January 01, 2009

7:06 p.m.

Dinner at My House

I have made the world's best salad dressing. I can hardly stop eating my salad long enough to type this, but as I am addicted to multitasking, I'll do it anyway. Type, bite. Type, bite. It's a balsamic honey-mustard garlic dressing. Seat of the pants measurements. Olive oil, aged balsamic vinegar, a dollop of Dijon mustard, a squirt of Agave nectar and a dollop of honey, then squish a garlic clove through the press. Very important to use the press, not chop. It gets all those oils out. I whirl it all up with my spinny thing that's made to froth milk. Jeepers, it's good. Really has a bite, too.

And thin sliced turkey breast things ("for scallopine," a dish I have no idea how to make) pan sauteed with salt, pepper, ground sage and a dash of red wine. (I'm told wine comes in another color but I just don't seem to have any of that right now.) Simple, elegant, chewy and dammee,* it's healthy.

*18th Century colloquialism for "damn me," used frequently by Gilbert & Sullivan, and William Makepeace Thackeray, and Lady Wallace.

Meanwhile, New Year's Eve. It was a minuscule party. My bandmates had to postpone; Chris is down with a heavy chest cold, and Carol was concerned about the dumping of snow we got all day. Pearl the Niece was at UB's house **

**"Useless Boyfriend," term coined by her Uncle Marc, for the 30-ish boyfriend who lives with his parents and hasn't worked a job since he graduated from college seven years ago.

so it was just Rose, Marc and I. We had great fun eating snackies that I'd brought (cherries and bananas Romanoff, multigrain crackers and hummus, crudite, this and that) and watching the Twilight Zone marathon. There were a couple I actually hadn't seen before. Oh, how we relived those other episodes and talked about our lives when the program was new! Cats came and went by the corn stove, and Rose did some more research on her laptop trying to find what became of the original builders/owners of the house. She found several excellent pieces of information, including confirmation that the couple and two daughters are buried in the nearby cemetery. There is another daughter unaccounted for, and we couldn't find what happened to the son. He died at 23 and doesn't seem to be buried with the rest of the family. Rose looked up in earlier census records, and in Civil War records, and couldn't find his name. We wondered if he maybe had Down's Syndrome or something else that caused him to be hidden away and exempt from family records. Or if he moved to Canada or overseas and his body was never recovered. He might have died from influenza. One of the daughters, who was older than he, died within two months of his death. But she's buried locally; he isn't. Strange mysteries.

At midnight I turned on my cell phone to send Dar a picture of me and Rose, only to find that he'd JUST left me three messages and was all disappointed that my phone hadn't been on. I called him back. He said, "Scratchy Mouse Ears!" I didn't think he'd even stay up. He gets up at the crack of doom no matter what day of the year it is, so he rarely stays up so late.

Rose was so pumped to have gotten her historical info that, when we finally hit the sack after midnight, she couldn't go to sleep for a while, but stayed up reading.

For myself, I stayed overnight in their guest room because a) it was BUTT-cold outside, and b) I had rehearsal today and this would put me 8 miles closer. I didn't sleep so well. I was kind of on alert because of the cats coming and going. The bedroom door had to be open so that it would only be cold, but not freezing, in the room, and I did have a few visitations. I'm not used to animals on the bed. I also got really allergic the moment I went to bed -- one cat hair too many, I s'pose. Plus every time they came onto the bed I had to pet them. Then about 2:30 I woke up with my thumb itching so badly that I wanted to cut it off with a rusty nail file. I finally got up and put some medicine on it. I actually slept perhaps five hours.

At least I didn't have to rush, as rehearsal wasn't until 12:30. We had a magnificent New Year's Day brunch with grits (in honor of my southern mom), pumpkin muffins, cherries, grapefruit, and a mess of bacon. There would have been eggs but it was discovered there was only one left, and that went into the muffins. We ate in the warm kitchen and watched all the birds on their 3 feeders, or sitting all puffed up on the fence because it was in the single digits this morning. Bright, sunny, inviting -- until one went outside. Rose has identified a single Carolina Wren in the yard. It was trying to find a way into the barn today. If it had only looked on the other side; the squirrels have several entryways already!

Way back in the woods is a large, derelict tree fort, long since broken and sagging. Pearl gave one of her "Bloody Stumps" Certificates ("This certificate is worth 6 hours of hard labor at any task you want me to perform") to Marc for Christmas and he's decided to redeem it by having her help him disassemble the tree fort, bring the lumber back, and make bird and bat houses out of it. I love this about him, this inventive, recycling mentality. I think I'll offer to paint them if he wants them to look artsy.

So by and by I had to go out into the cold world. Marc listened to my car start -- it was a tad slow on this frigid day -- and he suggested that next Fall I get the battery replaced. "You won't break down this winter," he said, "but that sound means it's a little bit discharged, and by next winter you'd do well to get a new one." It's never been replaced, in over 100,000 miles, so perhaps I won't complain too much. The fan belt is whining a little in the cold, too. At least I know that sound!

Rehearsal was rusty, as we could have predicted. Chris was really under the weather so he was not his usual, ebullient self. As we were wrapping up Carol brought up the subject of recording. We'd talked before about trying to have something in the can before the sabbatical, so we'd have a new album in the Fall when we come back. I rather loath recording, so I haven't pushed it -- but of course they are absolutely right. It would be a drag to be toting around the same old CDs three years after the last one was pressed. After disagreeing about a few options, we came up with a scenario that I really like, mainly because my parts of it (the hard bits, anyway) are already recorded. I'd have to record maybe one song more, and it's one we've played for years so there's no learning curve, just brushing up. The rest is bass parts and background vocals -- reminding me that, last CD, Chris did all my bass parts before I had the chance, because he's impatient, and I was very upset that I didn't get to play bass on songs I do live. Well, we ironed that out and I think there's only one bass part I'd be doing on this collection anyway.

Tomorrow Carol and I have to do a little bit of tax work -- counting up our CD inventory and counting the overnights we spent on the road, for our per diem deduction -- and I'm puttering around here otherwise. I'm full of salad and turkey. My tummy is bulging out. The family would be proud.