The food, the friends, and the fabula

Highly recommended. Delicious. Sensually joyful and deeply gorgeous. If you get Gourmet's Diary of a Foodie on your TV, watch it. The food writers travel all over the world, and find the growers, sellers, and cookers of some of the most elementally pure and lovely foods you can imagine. Watching shows like this always makes me more ready to get my hands dripping with juices and sharpen my knives and have company over so we can eat together.

We had company yesterday after Easter services - if you can call it company when it's just friends that feel like family. We sat and ate and talked and ate some more and had some wine and laughed and fell asleep (our Easter Vigil begins at 5 in the morning, and there is a 10:00 Solemn High Mass as well -- we were really tired as we are every year when Holy Week's labors are crowned at the Vigil and High Mass.) I actually roasted (after an all-night marinade) a bit of lamb, a bit of beef, and a whole chicken. Getting very fresh lamb is the trick, I finally figured out.

But now it's Monday. Monday, as if nothing had been different lately. Monday as if our son-in-law is not joining his battalion in the Middle East tomorrow, and Monday as if I weren't still too punchy to think clearly. Some of our friends are taking today off (a very smart move), and The Great Husband went to work only after sleeping in a little. Life goes on today in as surreal a manner as after some kind of life-changing event like a death or a birth or a marriage or an earthquake. Easter Monday is very strange in its peaceful and victorious ordinariness.

And class has to happen too! I am already two weeks behind with getting this quarter's PLA essays written (a communication snafu), but I got some extremely helpful help from my instructor last Thursday when I went to the campus.

I also got the psychological hit of academic and intellectual adrenaline I always get just by being on the campus! It is difficult to explain exactly what it does to me to be there, but you can see it if you go with me some time. I'm inclined to walk across the grass or barely restrain myself from balancing on the edges of the sidewalks on the way back to my car and I can't really stop myself from grinning like a Cheshire cat as I drive away. Sometimes there is the sound of drumming and singing coming from the music building - or a violin. It is too chilly and wet for there to be groups of students all over the lawns, but I can almost hear a hum of mental activity and curiosity and eager interest in "new learning" when I walk around between the buildings there. New learning, and the old Sisters of the Holy Names who used to teach the "Marylhurst Girls" in that place. I think it's the internal sound of the glory of intellectual pursuits.

The lit course I'm taking online this quarter has moved on from Joseph Conrad to Jane Austen, and I have a lot of reading to do. My fabula and syuzhet are all blended together and confused, but I think I can straighten out today if I just take my time getting the work done. My one-day course is this coming Saturday. SCI 366: Problem Solving. I'm supposed to bring cardboard - and a crayon - and a towel. (I love Marylhurst!)

Stuff due ... stuff to do ... a freshly cleaned up house (the Great Husband and I did that on Saturday) making things easier and a freshly exhausted emotional and spiritual mind making things slow and rather surreal ... a new wireless keyboard and mouse making things much less frustrating ... and I've just now realized that I have not seen the cat today. That's odd ...