COOKING:

Rice does not need to be washed or toasted before it is cooked.
Meat can be cooked in a tablespoon or less of oil.
Rinsing cooked pasta, especially in cold water, is a sin.
Toast should be brown but never black.
Sugar is not an appropriate second ingredient in any savory food.
Most vegetables taste better raw.
Potatoes do not count as "vegetables".
A meal should not take longer than 1 hour to prepare.

WASHING DISHES:
The person who cooks is ideally excused from doing dishes.
When washing dishes, it is important to wash at least all the tableware.
Sometimes this involves two loads, but it is part of "doing the dishes".
It is okay to soak pots overnight.
Dishes that are soaking should soak in the sink.
Emptying the dish drainer is part of washing the dishes.
Putting away the dishes is the last step in doing them.

Oh, hey! Hi! I'm so scattered I make the leaves look organized. I'm
actually getting a lot done, via plate juggling. On Monday, I went to a
concert and quilt show with my new dance partner, who is two years old,
because dating the inappropriately young is the new cocktail hat. He
was an extremely attractive conversation piece, which I appreciate in a
date, and he also clutched his sweet pudgy fingers around my neck,
which I enjoyed very much, as certain people in this house are Too Old
for cuddling. The music was good if you like hearing people sing folk
songs in not-their-native language, which I very much do. The quilts
were pretty much My First Real Quilt; not badly done but kinda boring.
When we left I was reintroduced to how awesome it is when people give
you their seats on the tram and so altogether it was a fine night.

On
Tuesday, Mr. H came and painted the bathroom. I have liked him since he
first laughed at one of my jokes 8 years ago instead of correcting my
Czech (My desire to anthropomorphize objects does not always
translate). We are mutually delighted by each other, and it is a
pleasure to see him now, eight years wider, with hearing aids and a
little slower on the stairs than before, but still so good at straight
lines it's like a superpower. Rulerfinger! I used to paint everything
myself but now I would rather have Mr. H come and show me pictures of
his grandchildren, thus saving my energy for the clean up afterwards.

Squire
came home Wednesday singing Lady Gaga's hit song, "Mah-mah-mah
pockmarked face, mah-mah pockmarked face" and that was pretty funny.
And then later he told me there was a Lidl store opening up down the
street and it took me like an hour to understand that it was the
supermarket chain Lidl, and not a leetle store, which explains his
weird accent. It's two blocks away so I imagine we'll be having this
problem for a while to come.

Today I am going to meet another
baby! It is good research and I appreciate all my friends having babies
at varying ages so that I don't have to. I smell their sweet heads and
read them educational articles from the paper and teach them some dance
moves and laugh at their jokes as many times as they want to tell them
and then hand them back to their moms when they start to smell funny.
I'm like a Victorian daddy. (I actually can change a diaper and like to
think of myself as somewhat useful but I like also this idea of me in a
morning coat; don't you?).

And that's it. I'm finishing up my
job at the educational web site in a week or so, following which I plan
to take a long bath in apple cider vodka,
and then fully devote myself to babies and brains (the separate study
of both, not the eating of either, although nomnom) for a year,
whereupon I shall either emerge entirely brilliant or pretty much the
same as always. SAME THING I KNOW.

We found a sleeping hedgehog at the cottage. It was not hibernating,
just napping under some leaves. We wanted to plant some things in that
particular place, so we moved the hedgehog who totally didn't fool us
playing dead.

Narcissus bulbs are not a kind of lighting that makes you look particularly good.

Also,
there is a difference between bulbs and tubers, which it will be
possible to explain once I understand that you are not saying bulbous
tumors.

So, happy anniversary Berlin. The Berlin Wall came down the same
month that I moved to Japan, and I remember that as usual I made the
whole trip much more fraught than it already was, having my wallet stolen and my passport,
and let's see, trying to replace it at
the embassy in San Francisco, which had just gone through a little bit
of an earthquake. Good times. On the airplane, shiny new passport
firmly in hand, I read about the Berlin Wall, and about the Velvet
Revolution, and having just "discovered" Milan Kundera I had the odd
conviction that my plane was going in the wrong direction. It took me
another five years to get here, but the trip probably started then.

And happy birthday to Sesame Street. I do not remember a world
without Sesame Street, though I understand they didn't start
broadcasting until I was old enough to get some of it. Did you know
that Jim Henson was the coconut cream piiiiiies guy? I do not remember
or care where I was when I heard that Michael Jackson died, but when I
heard that Jim Henson died I was sitting at the round table in the
lobby of the language school where I was teaching in Kitakyushu, and I
put my head on the cold formica table, ostensibly to keep it together,
but then I wept and wept anyway. He taught me when I was little, he
entertained me when I was older, and that he would not be around to
quirkily illustrate my adulthood seemed really unfair. And I cried for
the people who had worked with him, and for his children, because if he
had influenced me so, what must he have been to them?

Yeah, I got nothing. Little bitlets. Leaves in gorgeous reds and
yellows, making the world look like a Carcassonne board for a minute,
beautiful, and then soggily carpeting the sidewalks after the too
persistent and early rain. We are good; we are well.

Each apartment in our building has its own little cellar space, about a 10×10 space with an infinite capacity for cobweb storage, and possibly also mouse habitation. Friday night we cleaned out the cellar. Well, sort of we did. We started cleaning it and then Squire shut the door with the keys inside, and so then we spent some time breaking down the door, and then we cleaned it some more, and then I realized I was sweeping a dirt floor, so we stopped. It was a whole-building thing, all of us down there in our grubbiest clothes, some wearing babushka headscarves (ala Russia, not ala Kate Bush) and groaning at the smell and the dust and the only-blame-yourself human habit of saving things we don't love until they are moldy and horrid. It was quite an evening. Some other cellar owners had piled their stuff right outside our door, so we couldn't actually take most of our stuff out of our room; we just stacked it neatly inside the door. The truck came today to pick it all up, and it was a moment of liberating excitement for me – soon, all this crap will be gone! – but then the truck got full before the movers got as far as our cellar. So we have neatly stacked piles of mouldering cardboard boxes and stuff now, yay.

I look very enticing with cobwebs in my hair, I have to say. And I think Friar REALLY enjoyed tearing the old wardrobe apart with basically a hammer and his bare hands (all our larger tools are at the cotthut). It turns out it wasn't the worst way to spend a Friday night, destruction and clearing away rubbish. I am comfortably sore today, the way you are when you strain your muscles doing Something Useful, like helping a friend move or waxing a floor or anything like that. It would have been better if we had actually had the stuff taken away, of course, but that part almost wasn't surprising. I haven't gotten that optimistic about life in the last week or anything. And I did the parts that I could do, which is perfectly fine.

And so it is like this: 4:30 in the morning and I have shoved at insomnia
for an hour before admitting it won. Lying in the dark, trying not to
toss and turn, playing the trick my grandmother taught me of counting
all the body parts and how they were sleepy, unable to focus on a
single muscle without also cataloging every injury, every insult.

Your toes are sleepy, I tell myself. Toes, you are very sleepy! And
also he had no business telling me I was irresponsible for not
finishing the project; we were moving across the country the next week
and I think it was unreasonable to expect a seventh grader to make up
sentences for 20 vocabulary words when her family is nearly off its
hinges.

Insteps, you are sleepy; stay still and stop twitching. Think long
relaxing thoughts! And Dennis standing at the foot of the bed and he's
going to fucking kill me, rip me apart, and so again
I am sleeping on the couch in the office where I work.

Heels, to heel. And the place where I passed out on the floor of
the bathroom, cracking my head against the tiles, and they told me it
couldn't be a gas leak because gas smells bad.

I'm not up to
my knees, I'm not even at the fidgety parts yet, and why do I store so
much that makes me sad, and what is it that wakes me at three in the
morning and says let's think about all the bad places you've left instead of let's think of all the good places you went to.

Listen, I keep everything. I remember everything. On good days I am
able to say that I got to live with a beautiful woman who made paper by
hand and who had all of Leonard Cohen's recordings on reel-to-reel
tapes that were copies of copies and scratchy from being loved so much;
that my boss went out and got me McDonald's for breakfast and told me I
was radiant even with office couch creases on my cheeks; that
California turned out pretty well. But this month has been a month of
sleeplessness, and remembering all the bad places I've slept is not the
worst catalog I've got, but none of my catalogs are all roses either.
Be patient with me. I know good things and I'll tell you them soon.