mood

about right now:

~ there is a (disturbingly large) segment of the population that is wilfully, proudly dumb. that's disconcerting. people who were dumb used to want to conceal that fact. i wish they would again. i blame reagan for the fact that they no longer want to do this. and doubly so dubya. and now, we see the results of it with the current dysfunctional administration.

~ sometimes it's fun to go against your own nature and just quietly observe instead of jumping into the conversation with your own stories. or rehearsing them in your head before it's your turn and then not really listening. this is also hard. but undoubtedly good for you. and by you, i mean me.

~ when your own mother is losing her mind, it's always interesting to listen to someone else's lightly racist mother reminisce. being able to remember is a good thing.

~ husband took a disgusting manufactured (albeit locally) plastic-wrapped cake of the sort that will be what survives a nuclear war (which these days, is closer than we might think/hope) to his meeting instead of the beautiful homemade cake that i made for him. he took the cake i made for him along, but "forgot" it in the car. the purchased cake was a joke. apparently. (tho' i fail to see the punchline if one doesn't reveal that one has actually brought a proper cake.) but i'm not bitter. or maybe i am. seriously, wtf?

~ i would feel better if we just had a few days of sunshine. i'm definitely in an end-of-winter-darkness funk. and probably have a serious vitamin d deficiency.

the view from sunday night

it rained most of the weekend, but between showers, i managed to pick a bowlful of violets to make cordial. i also picked a wheelbarrow full of rhubarb and made cordial of that as well. and it doesn't even look like i picked any. the rhubarb is doing well.

so well, in fact, that i had to make a rhubarb cake. which i've blogged here, if you're interested in the recipe. it's the perfect mother's day cake. but alas, my mother wasn't here and my family didn't seem to have gotten the message that it was mother's day. not that i really mind. isn't it really just another day crafted by the consumption industry to try to force us to eat out in restaurants, buy flowers and jewelry? tho' it would have been nice to have been served breakfast in bed.

i was walking out to the garden to pick some asparagus for my risotto when i happened to catch these two snails in the act. i went back an hour or more later, to give the cats and the pigs their dinner and tuck in the chickens and they were still at it. i guess they were enjoying the rainy weather. i'm not sure if they're ones we painted on, as i didn't want to disturb them to check their shells more closely.

with the rainy, dreary weather, we were in the mood for some comfort food, so i made a chicken and asparagus risotto. it's also got dried mushrooms in it. my neighbor dried a whole lot of mushrooms she found at her summerhouse in sweden last summer and they are a heavenly cooking ingredient. i think risotto one of the great kitchen gifts. so easy, so comforting, so warm and so delicious. it takes whatever tastes you throw at it and seems at once homey and elegant somehow. perfect sunday night food.

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other than things domestic, i was reading this piece on generation y and the reasons for their unhappiness and i wondered if it doesn't also apply a little bit to generation x.

i'm also watching a couple of FX series - fargo (based on the coen brothers film of the same name) and the americans. fargo is fantastic and i feel very impatient for the next episode. i'm slowly getting into the americans. i think i was just in the mood for fargo. it's well-written, well-acted and the way they have woven in the original movie is so cleverly done; there are echoes of it throughout, even tho' it's a new story. and it all begins, like the film, with the coen brothers myth that it's based on a true story. it's not. minnesotans are more sensible than that. but they really do have that accent.

and have you seen the lego episode of the simpsons yet? quite subversive and a bit edgier than i would have thought. a good melding of the two brands that allows them each to be who they are. thumbs up from me. best line from bart, "i'm a creative but undisciplined builder." most subversive moment, when the minister says, "bad news people, our religion is not true. sorry about that."