can have one later. I don't need
nearly as many as I want nor as many as are available. Also I was raised
to clean my plate in a restaurant because this is a treat and expensive--despite
Friendly's being the extent of it--and besides, I wanted to eat everything
anyway since a McDonald's plain burger and small fries doesn't go very
far. My sister hates that I still do this. So I ordered mousse au chocolat,
and nibbled the four hazelnuts off the top, and ate mousse, which was
served in something I want to call a soupçon because it sounds classier
than teacup sans handle. I ate about half and felt my craving sated. Furthermore,
my belly began to ache. I stopped. I set down my spoon.
The cup sat in front of me, still half full. The taste lingered on my tongue. I picked up the spoon again and slowly, as slowly as RDC sipped his cognac, finished it all.
I hate that in myself. It is so stupid. My mind is satisfied, my belly is oversatisfied, my conscience pipes up with information about calories and fat (and more information about wasting resources) and still I eat.
We had had
to park a distance away and I was glad of the chance to breathe and to
stretch before driving home. Blake was pleased to have us home before
10, his usual bedtime, and woke up entirely. There was an amazingly bad
propaganda movie on TCM, "Wings for the Eagle." Its first 20 minutes,
all I was awake for, wasn't as cheesy as "Destination
Tokyo" (a low point for Cary Grant), but close.
Are there
tongue models the way there are hand and foot models? Hand and foot models
are the contemporary equivalent of growing your fingernails dozens of
inches long to prove you need do no work. There's an ad for a postage
meter on television which features about a man about to lick a stamp (with
Cliff from "Cheers" on it). There's a closer-up of a tongue than I ever
want to see, more detail than I want to see, like the scene in "Something
About Mary."
I'm watching
"War Games."
One of the few redeeming qualities of this movie (besides Ally Sheedy's
bendiness) is that it portrays a computer able to learn a lesson the grown-ups
of the Cold War very nearly couldn't. PLT
told me the computers in "Alien"
were dumbed down because in 1980 computers were in fact capable of more
than the public would believe. The public presumably would believe in
interplanetary travel and aliens "Hello-My-Babying"
out of people's guts but not in the computers of a mere five years later--I
would guess because it's easier to believe the incomprehensible than the
merely nigh-possible.
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