Crackling Redux

A pleasant Sunday making a cornbread casserole. A side dish, that with the addition of cracklings becomes (for me) a one-dish meal. After two weeks of Anglo-Saxon, I wanted to take the day off with some fiction, but I couldn't find anything to suit me. Rooted around in the library and Goodwill stacks and settled in with a book on earth sheltered housing design. I'm almost always designing a house in my head, it's my recreation, to solve puzzles in my mind. How to achieve elegance by just allowing certain materials to be themselves. When Bear was last over he was looking at a particular joint in the beam-work of this house, four beams meeting at two different heights, the post is a tree trunk: it is a very cool joint, and I can remember several nights thinking about how I could accomplish it. First this then that. What is the push-and-pull, and how do you handle the load? The casserole is simple, my one cup cornmeal mix, with a small can of chopped chilies, a can of creamed corn, a small container of sour cream. I had to laugh, rendering cracklings, I was so ahead of the game. A nap after dinner, then awakened by rain. Quite warm and I lounge around in just a long-sleeve tee shirt and light-weight sweat pants; a pair of socks, destined for the trash, that collect below my ankles. A fashion statement, a close-up of holes in the socks; I buy a bag of a dozen pair because it so neatly limits my time at the laundromat. Any two socks are a pair if you follow my simple system. If all of the socks are the same, any two is a pair. As a recluse, I actually fail, I want to talk with Jude and Joel. I want communication.