zirconium

Well. The past week included more collisions than I would have cared for with figurative handbaskets and pavers, but I managed to get to bed within an hour of either side of midnight most nights. (The exception was the night before nochevieja, when filing all the FSA paperwork and herding Picasso ducks to the designer kept the candles burning past 3:30 a.m.) Yesterday I closed my work laptop by 5:30 p.m. (in time to catch Ailey's Revelations Through the Decades while the streaming window was open) and my personal laptop by 11:45 p.m. (with a promise to myself to refrain from checking social media until after noon today, which I kept).

This current round of reflux has been enough of a nuisance for me to dial back on citrus and other trigger foods for a while. I'd bought a sale bag of grapefruits before deciding this needed to happen. Fortunately, I now have water-bath canning in my culinary toolbox:



I also prepared a batch of pickled clementines two days ago. One of the jars didn't seal properly, though, resulting in orange syrup splattering across my counter yesterday morning. (At least I tested it before delivering it to the recipient!) So far, the seals on the jars of tomatoes I canned back in October-November have definitely done their job; I usually have to pry them off with a knife, and the jar I used in Wednesday's oxtail stew was no exception.

For Thursday, the BYM picked up ribs and beer from Various Artists Brewing. A week earlier, I'd picked up a Feast of Seven Fishes from Nicky's Coal Fired. It ended up covering both Christmas lunch and dinner, plus a cannoli nightcap on Boxing Day and a risotto break the following week. I'm dreaming about re-creating the baked clams, and getting the pasta again. (The octopus in the seafood salad was also outstanding, but that's one I'll leave to the professionals.)

Christmas Eve also included a Zoom service and social hour hosted by my church.



I'd contributed tracks to three of the carols, and the video for a modern setting of "I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day" (way less lugubrious than the traditional Calkin hymn!) was created by Trigg. I had been on the fence about catching the service (I worked fifteen minutes into it), but I was especially glad that I had done so when I saw the reactions in the chat as the segment aired. It's archived on YouTube (the carol starts at 42:27):



( In other news (behind cut-tag for profanity) )

Christmas itself was marvelous. Like today, I jettisoned my extensive to-do list in favor of a long nap, and I have no regrets. (Aiming for much more sleep in 2021 is definitely going to be a thing here.) Because of the title of this entry, I will note that the bounty included apricot preserves from American Spoon (all the more delightful because I had talked myself out of ordering from them just a day or two earlier). Because of the title of this blog, I feel compelled to celebrate here the most over-the-top present I opened that morning:



That's a bar of zirconium, y'all. Carefully machined, sanded, and polished by my friend Bill, with its own fitted cherry stand. I've done enough wood- and metalwork to have an idea of how long it took (augmented by conversations with and messages from Bill this year about his adventures in acquiring and working with other elements. He had particularly sulfurous comments about antimony . . .). I can't stop admiring it. :)

2020 ended with the BYM turning in an hour before midnight. I wasn't making a point of staying up (I'm usually the one dozing off before the guitar falls) but there had been a poem I had been trying to write all month, so I buckled down to fleshing it out and hit the Submittable button forty minutes before midnight (and again at twenty minutes 'til for another packet). Then I put away laundry while peeking at the lights still up on my street and on Holly. A year ago the ones on Holly would not have been visible because of trees the tornado knocked down.

Tonight's dinner is leftover rice with black-eyed peas and Chinese sausage, with sparkling wine. It reached 74 F in parts of Nashville today, so I spent part of the afternoon cutting spotted leaves off the rosebushes, and tomorrow I'll spray them.

Friends, here's to a year with an abundance of roses and other rewards. And, if you aren't blogging or tweeting about your goings-on, drop me a line on what you are seeing, hearing, tasting, or considering? Message me for my address if you'd rather send (and get) a (post)card. :)

I was a little apprehensive about going to the Chef and I in Nashville's Lenox Village last week. When I bought the Living Social voucher, the word "interactive" hadn't leapt out at me the way it did when I went to the website for more details, and I can get pretty sullen and surly if I'm feeling badgered into more interactivity than I'm in the mood to provide.

But it turned out to be a nice evening, even after I realized I'd totally gotten wrong which Lenox-something the restaurant was located around. (Note to self: do not buy anything via LS before the second cup of coffee. Ever.) The place is more mellow than its website -- I had a lovely sparkling wine (from Cielo winery) with lobster bisque, and halibut with various vegetables. The chef chatted briefly with me about the amuse-gueule (leftover coffee-crusted turkey, brie, and a sliver of scallion), tools for flipping fish, and the economics of serving lamb, but I was mostly left alone to enjoy my food, my notebook, and book in peace, and the room was large enough for the large birthday party behind me to be amusing rather than annoying.


"Thanksgiving in a bite"

(More cell-phone snapshots here)

Other recent eats:
* fried calamari at the Bosco's in Cool Springs, with iced tea
* buffalo cauliflower at Tavern, with a pint of Left Hand Milk Stout and a pint of Mayday Boro Blonde. And they serve cucumber sticks instead of celery. Rawk!
* chicken, stuffing, corn on the cob, and other sides, prepared by Jase. Happiness is comparing Music City Tent & Events warehouse sale acquisitions (*) while sipping a good pinot noir. :D

(* Jase is a party planner. I used to coordinate events for a cathedral. I don't plan to execute anything ambitious in the near future [at least in that vein], but I did leave the sale with what I'd gone for [5 champagne flutes] and then some [4 martini glasses].)

On the writing front: 2 outright rejections, 4 rejections-by-inference, 2 made-it-through-another-round, and 1 stern-talking-to to stop myself from taking on a new and intriguing but poorly remunerative assignment that would tick me off if I actually let it nibble into the time I already can't spare for [lower 4/5 of Workflowy list]. (But because I am a dreamer, it's nonetheless tucked into that bottom 5th. It'll save me from making the same notes again the next time my magpie brain darts in that direction...)

In the meantime, an item in the top 1/5 is to get enough sleep. So it's off to bed, undrafted [x] and unpasted [y] and unstitched [z] notwithstanding.

Our friends Jase and Chuck are hosting a carnival tonight. Since I own a cloak, and it's going to be cold, I told the BYM that I'd be going as a Generic Fairy Tale Character.

He nodded sagely: "Oh, that's what I tell people you are anyway."

(The ongoing joke in his circles is that I'm imaginary, since I'm more introverted than he is by a factor of 31.)

I am, however, also the Queen of Tarts. (The Dreamwidth icon, incidentally, was taken in front of a Dublin cafe with that name.) After consulting this recipe for proportions, I made a plate of chocolate cheesecake bites and another of raspberry-jalapeno ones:



I'm also going to be wearing two pendants, both made by Jaime Lee Moyer (her Etsy shop is Warrior Kitten Creations). The one that arrived in this morning's mail is my prize as one of the October first line contest winners:



(The one I won earlier is chronicled here.)

...It was a poetry-thickened week, in fact. Wednesday, I went to Vanderbilt to hear Lisa Dordal read from her new book, Commemoration. She also read some poems outside of the collection, including "Bad Dog on Couch," which has made me smile every time I hear it. I've also been wrestling with revisions for a poem I originally started submitting to markets in 2009. I truly thought it was ready back then, of course, but rereading it earlier this week, I realized it needed a better first line, and by the time I was done, the only words the new version shared with the original were those making up 3/4 of the punchline.

There was a lot of sunshine today -- it was beautiful at the lake, gleaming on the jet black necks of geese and the different browns of fresh mulch and the white froth of rushing water -- and also a lot of absent-mindedness. I left my phone at home during my first round of errands. The exterminator left his clipboard on our porch. The contractor left the garage door open. (It's a good thing I happened to be taking the laundry downstairs.)


Peacocks in the parlor at Graceland

After all that running around, I am staying home tonight, working on a manuscript and painting my toenails blue.

Today's quote comes from a 1983 lecture by Katherine Paterson:

A year ago January I hit a section in my current novel which had me convinced that I was never, never, never going to be able to finish it. Painfully, I announced this sad fact to my husband, who said: "Oh, you've reached that stage." And he proceeded to remind me that in every novel there is that THERE-IS-NO-WAY-I-CAN-FINISH-THIS-BOOK stage. I don't care to be told in a crisis of mortal agony that I am merely passing through a thoroughly predictable stage -- one that I have successfully travered six times and am certain to do so again. So I took my anguish to my friend and fellow writer, Mary Lee Settle, with whom I share frequent Szechwan lunches. "I'll never learn to write," I moaned over the hot sour soup. "I'm such a dodo. Nothing I've ever done ever helps me with anything else."

"No," said this woman who is one of America's finest novelists. "NO, you've learned one thing from those six other books. You've learned that a novel can be finished, and that tells you that you can finish this one."

- The Kerlan Awards in Children's Literature, 1975-2001 (Pogo Press, 2001)

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P.S. I am charmed by this report from today's Tennessean:

What came across at the dinner, Newkirk said, was the president's commitment "to the average person like me, to making sure that I have the ability to have a better life."

She was floored when Obama took out a pen at the table and jotted a thank-you note to a friend of one of the other couples at the table for watching the couple's two children during the dinner.

"It was really amazing to me that the president of the United States would take time out of his schedule to write a note to one of the attendee's baby-sitters," she said with a laugh.