Caveat Lector

I’ve done up everything that can be done up in advance, so now I’m taking a quick blog break before the frantic round of “if it’s on the counter, cook it!” that always rounds out a major meal effort on my part. Time to grab husband by scruff of neck to clean and set table. Time to practically empty the fridge of vegetables. Time to hope I don’t burn anything (including myself!), break anything, ruin anything, or get the timing so off that I can’t serve on time.

(It’s never happened. But I worry anyway.)

Grateful for books. Grateful for friends. Grateful for games. Grateful for music. Grateful for people who know how to make the human body work right; grateful for better health than last year at this time. Grateful for strangers who send me hellos by email and then aren’t strangers any more. Grateful for unknown people who send me news and give my name to other people who might employ me. Grateful for home, solvency financial and academic, half-decent job prospects. Grateful for cats. Grateful for husband.

Grateful for having enough, and then some. Hope you are too.

This is, bar none, the worst time of year to run out of vegetable broth. I’ve got a cauldron of it simmering on the stove; I hope it doesn’t push back the cooking schedule too far.

This year’s menu, now that I’ve been shopping and actually know what it is:

• Soft rolls and butter.
• Molletes. I’m making these in imitation of the ones at Frida’s Mexican Grill, which even my husband likes. Bias-cut baguettes spread with refried black beans (cold, please, not hot) and topped with tomato, onion, and grated farmer’s cheese. (And probably some other things too, but we’ll try this and see if it works.)
• Corn chowder, because there is always corn chowder and it is always so damn good it makes me wonder why I bother with the rest of the meal.
• Quorn roast, because we tried it last year and liked it. With cashew-nut gravy, ditto. (And I’ll throw in some pine nuts, because they need to get used up.)
• Succotash.
• Mashed potatoes.
• Herb dressing.
• Eggnog.
• Non-alcoholic sparkling cider-type-stuff. (It was on sale. Eggnog is heavy. Shut up.)
• Chocolate cream pie with sweetened whipped cream. (This year’s experiment, now that I know I can do pie crusts.)

Yikes. Must go cook.

Won’t forget to take my calendar to the physical therapist again, as I did last time. Because my memory played tricks on me, and an appointment I thought was for today was actually for two days ago. Oops.

Fortunately, though I could stand to have my shoulder worked on, I’m in pretty fair shape, all told. I can do a full day’s work. Elbow hurts on flexion, but doesn’t seem to mind extension any more. Some wrist ickies, but only after a lot of work, and I suspect a PT session will get rid of them.

So I’m damn thankful. I’m clearly healing. Definitely something to be thankful for.

Remember my on-again-off-again maybe-client? Supposedly it was on again. Except I found out today that the terms weren’t what I was led to believe they would be, and I can’t in good conscience accept them.

So I said no. I could use the money, I grant you, but “no” was what I had to say and so I said it.

I should have said “no” a long time ago, frankly, and if some of the people at Maybe-Client weren’t my friends, I would have, because I have been yanked around pretty unmercifully over the last year or so. It’s really hard to work with people who keep forfeiting my respect.

Ah, well. “No” has finally been said. I’m sorry I had to say it. But there it is.

My dad was always convinced he was gonna show ’em. Those nincompoops in his department who were keeping him down, not giving him graduate students, not funding him, making him teach crap intro courses. He’d show ’em. Someday, he’d show ’em.

He didn’t even particularly care, I don’t think, about having his own research agenda vindicated, as long as he could prove to his own satisfaction that his department were a bunch of evil know-nothing blowhards. He used to put his clueless undergrads through exercises designed solely to Show ’Em. ’Em, of course, not being the undergrads, but the department.

Everything the department did in his general vicinity got filtered through his bitterness. Everything. Any positive gesture he called insincere or forced; anything that affected him negatively he considered to be aimed at him personally. Any disagreement with him, no matter how minor or well-justified, was an attack. Nothing was neutral. Nothing happened, nothing could happen that didn’t involve him, that wasn’t aimed at keeping him down.

But someday he’d show ’em. He’d show ’em!

What I don’t understand is what he thought his department was supposed to do about this. Or even objectively, leaving him out of it, what they ought to have done. What could they have done to defuse his hatred? He hadn’t left them anything to do but be evil, even if they didn’t care to be.

I ask these questions, of course, because I and mine are on the receiving end of a few of these vendettas (never mind the obvious application to the current US political situation), and I have yet to figure out how to deal with them myself. Once you’re wearing demon’s horns, how do you cut them off? Where’s the win, being open to people who only know how to hate you?

Well, lookie lookie, I been headhunted.

(No, it’s not precisely the first time, but close.)

This particular headhunter demonstrated a singular level of cluelessness, though. He left a message on my answering machine last night containing his name and number and a vague assertion that “he had been told he needed to talk to me,” which sounds like it could mean anything from a job offer to a lawsuit. Just very strange.

I called a little bit ago and heard his pitch, which he mumbled over like an old dog with a bone. Not jobs I was interested in (human-resources or management), and for a financial-services company, very possibly a slightly dodgy one. Certainly their headhunter’s behavior didn’t help the company pass my ethical sniff test.

Eh, well. Whoever passed on my name, thanks; it was kind. But I think I’ll stick with libraries and publishing outfits.

Finished the cataloguing paper. It is a long way from deathless prose, and it’s too incomplete to be publishable (it’s missing a survey of existing correction tools; I ran out of space and research time, frankly), but it will serve the purpose.

Cataloguing-by-analogy journal is due a week from Tuesday, and then I’ve got my database project to dig into. Then the semester’s basically over; I’m not wasting worry on the third database quiz or the cataloguing final, as I could blow both high, wide, and handsome (not that I expect to) and still get out of the classes with Bs.

I wish I knew what was up with Amazon thinking David’s book isn’t out until February. That’s nonsense. It’s out now.

If you’re in the States, I recommend ordering direct from the publisher. If you’re overseas, try Powell’s, which unlike Amazon has its head on straight.

Sorry for the confusion.

I bought a house in large part so that I’d have a guestroom. This is the stone-cold truth. I believe in hospitality, if nothing else as a tiny rejection of the human tendency to conflict.

Shame I’m so bad at it, though.

I will say in my own defense that my guestroom is a pleasant little place (though it needs a decent sittable chair, and if we manage to stay in Madison it will get one). I keep the cats out of it, so it doesn’t succumb to the rest of the house’s habit of getting covered in fur. There are runners along the side and foot of the bed so nobody has to freeze their feet going to the bathroom at night. And perhaps somebody can be cold under a wool blanket, a down comforter, and a quilt, but I haven’t had them to my house yet.

And while I’m not the world’s foremost gourmet chef, I can make a thoroughly edible black-bean soup.

What I can’t do? Extended conversation. My land, am I awful at keeping my guests amused. At some point, I just have to run off and hide in my office keying Greek or something equally arcane.

“You’re an introvert,” my husband told me yesterday, amused. Well, yes, yes I am. But that’s a fact, not an excuse.

I did get to my first poetry slam Friday night, which while rather noisy (and not at all impartially emceed) was pretty good fun. Spoken-word poetry definitely fills a void in the arts scene; it’s got bits and pieces of theatre, improv, music, language, politics, memoir, even essay. I was wondering where the hell America’s socio-artistic conscience had got to. Now I know. It’s hanging out at open mics.

I couldn’t drag myself to the slam finals last night; the noise would have been too much for me. But I now have my eyes open for more events of this kind. There is hope in them.

I’ve got all the Greek from the main text in; now it’s time to go back through the book and do the footnotes, which in classic SGML style have been smushed together at the end of the file.

Must say, this is taking rather less time than I thought it would. Though ask me again once we get to the proofreading stage.