Livre d'Or

I decided to put in the effort to make a complicated multi-step curry for date night this week.

( food )

I am certainly not going to cook a multi-part meal from scratch every night, but now my life has no commuting and many of my social things are restricted, I more often have time and enthusiasm for that level of cooking. But I'm slightly bored of most of my repertoire. Now that I'm pretty confident our supply chains are robust and I can reliably get hold of even non-standard ingredients, I would like to try some new things.

Would anyone like to suggest or swap recipes? What do you make on a weeknight that's easy but satisfying? What do you make when you have time and energy to cook, but short of actual formal entertaining (which isn't pandemic-appropriate anyway)?

8 years ago, I married my most wonderful jack, on Leap Day exactly four years after we started dating. So Saturday was our second anniversary. Since our anniversary happens rarely, we felt justified in treating ourselves: we went out for the veggie tasting menu at Midsummer House. Which with two Michelin stars is the fanciest restaurant in Cambridge, and we'd never been.

( food )

Anyway, my happiness about being married to jack is still here just like at our first anniversary. The main thing that's got better since then is living together full time since late 2017. We still have our wonderful polycule; they've been part of our lives for more than half our marriage and nearly half our entire relationship. Basically life is good.

Also our anniversary present to each other was a bread machine. So HMU with good bread machine recipes, and particularly recommendations of good flour. We can both eat gluten so normal wheat flour is fine, but I'm never sure what's good for bread machines as opposed to hand made bread.

So my excellent jack turned 36 last week. Since we've been together nearly ten years, I realize we were kind of impossibly young when we started dating. And I really really could not have imagined that we'd be celebrating such a big number birthday together, as a married couple who own a house together.

I also couldn't have imagined choosing to go out for dinner in a fancy restaurant: Alimentum. ( food )

The next day I spent the evening playing with OSOs and their kids, and left a bit later than I'd planned due to getting absorbed in a game of Roll Through the Ages, and had a minor disaster getting home. I managed to jam my bike lock somehow, and broke the key off in the lock. And I didn't want to disturb partners who were pretty much going straight to bed after I left, so I hoped I could get the bike home on my own, as I'd only locked the wheel to the frame and it wasn't attached to anything. It turns out that dragging / carrying a bike over a mile or so with the wheel locked is a pretty unpleasant experience. I got the lock tangled in the spokes somehow, and my lungs were protesting at the cold damp air, and it took ages. I stumbled through the gate just before midnight, at which point a random down on his luck young man approached me and asked for money or to speak to my husband.

I was in a pretty awful state by that point, struggling to breathe and exhausted and worried about the consequences of a non-functional bike and not far off a panic attack, so I had zero spare capacity for either being compassionate to a beggar, or sufficiently assertive in telling him that midnight is too late to importune strangers. And I was scared that he would follow me into the house, and probably he wasn't aggressive but I was really out of it. Then jack showed up and fixed everything.

He dealt with the beggar, he dealt with getting my broken bike into the shed and me into the warm house. He coped with the fact that I was more or less in hysterics by this point, crying too much to speak coherently, and upset with myself for being so upset over such a minor thing as a broken bike. He didn't overreact, he gathered that there was no immediate crisis just that I was tired and upset. And he calmed me down with tea and hugs enough that we could actually get to sleep at a not too ridiculous time. And then in the morning, my amazing husband went out to the shed, poked at the bike and managed to pull the broken key out of the lock and disentangle the chain from the wheel and made my bike rideable again in time to get to work.

Ten years ago I had no idea that my boyfriend was going to turn out to be so competent, both practically and emotionally, in a crisis. I always knew I could rely on him to support me as best as he could, but he's acquired so many skills in the intervening decade and got really good at supporting me.

So yes, happy birthday to my excellent husband. Thank you for being a brilliant dinner companion and an ideal housemate and a hero when I need you and generally making my life better in so many ways.

Heartfelt thanks to all of you who took the time to make supportive comments when I was feeling down. I am incredibly touched by so many people reaching out.

I have only a little gap before Passover chaos sets in, but I don't like leaving depressing stuff at the top of my journal, so have a general consumption update:

( food, games, TV )

As I mentioned in a footnote to a reading post, I've had a really great but also really intense few weeks. Let me put a bit more detail here, partly cos I want to record some of the fun exciting things I've been doing.

( diary, bit of angst )

Last weekend I spent Saturday at the beach with ghoti and family, which was completely wonderful. I didn't realize it's relatively easy to get to the north coast of Norfolk by public transport; I want to do that more often! But we did proper traditional English beach things, building sandcastles and eating chips and icecream and paddling in the sea.

I had to run back to Stoke for a stone-setting on Sunday. Which was annoying travel-wise but it's important to be available for these things, and the community made a big effort to scrape together a minyan. And the good thing was that angelofthenorth was able to adjust her plans and come up Sunday evening instead of Monday, so I got more time with her, yay. Mostly spent being quiet and domestic, I managed to do a fair amount of working from home so we could just quietly share space while we got on with things. And angelofthenorth was a wonderful guest, she brought me food and made me tea and generally looked after me.

And in a continuation of the theme, cjwatson came up to visit for the weekend. When I moved out of my old house and into the tiny flat on campus I was expecting to give up hosting, but actually I have a few really dear friends who don't mind sharing a very cramped space, and quite a few have visited me since I moved.

Saturday I led a service at synagogue. I was quite pleased with it, I talked about the idea of reward and punishment – this week's Torah reading contains the middle bit of the Shema which says that good things will happen if you keep God's commandments and agricultural disasters if you don't. And I talked about the consolation reading from Isaiah and the idea of exile as punishment for sin, and how that squares with the expression of God's love and Covenant faithfulness in both the Torah reading and the Haftarah. And I was glad to be able to invite cjwatson to a full Torah service given he was curious after coming for Friday night a few weeks ago.

It was a gloriously sunny day, one of the warmest this year. We had lunch at Peaches, who have stopped doing their all-you-can-eat menu for Saturday lunchtimes but had a very sensible prix-fixe menu instead, including their exciting garlic mushrooms. And we went for a bit of a walk in the woods behind campus, enjoying the shade and the hot still air and almost nobody around on a summer weekend.

Today we got up late and didn't do much beyond going out for lunch at the lovely Hand and trumpet country pub. Food was not as good as I've sometimes had there, but that's a high bar, and it was still very good indeed.

Basically I have wonderful friends, and spending time with them makes me extremely happy. Being at home Sunday evening, since cjwatson took on all the travelling that I would normally be doing, I even had time to call my parents, which I haven't done in too long.

...To nou on turning 40! nou organized a most excellent celebration, including walking under the Thames through Woolwich foot tunnel. I did not know there was a tunnel under the Thames, but nou is really good at paying attention to things like that.

And then we spent the afternoon in the Greyhound pub, a proper trad drinking hole sort of pub, not ye olde, not hipster, just a place where you can sit and talk and drink lager. It was basically too hot to move, though a few people did manage some walks and visits to the local artillery museum. Me, I just had fun talking to nou's excellent crowd of friends. Walking people, geeks, local history people, and a bunch of people from Oxford who all have second-degree connections to me. I was in extrovert heaven, in spite of the heat.

We moved on to a Chinese restaurant in Surrey Quays, Noodle Family. It wasn't in fact the restaurant that nou was expecting in that location, though they confirmed it was the same place when she made the booking. But it served very very tasty food, including things like thousand year eggs and sea-spiced aubergines and Chinese style potato salad made out of raw lightly cooked grated potato in vinaigrette.

I headed to nanaya and alextiefling's after the meal. And in that part of south London it's often easier to get around by bus rather than train or Tube, so I ended up with a change that involved walking past the restored Cutty Sark at sunset. So I got an evening and morning of chatting and catching up with good friends I don't see often enough, as well as being enchanted by their two young kids, the older of whom is just about learning to talk.

...And to adam_in_rabbinical_school whose username is no longer accurate, as he is now Rabbi Adam. The ordination service at Southgate Progressive was amazingly moving; the focus was on the wonderful friendship between our two newest rabbis. And R' Mark Solomon was leading the singing, which is always a treat.

I met up with jack before the service for lunch at a very good Lebanese place, Warda, and for a chance to chat as we haven't seen eachother in three weeks, for various reasons. And the service was, as these things are, full of old friends, including pseudomonas's parents. We stayed on for a reception and dinner, and by about 7 pm I'd just got to the point where I couldn't deal with being out and about for one moment longer. So jack drove us home, and being in my husband's car on the way home is enough like being in my own space that I started to unwind. And we had a couple of hours before bedtime to sit on our new sofa and drink tea and chat (mostly ranting about Princess Celestia and about Git). It is so, so good to be home.

My plan for three_weeks_for_dw had been that between 25^th April and 15^th May I'd post three diary entries, surveys or queries, one substantial thinky post, and ten pointers. In fact I did manage 13 posts, which was about right, but they don't quite fit siderea's classification scheme.

I didn't really make a substantial post at all, but then again I did put lots of thinky thoughts in my five link posts. So instead of 10 quick "here's some content" things and one essay, I made five posts that fall somewhere in between those two stools. In terms of posts mainly about me, I did in fact make two diary posts and one post asking for advice and opinions, plus bits of diary and survey style things in the other posts. So that's about right.

The rest of my activity was two reading Wednesday posts, one meta thing about DW and the fest itself, and two posts about the UK general election, which happened to fall within the fest but was important enough that I wanted to talk about it. I think that constitutes a reasonable contribution to keeping up activity on DW, even if it doesn't quite match what I set out to do.

I'm about to go away for an exciting trip with ceb and some other awesome people, so I expect to be quiet for the next week and a half. I'm just coming to the end of my busiest time at work, and I've been as usual cramming a bit too much into the weekends in between. Highlights were kaberett's party at the weekend, and dinner with ghoti at the Plough last week, and with cjwatson at Mestizo on the way to kaberett's party.

I do very much love my friends. The minute I post even slightly meepy things to DW, lots of people get in touch. And if there's one thing that cheers me up it's getting to talk to my friends! Thank you so much to everybody who left helpful, supportive comments on my post. Now I have actual plans for meeting up with withagreatlove, and have made some progress towards plans with khalinche. I had some really cheering conversations with hatam_soferet and rysmiel and ghoti, and I've started talking to people a bit about means other than email to keep in touch.

( good weekend )

And I met my new cohort of students, dear little first years, this morning, and to nobody's surprise teaching is a lot more fun and satisfying than marking.

Also ghoti made me some gloves for my birthday, and they are awesome because they have subtle owls knitted into them. So now I can go around with owls on my warm hands, this is very pleasing.

So far I seem to be giving out food related prompts. (I like talking about food, I guess.) So a favorite food memory?

forestofglory said:

So far I seem to be giving out food related prompts. (I like talking about food, I guess.) So a favorite food memory?

( timing is everything )

[December Days masterpost]