duck-shaped pain

2000-08-23
Where I Set Myself Up For Possible Failure

Someone wrote me the other day to tell me that I hadn't been talking enough about food lately, which puzzles me, because I sometimes think that I talk about nothing else.

Anyway, to satisfy those of you cruising by here looking for dinner porn, here's what I had to eat tonight. I made vegetable lentil soup. I bought the biggest eggplant I've ever seen at farmer's market this weekend, and it was finally time to do something with it. I chopped it up, and combined it with some yellow pear tomatoes that I had roasted in the oven, a diced onion, a ton of garlic, some yeller squash, red wine, mustard and a handful of dried lentils. It was pretty good, especially for something I made up at the last minute. Usually, I would have crusty bread with a soup like this, but I ate the last of mine yesterday when I made goat cheese and tomato sandwiches, so we had Gardenburgers with the soup instead.


Today marked the four-month anniversary of the paper version of this journal. It doesn't sound like much, but this is a pretty proud, monumentous thing for me -- I've never been able to keep one for so long. Now, it feels really weird and wrong if I go a whole day without writing something, either in here or in the paper journal. Which was the entire point of all of this.


Today's listening selections: Spy Vs. Spy: The Music of Ornette Coleman by John Zorn and a flock of his buddies, and the collected works of Minor Threat. I was actually in a very calm mood today -- I was just clearing the cobwebs out of my head.

At one of my jobs (actually, it's the only job right now, but that's a story for Another Day), I work out of this guy's house. It's a pretty nice house -- it's a huge, adobe-style [1] house that he had custom built. I always feel really awkward and out of place in this house, which may be why I need to listen to things that are loud and fast whenever I work there.

Spy Vs. Spy is one of the few things I own that comes with listening instructions: "This recording should be played at an increased volume because of its wide stereo field." Then Zorn adds, "Fucking hardcore rules!" and you don't dare doubt him, not even for a second.


Today, I swore to myself that I was going to try to not buy anything for two weeks, just to see if I could do it. I'm not doing it in the interest of saving money, I'm mostly doing it because the last thing I need is more stuff. I'm not placing an absolute ban on purchasing items -- I can buy food and emergency items -- but the whole idea is not to bring anything more home that I'm going to have to find room for. Like, I can go get library books -- they may take up room for awhile, but they have some place to go back to when I'm done with them. So, no thrift stores or yard sales for me for two weeks -- we'll see how strong a person I can truly be.


[1] It's really covered with stucco, shaped and treated to look vaguely like adobe. Very few adobe-style buildings are made with adobe -- they're either a typical wood structure plastered with stucco or a straw-bale structure, coated with a thin layer of adobe. Adobe can either be the cheapest or the most expensive building material you can buy. Adobe structures are vey time-consuming to build, so if you're building a large structure or hiring people to build an adobe building for you, it will cost you more money than you can imagine. On the other hand, if the only two things you have a lot of are dirt and time, you can build yourself a house very cheaply. Adobe also tends to dissolve when exposed to moisture, which is another reason why most showy Southwestern-style homes are actually not adobe.

previous | next

the past + the future


also, see here.

newest
older
random entry
about me
links
guestbook
email
host
wishlist


www.flickr.com
This is a Flickr badge showing public photos from hypothetical wren. Make you own badge here.