Idle essays

And God bless us, every one.

Managed to get almost nothing done today, other than scribbling a post for Writers Plain & Simple and recording a couple of videos for the online magazine-writing course.

This was one of those mornings when you wake up tired, for reasons unknown. Ever have those? Guess it must be the result of not sleeping well. Or something.

Fiddled with QuickTime all morning without even noticing the time pass — took some doing to figure out how to make a video of a PowerPoint presentation and get the audio to run with it. Looks pretty good, and now it should be fairly easy to cook up a few more how-to-do-it videos for that bunch.

Back hurting as usual, very annoying. Plus, equally annoying, sitting around fooling with QuickTime meant I never got around to the planned a.m. mile-long walk. Fat fat fat fat…. So I decided to combine an ad-hoc yoga session with the physical therapy exercises. Helped some but certainly didn’t effect a cure.

Along about 1:30, prepared a nice little meal:  salmon with asparagus, dates, and corn tossed with red bell pepper (not bad), all cooked on the propane grill. Continued to diddle away the afternoon, again with modest results. Finally, along about 4:30 I could NOT hold my eyes open one. more. minute.

Stumbled off to bed, accompanied by dogs. Crapped out until dusk.

And now here’s the WEIRD part: when I woke up, the back pain was gone.

Completely, totally GONE!

That is weird, because normally any time spent inert on a bed freezes up the back and creates exuberant pain. So…wow! Several whole hours, pain-free!

Too good for words.

Out with the dogs: one mile, locked between one dog that tries to drag the human  forward up the street and another that tries to drag it backward. That was fun.

Now to edit some copy in front of a Bones rerun.

🙂

Here’s something for your Christmas delectation:

These exquisite performances are by the All Saints’ Episcopal Church Chamber Choir. Our choir director, Scott Youngs, recently posted them on YouTube. All Saints has three choirs, in addition to a choristers’ program for young singers: a chamber choir consisting of professional singers, a women’s chant choir, and the senior choir for us amateurs who like to sing along with the pro’s.

The church has an astonishing music program. I must confess that what lured me into the place was the music. One day, for reasons unknown, I happened to show up at a Sunday service, and for heaven’s sake here was this incredible music. I thought, “My Lord! It’s a free chamber music concert! All you have to do is throw a few bucks in the plate, sit through the religious palaver, et voilà!“

Well, from that point of course things grew more complicated, and the next thing you know I’m afflicting Scott with my old-lady voice — much, I imagine, as Hyacinth Bucket harasses her neighbor’s brother Emmet on Keeping Up Appearances. He has the grace to let me join the choir, which he must pray will drown me out. 😉

Listening to and working with these amazing singers every Wednesday evening and Sunday morning surpasses privilege. It’s a constant joy.

And…come to think of it, even the religion has weaseled its way into my heart — singing is, after all, a form of prayer. My father detested organized religion. He wouldn’t allow my mother to take me anywhere near a church. She would sneak me to an Episcopal church in San Francisco while he was at sea, but when he was on shore that was out of the question. He must be vibrating in his funeral urn!

Beauty is truth, truth beauty.

About to fly out the door: tons of work to do, interrupted by a couple of nuisance errands that can’t be put off to another day. But assuming you’d like to be entertained today, 101 Centavos kindly retweeted this rant I published at Writers Plain & Simple about the University of Virginia fiasco.

Drop by and give it a read. If you like it, do a little tweeting and retweeting of your own — I’m really working hard to build readership at that site and will appreciate any visibility you can share.

🙂

So, what Thanksgiving remnants are still strewn across the landscape of your life?

Hereabouts: Two pounds gained. Dayum! Now I’ve gotta get rid of that — it took six weeks to drop the two or three pounds gained during the endless stress marathon. Best thing to do, I guess, is just to starve for a couple of days. That was what finally worked to jump-start the weight loss last month.

More to the point: FOOD IN THE FRIDGE!

Holy mackerel, what a lot of Food in the Fridge. None of it is conducive to weight loss. 😀

I came away with half a pan of the (really incredibly delicious!) pan “dressing” we made for the party. It is, of course, mostly bread, the single most inimical foodstuff in the pantheon of delicious foods that loads the pounds on my bod’.

When I went to make this delectable, we were a little short on bread. M’hijito had picked up a couple of nice loaves from Sprouts, but they were focacccia and so not quite large enough to make as much dressing as we needed. I really wanted some cornbread but had neither eggs nor milk in the house and had no intention whatsoEVER of entering a grocery store the day before Thanksgiving. So I made a batch of regular yeast bread and substituted a cup of cornmeal for a cup of wheat flour.

The result was two particularly yummy loaves of cornmeal yeast bread. Put one and a third loaves into the dressing and then had…oh, yes! Bread!

Bread in the morning, bread in the evening, bread all throuuuugggghhhh the dayyyyy…. So good to eat.

Well. So. Bread “stuffing” adorned with leftover incredible turkey gravy for breakfast. Fresh home-made bread with butter on the side with the big noonday meal. Fresh home-made bread with butter, served up with a glass of wine, for evening snack. Oh, what the heck. How’s about another plate of bread and butter? And a splash more wine?

Inimical.

Meanwhile, I’d made a gigantic pot of turkey stock out of the bones from the Butterball pseudoturkey I’d bought and processed into food for the dogs. It made a lot, but it was watery. Like a Butterball itself, pretty flavorless.

But instead of throwing it out, I poured it into a bunch of storage containers and filled up the fridge with the stuff. That of course left no room for much else. Plus I need those containers, because over the next month I’m going to have to make several weeks’ worth of food for the dogs, not knowing how long it’s going to take to recover from the upcoming surgery. Assuming there is an upcoming surgery.

Today I poured all of that into a stock pot and set it on the stove over a low flame, where it’s gently simmering away as we scribble. The plan is to reduce it by about 30% to 50%. The result, I expect, should be pretty tasty, especially if a little wine is added to it. Sure smells nice right now!

Speaking of wine, I’ve developed a fondness for that vinho verde discovered during the search for lower-alcohol wines. Very low-brow, no doubt, what with its tendency to display a little fizziness. But it’s really VERY tasty as a simple white table wine — not too sweet, not too stringent, just a refreshing drink that actually tastes like a halfway decent wine. The price could not be more right — $8.99 at AJ’s, a joint whose wine prices make Whole Foods’ look like a bargain — and some brands are as low as 9% alcohol.

So far I haven’t found a comparable red wine, which is too bad. Some Beaujolais are acceptable, sort of, in terms of flavor, but they’re unpredictable (some are truly awful) and the alcohol content is up around 12%. Personally I tend to prefer reds, but I’m fast cultivating a taste for Portuguese whites.

Well, it’s getting late. Got to make a Costco run, a Home Depot run, and a variety of other runs. Read client copy. Pay subcontractors. Walk dogs. Walk me. And generally carry on. And so, to work…