Happy Beltane!
Not turning on my computer for four days running is a very good method of dealing with stress. I like it. It does, however, mean that I have a bunch of stuff to catch up on when I get back to it. The good thing is that it was over the weekend, when there’s generally less stuff to handle anyway.
Let’s see. My parents were in town for a conference, so they came over Friday night and I cooked a belated birthday dinner for my Dad. Roast breast of duck glazed in ginger marmalade and soy sauce, wild rice with oyster mushrooms and toasted almonds, organic spring greens salad with homemade vinaigrette, followed by a dessert of chocolate sponge sandwiched together with strawberry coulis folded into whipped cream, then topped with fresh strawberries and chocolate ganache. And my parents brought an excellent Australian shiraz called [yellowtail] and it was the perfect accompaniment. It was so incredibly perfect. I’m not sure what happened, but it all worked. I’m always surprised when special dinners work.
Band practice was very okay. We miss our drummer something fierce when she’s not there. We talked about what to drop for the upcoming private gig (we’re playing a wedding! okay, it’s the guitarist’s wedding, but still!) and ran through stuff. I think most of us feel better about the gig in general after a week of distance.
Liam’s naps and sleeping-through-the-night went out the window again. Saturday was very, very bad. Last night he only woke up once around midnight, and today when he woke up after a scant twenty minutes of nap he was soothed back to sleep, so I am cautiously optimistic. We thought a tooth had made its appearance Saturday morning, but it’s still covered by a thin bit of skin, damn it. Like the other three, now.
We had coven yesterday and wove a beautiful Maypole. We slipped the weave off and tied it into sections and everyone took a bit home. Our feast was really good, too.
I’ve been going to bed very early to cope with the sleep fragmentation I’ve been suffering courtesy of the waking baby. It seems to be helping a bit.
Reading an excess of Connie Willis (not that there really is such a thing) makes me want to write desperately again.
Okay, baby’s awake! That makes for a total of over an hour of nap this morning. Hurrah!
The [yellowtail] shiraz is possibly the best shiraz I’ve ever had in my life. We drank a lot of shiraz in California, and the [yellowtail] was by far the best. And reasonably priced, too!
Your dinner sounds delicious.Can you pass on the recipe for glazed duck, please?
Also (says the English teacher in me) you don’t want to write desperately. You desperately want to write.
But I know what you mean about Connie Willis. Reading her makes me want to steal her idea of time travel, for example, and use it to write about her characters visiting other eras than just WW2 or 1900. I can’t see why she hasn’t done more of that type of books herself. And I wish someone would option the Domesday Book as a film, although it might be a bit too downbeat, what with people dropping with the plague and all…
The glaze is easy: take some ginger marmalade, warm it up in the microwave till it’s soft, add a splash of soy, stir. Brush it onto the duck. I left it to sit in the glaze for a while, so it may be more of a marinade.
Alternatively, I could want to “write, desperately”. Although the way I wrote the sentence isn’t wholly incorrect; I’d settle for writing desperately, as I did for the last two books, because it would mean I was writing even if I was spilling the stuff out for a deadline. I’d like to be writing desperately, because it would mean ideas ambushing me and thwacking me until I got them out on paper.