Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

It still doesn't seem like a good idea to eat in restaurants here, so we celebrated my birthday as well as cattitude's at home. We celebrated Cattitude's birthday on the actual day, but adrian_turtle was waiting a cautious three days after seeing her other partner.

So I had two small at-home birthday dinners this year. My actual birthday dinner was bay scallops, cooked very simply, because we saw them on sale at the farmers market that afternoon. Two days later, he cooked duck breasts for the three of us, at Adrian's place; before we saw the scallops, I was going to have duck for a birthday dinner.

This also got me two birthday cakes: lemon cheesecake from 7Ate9 at home, and a homemade carrot cake at Adrian's. Adrian made a cake with a cinnamon glaze, instead of the usual cream cheese icing, and it worked very well.

I think we have one piece of the carrot cake left; about half the cheesecake is in the freezer, in single-serving slices.

I just had a very nice birthday dinner: cattitude roasted a leg of lamb, with potatoes and sweet potato pieces in the roasting pan, as I had asked. adrian_turtle showed up with a very nice birthday cake--rather fancier than I was expecting from our earlier conversation about her making either cake or an apple crisp. Chocolate cake, frosted with chocolate ganache over a thin layer of orange marmalade.

Cattitude got fresh rosemary to use with the lamb, instead of dried. The sweet potato was also somewhat experimental--not the roasting, but putting it next to a roast rather than at the higher temperature we generally use for roasting root vegetables.

Since we are only three people, Cattitude and I also have at least enough lamb for another meal.

The main difference between this and how we celebrate in normal years is that we were at home, rather than in a restaurant--but dinner with the two of them is how I usually celebrate.

Happy birthday roadnotes!

cattitude took me out to dinner tonight to celebrate my birthday at a bistro near my office, L'Express. I had two appetizers—a crab cake and an onion tart—and dessert. The crab cake was just right, soft and sweet and crabby rather than bready, and came with a bit of salad dressed with good olive oil. The onion tart was the sort of not-quite-as-expected that I enjoy, in the general area of my expectations and also very good. (I'd thought it would be a small tart with a crisp shell; this was a piece cut from a rectangle, with little crust, and lots of soft onion flavor. For dessert I got an apricot creme brulee, which was every bit as crisp as it should have been. Again a small surprise, with actual chunks of apricot (the menu also offered vanilla, and I expected this to be apricot-flavored in the same sort of way that a dessert might be vanilla-flavored).

This was a lower-key outing than some years, but tasty. It was also closer to my birthday than we've managed in a few years. (Yesterday I went to the gym and saw Emilie, because that's what I usually do on Thursdays, and it's something I like enough that it fit with a birthday that's also a workday. So ( gym-notes ))

I also got an unexpected birthday gift: Amazon has released an update of the Stanza ebook reader, so it works again after Apple broke it with iOS 5. This is apparently going to be the last update, but it's one more than we were expecting; they seemed to have more-or-less abandoned the software after buying Lexcycle. "Also" meaning in addition to Cattitude buying me chocolate, and birthday cards and email from friends and relatives. (And a very weird set of phone messages from the company we have renter's insurance through, left by someone who seemed to be having trouble remembering the English for "Feliz cumpleaños" or finding someone to help her.)

Twenty years ago, I woke up, turned on the radio, and heard “Berliners continue to celebrate in their no-longer-divided city.” That was a pleasant surprise, in an odd way a fine and memorable birthday present.

Google has gone to some trouble to make sure I know that [Bad username or unknown identity: ”bcholmes”] and I also share our birthday with Sesame Street. I’m just old enough that I didn’t learn much from Sesame Street: but I have a younger brother, and I did watch, and I’m still fond of Grover and Kermit, and remember Big Bird and Mr. Snuffleupagus and the Cookie Monster and Miss Piggy and Oscar. Quite a bit later, I watched The Muppet Show. I also have fond memories of The Electric Company, and still give 02134 when a store asks my zip code for demographic purposes.

There are gorgeous purple flowers, mostly roses, on my desk here. *grin*

I had a very good workout this afternoon. It usually doesn't seem worth the energy to go down to the gym on a weekend without other plans--but gym followed by a birthday dinner made a lot of sense. The gym was pleasantly uncrowded, as it usually is on weekend afternoons. On the streets near the gym, I passed several picket lines--the stagehands are now striking most of the Broadway theaters. (Most because some of the theaters have current contracts--the people on strike had been working without a contract since summer.)

After exercising, I read for a bit in the hotel lobby (my usual gym branch is in the Marriott hotel near Times Square), waiting for cattitude to call and say he'd gotten downtown by subway. (Had he been running earlier, he would have had time for bookstore wandering while I finished at the gym.) We rendezvous'd, and got back on the subway to Brooklyn, for a birthday dinner at Henry's End in Brooklyn Heights. We hadn't been there in a few years, after a disappointing visit or two, but I thought of them this week, looked at the web site, and thought "crab cakes!" so we went. It was excellent. Crab cakes and duck with wild mushrooms for me, chestnut and apple soup (a special) and steak au poivre for Cattitude. All very good, especially his soup. I had them wrap half of my duck, and a couple of slices of fruit bread from the bread basket, for me to bring home. And then I had a Persian lime pie (well, lime custard on a graham cracker crust, served in a small glass bowl), and he had a cheese plate. We are well-fed and happy.

Also today, I concluded that my old down parka was no longer warm enough even as a fall jacket, so I have thrown it away. Keeping it as long as I did was more sentimental than practical. (Fear not, I have a fine new parka, rated down to -25, -40 if one is exercising, which proved its value in Montreal last winter. I also have a long wool coat.)

( gym numbers )

Happy birthday, zorinth!!!

cattitude and I celebrated his birthday today by walking in Central Park and then going out for dinner. We'd considered the Botanic(al) Gardens, but both of them were doing Halloween stuff today, and transport looked iffy [1], so Cattitude decided he'd like to just walk around Central Park and enjoy the warm afternoon and surprising amount of green. And such fall colors as have developed thus far, the occasional tree in orange, red, or yellow standing out against the green background [2].

We entered at Columbus Circle and walked north. The Parks Department had decided it had been dry long enough to open the Sheep Meadow; I decided it was warm enough to go barefoot. There are few places I'll go barefoot outdoors in the city, but this is one: the lawn is lush and well-maintained, basically free of glass, rocks, and even acorns. There were some squishy bits underfoot, and my feet got wet, but not excessively so.

What neither of us expected to find was wild strawberries, next to the fence. Cattitude spotted the yellow flower first, and bent down to take a closer look. Yes, the leaves matched. I said it wouldn't last long enough to produce ripe fruit, and then he spotted a bit of bright red. The seeds were still sticking out, in a "this isn't ripe" way, but yes, on the next-to-last day of October, in New York City, there were two developing wild strawberries and one strawberry flower.

No dragonflies, though we looked, nor lilacs.

The Ramble was nice, though we didn't hold still long or have binoculars with us, and saw nothing more surprising than a hermit thrush (the bird I added to my life list earlier this month). By then I was tired, so we sat a bit and read. When I got chilly, we took advantage of our memberships and went into the Museum of Natural History for a (not very good, but much-needed) cup of tea in the basement cafeteria, and the exhibit on new dinosaur discoveries.

If you follow dinosaur news, there won't be any surprises here, though I enjoyed looking at the recent fossil discoveries from Liaoning, China. They have a mix of actual fossils and photographs. The one thing that startled Cattitude wasn't a dinosaur: it was a slow-motion film of a running alligator, whose motion resembled that of a frog hopping rather than of a crocodilian walking. We stopped into the Hall of Vertebrate Origins to look at coelacanths--the exhibit needs updating (it still claims there's only one living species), and I hadn't realized how big the contemporary coelacanth is. The model that's about the size of my tattoo is of an embryonic coelacanth, with yolk sac still attached, taken from the belly of the fish that showed the species to be oviviparous [3].

For dinner, we went to the Silver Swan, because German food is one of his comfort foods. We both ordered a complete dinner--I overestimated how hungry I was--which comes with a choice of several appetizers. I was thinking I'd probably get either the duck pate or the smoked mackerel, but I had to ask what "ochsenmaul salad" was, because I didn't think it could actually involve hitting oxen over the head with hammers.

Not quite. Other end of the ox. "Ochsenmaul" is oxtail. I said something like "that sounds weird, I have to try it." It was weird and good, a slightly vinegary rare meat served over a bit of lettuce, with a little raw onion and a couple of tomato wedges. ('Twould have been a better salad in tomato season; as was, the only thing wrong with it was that there wasn't enough salad-stuff with the meat.) After one bite, I said "you'll like this," and gave Cattitude some. He did, enough so that I gave him probably about a third of it. He said it tasted like tongue, and we discussed the possibilities of a tongue sandwich at the Second Avenue Deli, though it wouldn't be like his Mom used to make--she served it with a sauce based on crabapple jelly.

[1] Getting from our house to the NY Botanical Garden, in the Bronx, involves two buses, and getting downtown for dinner afterward might have been tricky; the TA was messing with service on the best train line for the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.

[2] The tree directly across the street from the Indian Road entrance to our building was red this morning.

[3] They lay eggs, but carry them in their bodies until they hatch; once the egg is laid, the mother is providing protection but no further nutrition, unlike a placental mammal.