Potatoes in the Mist

1. I feel bad when I turn down subbing gigs at awful hours. E.g., 6:45 am-7:45 am. I have a permanent class at this place, and I like to allow thirty minutes to get there by subway, so I'd have to leave at 6:15 am, and get up at 5:45 or so. If I were desperate to teach, I'd do it, but not now. Bear in mind I fall asleep at 1 am, *with* the help of melatonin. 2. We tried a new Ethiopian restaurant with D's cousin J last night. It is so new that it's not even on menupages yet. It was good, except for the vegetarian meatballs that D started to use as hockey pucks. 3. I have an old "boom box" that I can't bring myself to get rid of. It stopped playing tapes in 1997 (that is, it began eating them) and it still plays CDs, but it skips and stalls. 4. Sometimes I play Donna De Lory's music in my yoga classes. She used to, and maybe still does, sing backup for Madonna. 5. The other day I patted a dog named Gracie, and two other people patted her in a span of 1...

1. I'm posting a Thursday thirteen on Wednesday. Because I can :) 2. Cooking-wise, it's been a blogariffic day... Vernicious Knids ' carrot soup for lunch, Lindsay 's Asian black bean soup with long-grain brown rice for dinner. 3. I've become a food renegade...when cooking, I change ingredients around freely. 4. I used to follow recipes strictly. When I lived in Newton, I once drove to the supermarket to get cumin. My roommate couldn't believe it. 5. When I told my mother, she said, "Cumin is distinctive." 6. We're having an unusually social weekend. We're getting together with M & M (she's pregnant! due in February) and a few other people. M (the guy of the couple) is one of those people whose rolodex must rival War and Peace. (In terms of length, not upheaval and bloodshed.) Saturday we're having dinner with DG. 7. It's probably good for me to be social; I need to be reminded that I'm an extrovert. My tendency is often to ...

1. There are three Woody Allen movies I watch over and over: Annie Hall, Manhattan and Play It Again, Sam. 2. I've walked out of one movie in my life: The Pick-Up Artist. 3. My mom walked out of The Witches of Eastwick. 4. One of my favorite soups has sweet potato, tomato, onion and carrot in it. It sounds like an odd combination, but it works. 5. I have 3 bottles of nail polish: pink, cranberry and purple. 6. I wonder how much birth order affects a person's life. 7. I'm afraid to go to countries if I have to get inoculations first. 8. My veins are hard to find. 9. I liked going to New Hampshire and Maine when I was little. 10. I still would, but they're further away. 11. New England winters can be brutal; I remember when I owned a car there, the manual instructed me to maintain it on the same schedule as a Canadian. 12. The TV shows I like the best are: Grey's Anatomy, Desperate Housewives, The Office, The New Adventures of Old Christine, and How I Met Your Mother....

1. On Sunday night, I came down with a cold, and threw my back out getting up repeatedly from bed to blow my nose. How glamorous. 2. My back has mostly repaired but my cold is hanging in there. Well, the diminished voice part is. Teaching this morning was interesting. 3. I said to one of my students, "See you next Thursday; I hope I'm in better voice then," and she said cheerfully, "It didn't matter, the message got through." 4. She is a kindred spirit, as Anne Shirley would say. 5. I remember in college a friend and I were discussing favorite guys in literature. At the time I picked Heathcliff. She said, "Oh, he's a basket case," and picked Darcy. I still have an un-PC fondness for Rochester. 6. In college I wrote a paper about the Victorian woman's revenge fantasy, citing Jane Eyre, Aurora Leigh and maybe a couple of others. 7. The professor loved it. 8. I've never seen a number of popular shows from the past and present: Survivor, Ug...

1. I bought a pound of red grapes from the fruit man this morning. He said, "Thees is what pretty woman eats, no? If I eat this, I be pretty, too." The thing is, grapes are very exciting to me lately...my friend Carpe's doctor told him not to eat them. So they seem like a forbidden fruit, and I eat them more often. 2. Growing up, I had an above-ground pool in my backyard. I used to go underwater with my friends and have underwater tea parties. We would sit cross-legged on the bottom of the pool, open our eyes to see all the blue wavy water (tinted by the pool walls, of course), and raise imaginary cups of tea. I was telling D about this and he never did it. So I thought maybe it's a girl thing. Did you do it? 3. I played Billie this morning at yoga and it seemed to go over well. 4. Two of my regulars had an animated discussion about bedbugs and spiders (before class). 5. Bedbugs are on the rise. 6. I hope we don't have any. 7. I dreamed that a rat was lying on top...