Homecoming

After two and a half weeks gallavanting around France, my love is coming home! He is tired, over-fed, and completely sick of fine wines, stinky cheeses, and foie gras. I have very little sympathy. After two weeks alone I am tired of solo dinners, cold feet, and having no one to talk to at night. It will be good to be together again.

I spent the weekend working furiously, preparing for the return of our home's second inhabitant. After M. left it didn't take me long to lapse back into my single-girl ways. I ate a lot of toast, scrambled eggs, and foods that required salsa and sour cream. I washed the same dishes over and over again, never returning the clean dishes to their proper dry spots. I let socks fall to the floor and books and magazines pile up. I didn't take out the recycling, or the trash. I waited till the bins were so full there wasn't room for anything else. Not even coffee grounds or a paper chocolate wrapper.

And then Sunday came. I cleaned the bathroom, changed the sheets, dusted and scoured and wiped and polished. I made a big pot of pumpkin soup, roasting the pumpkin and a head of garlic in the oven till soft and fragrant, then pureeing with chicken stock, herbs and spices, and a little cream. I made beer bread, and cheese shortbread crackers for Thanksgiving. Then I swept and mopped and cleaned till the kitchen was bright and new looking.

Now it is Monday and I am clean and bright and new looking too. There's only eight hours left till the jet lands, customs is negotiated, and I wait at cubside for a tired and scruffy looking traveler to walk out from behind the sliding glass doors. I can't wait. I must wait. But only a little longer.

Celebrations

I love any excust to celebrate. But today was not a day plump with celebrations waiting to happen. I slept poorly, tossing and turning about. I couldn't seem to get anything done. The things I was supposed to do I couldn't get excited about. The things I tried to do were failures -- like the e-mail I tried to send that was returned to me over and over and over again. I was grumpy, staring at the clock and wishing that it was 5 o'clock instead of 11 o'clock. If it were 5 I could at least have a glass of wine and feel as my worries sashayed away into a boozy haze.

But yet, it was a birthday. And an important one too -- my darling baby brother's. There was cause for celebration. I am a big believer in the idea that if someone is truly dear to you, you should celebrate their birthday regardless of if you are actually with them. Which is why after I finished a particularly sweaty yoga class I stoped at the store to shop for cake. There were slices of cake, black bottom cupcakes, gingerbread black bottom cupcakes, and vegan cakes. There was pumpkin chocolate bread that beckoned, but it didn't seem birthday-ish enough. And then there were the darling mini-cup cakes: white cake with green icing and orange sprinkles. They called them fall cupcakes, though they reminded me a bit more of tiny alien cakes. But they were celebratory while also embracing my wacky, verging on sullen mood.

I carried them up Market Street in San Francisco, up a very big and steep hill, and up a secret and shaded passage way. I could feel the cupcakes rolling about in their box. I don't imagine that many people try to transport mini-cupcakes, they just eat them. I was worried the cupcakes wouldn't be as festive looking once I finally arrived home, that they would be mashed and ugly and that then my mood might be even more dejected then it was before.

But ta-dah, they survived. They were just as sprightly and peppy as they were on the cake plate. And now the question became, when to eat them and how to celebrate a birthday boy who isn't even here?

And so the cupcakes sit. Waiting for the moment when I just can't stand it any more, when I have to eat one. This is why there are two. So if I pick the wrong moment I will have a second chance. And today is a day when second chances and cupcakes sound particularly good.

To-Don't List

There are some mornings when my to-do list becomes my to-don't list. Sadly this is usually the days when I have the most to do, when the procrastination bug should not come calling. But then there are the days when I realize I don't really have that much to do and that it might be ok if I hung around and was lazy for just a few more minutes... or hours.
Today was such a morning. There was more fog, more cold. This is what I was supposed to do: pop out of bed, go to the store for coffee, come home, eat breakfast, make coffee, re-read Ch 1 edits, leave home and go to Post Office, Kinkos, Gym. Or something like that.
This is what I did: get up and put on brand new cozy knit hat (so perfect for cold mornings). Decide not to go get coffee. Sulk for a few minutes about having no coffee and decide to drink tea, Irish Breakfast tea with the last of my milk and a heavy dosing of sugar, just like they do in Ireland. Check e-mail. Read love note. Swoon. Wish I had someone to eat breakfast with or at least something warm to eat for breakfast. Decide to make pancakes and start cooking beans that had been soaking on the counter all night long. Eat pancakes with syrup, drink tea, watch tea as it steams into the cold air of the cold house and listen to the sound of my black and white speckled beans bubbling on the stove.
There's just something about making a list that makes me feel as if I've gotten a lot done, even if its nothing I ever intended to do.

Winter Breakfast

It is one of the first cold mornings of my new life in San Francisco. The fog has rolled in, blanketing my window with thick white clouds. It looks like it will be a sweater and socks day, a curl up under a blanket and read day.
So far I have been eating yogurt, granola, and maybe a bit of fruit for breakfast. But a day like today calls for something warm. I dream of oatmeal, warm milk, even crisp toast that melts a tab of butter instantly. But I only have coffee, and sadly only enough coffee for one cup! (Mental note to self: go to grocery store today!)
Nevertheless I curl up with my coffee, black and hot, and laced with just a dab of milk and sweet vanilla sugar. I sip and sip, hoping to get warm. I am also hoping for breakfast inspiration. I could cook polenta yes, and dress it with maple syrup. I could eat a leftover pumpkin tamale, the one I was saving for another meal. I could eat eggs -- wait, no eggs. I boiled the last two yesterday.
I wish I had enough milk to warm it and pour it over cereal, but I don't. There's nary a tablespoon in the small container I bought last week.
My stomach is beginning to growl and it seemed inevitable that I'll eat yogurt for breakfast this morning. Yogurt followed by a hot shower, perhaps?

Birthday Foods

The food of the weekend was pumpkin. There were pumpkin tamales, pumpkin ice cream and pumpkin-caramel cupcakes with puffs of white icing.
It's funny how I have never loved pumpkin. It must be a mature taste, a taste that comes with being thirty-one years old.