Risotto

The driveway, after 24 hours of rain, seems delicate and slightly dangerous. I decide to take the day off. Can't call the museum because the "9" is dead on my phone, but I figure they'll call me (Pegi does, after lunch). Mid-morning I rummage around and discover enough ingredients to make a decent risotto. A package of snow peas in the freezer, a can of shiitake mushrooms, plenty of cheese, a stick of butter, chicken stock, some arborio rice, an onion, olive oil. Actually I substitute walnut oil for the olive oil. Follow any recipe, I didn't use one and didn't pay much attention. I've made a lot of these, it's easy, just takes a lot of time. I did pay attention to the needs of the pot, of course, but I mean I didn't measure anything. Finished it with ample cheese and butter. Added some acorn meal with the first liquid to the pot. Excellent and very filling meal. A big shallow bowl of this, and a piece of bread, lots of black pepper. I opened the good zin Glenn and Linda brought on the last visit, a Ridge. As good as life gets. Plowing through Umberto Eco's "Kant And The Platypus", which, I swear, has taken me five years to finish. Dozens of passages marked with my little pencil dots and corresponding page numbers on bookmarks, AND pages of notes by B, as we had passed this book around for years. It is finished, but I'll leave it out for an extra year just in case. I moved the pile of books off the sofa, because they were putting a serious dent in the sofa cushion, and got them all the way to the dining room table. It occurs to me, not for the first time, that I need a convenient bookshelf for books that I'm not ready to shelve. Books I'm referring to day to day. I let the tool-chest coffee table thing get of control. There's a space to put said shelf, if I throw away some junk, so I think I will. I'll take Trivial Pursuit (the girls and I took the question cards on road trips) and the aquarium Samara raised funny frogs in, to the Goodwill. There's a way I can simply block off the upstairs, with a couple of pieces of dense foam, and convert the downstairs studio/store-room into a bedroom. Added perk is I could get shed of stuff. Shit accumulates. I need to do this, work on creature comforts, last winter was too hard. My friends were worried, and, frankly, so was I. Too close to the edge. Many times I didn't know if the cornice would support me. You hang five or ten and hope for the best. It's a rogue phenomenon, you do a couple of nice turns, because there's power in this wave, then you merely try to stay afloat. Grab any floating anything. And you're good, because of what, exactly? An edge honed by repetition. First thing I'd do is investigate his dirty diary. We'd need a secret handshake.