April 18

Three years ago, I bought twelve extra spoons because I was tired of always running out of them.  Since then, to justify my action to the teasing of my friends and family, I have always striven to make the additional spoons feel useful.  Here’s a chronicle of my spoon usage today.

Spoon #1.  I made my first cup of tea and oatmeal with the same spoon.

Spoon #2.  I needed a fresh spoon for my second and, later, third cups of tea throughout the morning.

Spoon #3.  For lunch, I had tomato soup, which one usually eats with a spoon.

Spoons #4-5.  In the afternoon, I made peanut butter cookies, an activity that required one spoon for getting the peanut butter out of the jar and a second, smaller one for scooping the dough out to roll into balls.

Spoon #6.  I stirred a quart of instant lemonade.

Spoon #7.  Having misplaced Spoon #2, I needed a fresh spoon for my fourth cup of tea.

So there, you mockers.  Tell me that my foresight of three years ago was not justified.  I even cleaned them all up after myself.

March 20

1.  Assam Tea.  This past week, I visited a tea store and bought “Assam Gold” black tea.  I am now drinking my first strong, flavorful cup, and I think it’s a winner.  I don’t have anything like a professional vocabulary of taste, but I’m told Assam is the basis for most breakfast teas.  So if you know what breakfast tea tastes like, this tastes like that, only more so.

2.  Lawrence of Arabia.  This is probably my favorite movie–no, I won’t even qualify it: Lawrence of Arabia is my favorite movie.  Which is why I’m so happy to have finished watching the first half, up until the intermission, last night.  Auda Abu Tayi, one of the tribal chiefs who becomes Lawrence’s ally, is described quite accurately in Lowell Thomas’s Lawrence biography as the Robin Hood of the desert, except when he steals from the rich, he retains a portion of the proceeds for himself.  In the movie, Auda says the perfectly hilarious line, “You trouble me like women.”  …I also started knitting a “Sherlock Holmes” scarf, which is long, and thick, and black.

3.  Weather.  Also, what’s with the weather?  We had a thirty-degree drop overnight!  Now it’s rainy and miserable (and, coincidentally, excellent weather for tea-drinking).   What’s the world coming to?  I blame education.

Today: Rain before 1pm, then a chance of rain and snow. Some thunder is also possible. Steady temperature around 37. Windy, with a north northwest wind between 20 and 25 mph, with gusts as high as 35 mph. Chance of precipitation is 100%. Little or no snow accumulation expected.

Man, I’m really glad they warned me about the thunder.  Otherwise I might have been scared.

March 14

1.  Central Market.  Yesterday I visited this spectacular store for the first time and came away with Wisconsin white sharp cheddar cheese, olive oil crackers, two new kinds of tea (“All Day Breakfast” and “Vanilla and Almond Black Tea”), and quite a lot of Strongbow cider for the St. Patrick’s Day party coming up later this week.  Central Market made me want to learn to cook, really cook, but I just don’t have the motivation or the time.

2.  Speed Reading.  I put The Farthest Shore on hold after reaching the halfway point and subsequently sped through a whole book in a couple hours.  Granted, the memoir Safekeeping by Abigail Thomas is almost half white space, being composed of one- to three-page vignettes surrounded by empty page.  And it was less than two hundred pages long in the first place.  I ought to write my response paper about it for class while it’s still fresh in my mind but probably won’t.  I detect a lack of motivation again.  Hm.

3.  Truancy.  We inadvertently overslept this morning, missing church.  Although we were perfectly well aware that it was Daylight Savings Time, we were dismally unaware that the cell phone that we use for our alarm would not update automatically.  To (mis)quote the film Kingdom of Heaven, God will understand, and if not, He is not God.

March 11

1.  The Summer Job Market.  The school I attend requires its students to take a summer class in order to work on campus in the summer, so needless to say I won’t be working all summer to pay for a class I don’t really need.  On the other hand, that leaves me with few options that anyone with a college degree isn’t overqualified to do (I speak here of retail in all its forms: a necessary evil).  However, to save myself from the drudgery of That’ll Be Twenty Dollars Even, Sir, I have applied the principle of “It’s not what you know, but who you know” and have been asking acquaintances for job information.  Reader, consider yourself asked.

2. Limbo.  Now that most of my major deadlines have passed (Translation Exam, Master’s Comprehensive Exam, Teaching Fellowship Application), I feel rather like I’m in Limbo.  I haven’t heard the results of any of these, and probably won’t for at least a few more weeks.  A few more weeks isn’t a very long time at all when you think of the span of a lifetime (or of eternity), but a few more weeks never felt more like eternity than it does right now.  In the immortal words of Inigo Montoya, I hate waiting.

3.  Endings.  In my current work-in-progress, I’ve passed the halfway point and am now trying to pull all the threads together into some coherent design.  Endings are always particularly hard, in writing as in chess, because often I will have only a vague conception of the end when I begin.  It might be an image or a state of being that I want characters to pursue or regain, but in truth it’s nebulous.  More often than not, once I’m done, the beginning and the ending will feel off-balance, and most of my rewriting will be spent trying to get them to agree.  I hope, however, to finish this one on Friday, or at the very latest Saturday, so I’ll know pretty soon whether the ending was successful or not.

4. Breakfast.  I believe I’ve mentioned this before, but I do love eating the same thing for breakfast every day.  It gives definition to my morning and I never have to worry about or plan what to eat because I already know: oatmeal and tea.  Although today I must be feeling wild, because I put some cinnamon-sugar on my oatmeal.  A good omen, I hope.

5. The Far Pavilions.  I’m progressing rapidly through my epic novel.  I believe I attained page 200 last night, the point at which most other novels are drawing to a close.  But this protagonist, still young and quite adventurous, has just set out on a new mission.  So that means I’m just over 20% through it.  One fifth.  Hooray me.

March 10

I should be a more faithful blogger, so in an effort to return to my previous state of posting a few times a week rather than a few times a month, I will write more casually about daily events.  Some of my blogging lethargy was a resistance to writing book reviews, which feels a bit like schoolwork.  Nevertheless, I still expect books to feature heavily on my blog, because, well, books are what I do.

1. Complaints.  I shall start off with a complaint about canceled classes.  While I, like any other student, pray to the god of the clock to be let out of class early, some part of me resents the wasted time and especially the wasted money.  No more evident was that than today, when a class that I assist, and for which I come to campus expressly on Wednesdays, was canceled without explanation.  I cooled my temper by reminding myself that I get paid the same whether I sit through the professor’s lecture or not, but if I’d known about the cancellation, I wouldn’t have even left the house.

2.  Books.  I am turning into a multiple-book reader.  Previously, in those glorious undergraduate days, when I had all the time I could ever want, I would read one book at a time, cover to cover, one after another.  Now I read in snatches, and several books at a time.  Right now I’m muddling through a biography of Katherine Mansfield and a 900-page mammoth by M.M. Kaye called The Far Pavilions.  I started it three days ago and haven’t even made it a third of the way through.

3.  Tea.  I’m a bit sad that whatever the Texan equivalent of winter is, is departing.  I’d been drinking two or three cups of tea a day, and now that it’s getting much warmer, I don’t always feel like sitting down with a steaming cup.  I remember vaguely a snippet from Andre Dubus III’s novel The House of Sand and Fog, which I read furtively in a bookstore, about how drinking hot drinks year-round helps you regulate your body temperature better, or something along those lines.  To me, though, the loss of afternoon tea is also the loss of the cookies or chocolates to accompany the PG Tips or Earl Grey.  Sugar and spice and everything nice.

4.  Capricious Washing Machine.  My washing machine is broken.  Sometimes.  Half the time, the basin doesn’t fill up initially; half the time, it doesn’t advance through the cycles properly; and the other half of the time (Can you count? I can’t.), it will work with no problems.  The broken times have apparently no logic or pattern to them.  Today it worked, tomorrow it may not.  But then again it might.  If not for these domestic imponderables, I fear my life would have no meaning.

An Ode to Breakfast

I remember reading in Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series, a series that has been on my Reread Immediately list for quite some time, that breakfast is the least-frequently-written meal in literary history, lunch and tea being more popular and dinner most of all.  Therefore whenever I eat or write breakfast, or read for breakfast, I feel somehow proud of myself a) for rising in enough time to make breakfast viable and b) going against the grain, so to speak, by championing a less noticeable meal.  And why shouldn’t my characters eat breakfast?  I do.

Breakfast this morning for myself included a cocktail of decongestants in orange juice.  Orange juice does not usually feature on my breakfast menu, but as I am trying to fortify my immune system against the cold that keeps me teetering on the edge of miserable, I have added eight ounces to my daily regimen.  Also it has calcium and Vitamin D, and since I haven’t left the apartment since Sunday, I know I can use the latter.

Usually to drink I will make myself a cup of Scottish breakfast tea or PG Tips with Splenda and skim milk.  Tea tastes fifty times better with real sugar than with Splenda, but I can’t afford the calories, since I can drink three to five cups of tea a day.  This morning it was Scottish breakfast.

I also enjoy eating yogurt with my breakfast, usually a couple spoons-ful dipped out of the tub while the water for my tea is heating.  I’ll buy a reasonably healthy vanilla yogurt in a big container and whittle away at it until the Best By date has passed.  Lately, though, I’ve been buying the small cartons of yogurt in different flavors; not nearly as cost-effective nor long-lasting, but sometimes I just can’t say no to banana strawberry, my favorite flavor, which I ate this morning.

The staple of my breakfast, that part of the breakfast which I could eat alone and still consider myself to have dined well, is the oatmeal.  I am not a gourmet when it comes to oatmeal: I take mine in microwavable packets with water, not milk.  There is, however, a science to adding the right amount of water to the packet contents, so that after microwaving for a minute and thirty seconds, it will come out just right.  Whether this perfect amount of water–never measured, always eyeballed–actually reaches the bowl depends heavily on whether I’m wearing my contacts or not.  Many’s the time I’ve had to microwave for two, for two and a half minutes, to evaporate the excess water.  On those occasions, the oatmeal doesn’t taste quite the same, but I eat it anyway.  This morning, happily, I was wearing glasses, so my oatmeal was a success.

I also regularly read for breakfast.  I take breakfast at my desk, so natural reading material is gmail and google reader, and if things are slow, facebook statuses.  Yesterday I read C.S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength, a book that has been on my Reread Immediately list longer than Thursday Next.  Today I wrote and read email, blogs, facebook, and this blog post as a Lewis appetizer.  I hope to finish it today.

As I was eating breakfast this morning, I contemplated the story I am writing to see whether I could feature breakfast in it.  But alas, my characters are working themselves up to a bread riot, so they get up with no breakfast, go to bed with no dinner, and eat a meager lunch provided them at work.  Sorry, characters.  The best you get for breakfast is dreams.

You know you’re in a hurry when

you aren’t able to finish either cup of tea that the morning brings your way.

1. Seeing that I was running out of time and hadn’t had a single sip of the tea I made myself this morning, I transferred the contents of the mug into a travel cup… and left the cup on the countertop.

2. After stopping by Starbucks for tea #2, I discovered that my regular parking lot was blocked off.  By the time I power-walked from the far ends of the earth to my classroom, I was simply too hot to drink the tea.

Sad.