Oh cats. They're cute and furry, and they purr and sometimes let you pet them. They're fun when they play. And then there's 4:30 in the morning.
That's when Paige likes to let us know how desperately she needs our love, how much she misses us in the night, and how empty her bowl is.
But not this morning! Yesterday, before heading off to the deliciousness of our Requa Inn dinner, we bought Paige her very own bed. She's never had a cat bed before, not exactly sure why not, but she hasn't. She'll sometimes crawl in with us for a while, but she doesn't stay long.
It took her a while to warm up to it and hop in (and I had to add a towel she's been sleeping on to coax her interest), but once she did, she stayed in! All night long. At NINE O'CLOCK, when we woke up (thank you, S family for keeping our other early riser overnight!), she was curled up looking very proud of her very own bed. No early morning meows. No kneading me in my sleep. No paws on the face.
She just needed her own little bed to be a wonderful morning cat.
Matsutake mushroom. Stinging nettle. Smoked sturgeon.
That was how our fifth course of a tasting menu was described tonight. I was picturing a roasted (?) mushroom, sauteed greens, and a small piece of fish.
What would you picture?
What I didn't picture was a small white pitcher being put on my plate. It was tiny. Like an individual pitcher of cream that might come with a cup of coffee.
There was a green foam hiding the rest of the contents, but as I dipped my spoon in, I found a velvety mushroom soup, with shavings of smoked sturgeon at the bottom. It was not at all expected, but it was so good.
It was maybe a quarter cup -- maybe -- of complete deliciousness that made me wish my tongue was long enough to reach the bottom of that little pitcher. I didn't try, although I wanted to. We were, after all, seated at a table for six and had just met two of our dining companions as the meal began.
Michael and I splurged for a late anniversary dinner and went to the Historic Requa Inn's Beermaker's Dinner tonight. (He was in Pennsylvania for the deal deal last month.) It was eight courses of magical cooking -- not a single miss on any of the plates, starting with a halibut fillet on top of creamy wild rice and ending with a panna cotta served on caramel sauce. I used a leftover piece of fry bread to mop up extra sauce from the family-style serving dish. I'm not ashamed -- it was the perfect end to a perfect dinner.
A couple years ago, Michael and I helped our friend Ruthe by joining other friends to read her fantastic play, This is Crescent City, out loud for the first time. It got some edits out of that reading, a few more suggestions from my helpful cousin Seth, tons more work and sweat and thought from Ruthe, and last night, it premiered on the stage with the Lighthouse Repertory Theater!
The play is about our town's history and present, and what makes people choose to stay here. Our local newspaper has given it good coverage and with luck, that will be just the beginning of the conversations this play will inspire.
We'll be seeing it next weekend and babysitting so other friends can go see it this weekend. If you're nearby, you should choose a performance and GO.
(And if you were admiring the poster, that's good. It's Michael's handiwork! Ain't he great?)
Next week, I get to talk about my previous life in paleoethnobotany. I'm pretty stoked. I'm giving talks to students at two schools ranging from K to 12. I'll be doing three lectures for high schools students: anthropology, intro to paleoethnobotany methods, and prehistoric agriculture in North America. For the younger students, I'll be doing just the paleoethnobotany intro and the prehistory.
Today, I was trying to figure out what images I have access to without having all the slides I haven't gotten around to scanning. I found a few of the micrographs of my seeds and enough photos of my fieldwork in Mexico to make me happy.
Looking at my seeds and beautiful chapatas, along with fields of huauzontle and trucks piled high with produce in the wholesale street market made me feel nostalgic for those lovely Mexican crops. And that's appropriate, given that one of my dissertation's themes was the role of nostalgia in maintaining traditional foods.
It's possible we are somewhat restrictive parents. Darcy didn't eat cake until her second birthday and then it was an applesauce cake with almost no sugar in the cake or frosting. (We've made up for that -- she's had more than enough sugar in her life, but we started out well.)
But one thing she still hasn't had is gum. I think. Although now that I'm writing this, I think I remember someone saying that she'd had a piece on an airplane at some point? Not sure about that. She got a piece of bubble gum during the trick or treat bonanza last week. Tonight, she got Michael to eat it and blow bubbles for her. She was unreasonably tickled by the whole thing and tried to touch each bubble he blew.
It's worth clicking on the picture to enlarge it to see her tongue sticking out of her mouth.
You probably have noticed the lack of photos (and posts) over the past few months. In part, that's because Michael had both our main computer and the camera, so photo taking and sharing has been difficult. Now the shared computer is in California, so I'm just going to poke through the archives and share a few cute photos of Darcy. I know it's what most of you like best anyway. Also, I spent eight hours at a culinary and agritourism training today, with an hour's drive at either end, so it was a long day and I'm tired.
Maybe not as tired as this pair, though. Darcy and Paige take a nap together (or at least pretend to) on our deck in Pennsylvania. She loves her cat and her cat loves her!
And here she is just being plain old silly. There's a sequence of these close-ups with strange faces involving Darcy and her cousin, so I think it was a Thing To Do during this visit. Silly girl.
That's pretty much the whole story today. Michael rolled into town this morning. We all got to sit down to dinner together tonight and he is singing Darcy's bedtime songs right now.
Life is good.
