duck-shaped pain

2000-06-28
Where I Work My Way Through A Pile

After spending this much of the morning writing stuff, I decided to actually leave the house and go do something. I decided to go to the library, because I had a book to take back and also because I had a ton of magazines that needed to get rid of. Our local library has a magzine exchange area where you can bring in old magazines and catalogs for others to take. I get a lot of stuff this way. A few months ago, someone left almost every issue of Bon Appetit from 1991 through 1999. I've been working my way through them slowly, and I still have four bags of them left to read.

On the way to the library, I stopped at a yard sale. It's very, very rare for a yard sale to be held on Tuesday in these parts, so I'm usually sort of dubious when it happens. I ended up stopping, and actually found quite a few things. I rarely find books I want at yard sales, but today I found these (for a quarter apiece):

  • The Back Country - Gary Snyder

  • Can You Trust A Tomato in January? - the Hidden Life of Groceries and Other Secrets of the Supermerket Revealed - Vince Staten

  • Raven's Exile: A Season on the Green River - Ellen Meloy

  • Some odd vegetarian cookbook printed in Singapore. It has all sorts of odd recipes for Indonesian dishes and the life, but they all look pretty good.

While I was at the library, I ran into B., my dad's secretary of sorts. I've known B. for a long time, because she used to be the secretary at another department at the college when I worked there, and I saw her all the time. She's a very nice woman, and I'm always glad to run into her. B. is recovering from hip surgery, and she also has a cane. Hers is bright red, much unlike my bright aluminum one.

We talked for awhile about how others have reacted to our injuries. B. was using a walker for a long time (I had the option to use one, but decided on crutches instead). She told me that the most polite and helpful people when she was using the walker, as far as holding doors, getting out of the way, etc., were high-school and college-age boys. The least helpful were middle-aged women, like herself. She said a lot of the women her age she ran into didn't want to look at her using the walker and went out of their ways to avoid her. "It was like my condition hit too close to home for them, and they didn't want to think that this might happen to them," she said.

I've found that the least helpful people to me have been teenage girls, and the most helpful have been older men. I don't know why this is.

I then came home, since it was blazingly hot this afternoon. It was raining this morning, but that went away and the 100-degree norm was quickly restured. I soaked beans for dinner, and ended up making black bean soup for dinner. It turned out wonderful - it was the best black bean soup I've ever made. I didn't actually use a recipe this time, but rather just put whatever ingredients I had in it: black beans, onions, red peppers, tomatoes, green olives, mustard, sherry, curry powder and basil. And some other stuff. The problem with not using a recipe is that I may never be able to duplicate it, so I think I'm going to try and remember exactly what I did.

Right now, I'm going to some videos I checked out from the library. I'm just about to start one called The Politics of Water and then, I'm going to re-watch the entire Cadillac Desert documentary series, which is also about water and is based on the book of the same name. I'm very interested in water, if you couldn't tell.

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