5/8/02
Okay, the good news is finally ready to go public! I am unbelievably thrilled about this. Academia, here I come--! For a little while, anyway.
Also, I'm finally out of my staggeringly hideous office-sublet situation, which some of you know about--the moving company showed up today and moved all my stuff quickly, efficiently, and very expensively to a storage space that's just barely big enough to fit everything (but not big enough to get things out without a significant hassle). Stressed all morning, moved most of the afternoon; Lisa and I got home and celebrated by ordering in pad thai and watching Monty Python in bed.
Cooked last night from a new acquisition, The New Vegan Cookbook by Lorna Sass, to which I was drawn by its beautiful design and the author's name. The meal was a combination the book suggested: "skillet grain medley with curried tempeh and cucumber-mint 'raita.'" (I refuse the unnecessary capitalization.) Was rattled enough mid-cooking that I neglected to put the cucumbers in the c-m "r," but then remembered and fixed my error. Anyway, it came out beautiful to look at and pleasantly textured, but a little flavorless (and the grains and tempeh are indeed dry enough that they need the "raita" to be bearable). I do want to try the carrot slaw with mango-chutney dressing, though; I'm comforted by the fact that the first recipe I made from my favorite cookbook came out charred and inedible.
Highlights of stuff I picked up at BookExpo America (some of which I've read, some of which I haven't yet): Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed: On Not Getting By in America (I'd read the excerpt from it that ran in Harper's, but this is really a splendid piece of work); Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex; Michael Chabon's Summerland; the Slow Food anthology; Neil Gaiman's Coraline; Marianne Faithfull's Faithfull; Richard Flanagan's Gould's Book of Fish; Mark Kurlansky's Salt; Nick Tosches' In the Hand of Dante; and not least Catherine Millet's The Sexual Life of Catherine M., which looks like it may win the all-time award for unintentional comedy.
I could be going to see Christian Fennesz play in an hour or so, but that would require for instance standing up and moving, which is really not something I'm too capable of doing at the moment.