Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

We just had a power outage, or maybe two or three--the power flickered for a few seconds, and then for maybe a minute, and then for 25 minutes. adrian_turtle and cattitude kept cooking; we have a gas stove (and oven) and long matches for exactly this situation. We ate dinner by flashlight, and the power seems to be back for now.

I am keeping the small flashlight (the one I lent nineweaving at either Farthing Party or Scintillation, because she had to back to the place she was staying via a poorly lit street) in easy reach for the moment.

This seems to be a very local problem: we could see both house lights and street lights on the other side of the street/around the corner Egremont Road, but two or three other nearby buildings also lost power when we did.

One of the first things Cattitude did when the power came back on was change the batteries in the large flashlight, which was noticeably dim when he turned it on.

I tried contacting Eversource, and found that they have a record of my phone number, or maybe two records: it asked whether I was texting them about our apartment in Arlington, or the one in Somerville. (The power here is in Adrian's name.)

cattitude and adrian_turtle baked a loaf of challah this afternoon, and we also made chicken with an apricot and tomato sauce, and rice to serve with/under the sauce, and it was all good, and I am feeling wonderfully taken care of. We used less than half the loaf, so we will probably have either French toast or bread pudding for lunch tomorrow.

Adrian has baked challah before, but cattitude hadn't, and we're still figuring out the oven in this apartment. The bottom crust was overdone and the bread is a bit dry, and we talked about things to change for next time.

I like living with both of them.

adrian_turtle messaged me this afternoon "Hello again. Check your porch."

On the front porch were three small herb plants, two packets of seeds, some flower pots, and a bag of potting soil.

This wasn't exactly a surprise: we'd talked some about what herbs cattitude and I would like to grow, and she even mentioned that she had a cunning plan for getting them for me. (For coronavirus-related reasons, neither of us is going to the gardening center for a while.)

I brought the plants indoors, and quickly discovered that our tentative plan of growing herbs on a kitchen windowsill would not survive the intense interest of the cats. So, they're on a porch windowsill, and we are going to keep an eye on the forecast: the porch is enclosed but unheated, so basically at the outside temperature, sometimes with a time lag.

The porch mostly contains some overflow storage (canned goods, yams, paper towels) and boxes awaiting recycling. We want to spend time out there when it gets warm, but the coronavirus happened before we had time to shop for porch furniture.

Friday was my (rescheduled) date night with adrian_turtle. We had a quiet evening (and morning) at her place; we cooked chicken, and had that, rolls, and salad for dinner, with enough left to make another meal for her. Saturday I came home via Arlington Heights, stopping at Penzey's for nutmeg, horseradish powder, and their latest free sample offer, "Bavarian seasoning," which I decided was worth trying as a blend with neither salt, sugar, nor hot peppers.

I baked Quick After-Battle Chocolate Cake, because I felt like baking. It was quite tasty, but would have been quicker if I hadn't had to start by mixing up chocolate soy milk*, and if I hadn't then spent several minutes looking for the electric mixer, and thinking about what to make since I couldn't find it, before cattitude found it behind something on a shelf in a closet.

Cattitude made salmon and asparagus, and after dinner he put a candle in the cake and he and Adrian sang "Happy Birthday" to me. We were eating seconds of the cake when the power went out. Glancing around we saw it wasn't just our building, but a multi-block area. If I can believe the Eversource phone system, I was one of the first people to report the outage. About half an hour later, I got a call that T-Mobile flagged as "SCAM LIKELY," so I let it go to voicemail. It turned out to be Eversource with an update on when they thought they'd have the electricity back on, which has me wondering about their scam detection algorithms.

Adrian left around 9, and we got the power back about 9:40, which was long enough to conclude that we need more, or better, flashlights (and not just because one of mine is vacationing in Cambridge).

When we woke up this morning we had no heat or hot water; it took me a while to figure out that this wasn't just me feeling cold. The repair crew got those back on about 3 p.m., so it could have been a lot worse. The management company told me (around 10:30 a.m.) that it would be a few hours because they needed parts; I don't know if the timing on this is coincidence, or if the power failure (or restoration) provoked the failure.

*The recipe calls for the milk from a chocolate cow, but I used milk from a patch of chocolate beans instead, so Adrian could eat the cake.

We have a new teakettle, which we bought at China Fair (thank you to everyone who mentioned it; despite having been there a couple of times before, neither I nor cattitude thought of it on our own yesterday).

I'm not sure I like it as well as the one it's replacing, but I'm not sure how much of that is that we'd had the previous one for thirty years and were very used to it. If by some chance I see another of that style, I will probably buy it (it had no label of any sort, and I have no idea if they're still being made, or indeed were made for more than a six-month period back in the 1980s).

This was supposed to be a rest day, which I hadn't really gotten last weekend. (No, adrian_turtle didn't run me ragged, but there were some nice long walks, and carrying bags of groceries and such, and those long bus rides aren't the most restful thing in my life.)

In the sense of minimal physical exertion, it was. (And, on the short wanders outside, I not only enjoyed some fine spring weather, I saw violets and the first goslings of the season.)

However, I've done more cooking than I planned, in part because cattitude wasn't up for it. In addition to making us lunch, I made a batch of lemon ice cream while he was napping, then fish stock (because he didn't have the energy), and then I baked us fish for dinner. So I am well fed, and there are several containers in the freezer with labels that say "FISH" (because confusing that with the poultry stock seems a bad idea, moreso than confusing the duck and chicken would be, though the duck is also labeled).

Somewhere in there, the timer switch on the ice cream maker broke. I wound up turning it off with a pair of pliers (and think I did so too soon), and have email in to the Cuisinart company, because "replacement switch" isn't on the list of parts they offer on their Web site. A new paddle, lid, motor arm, or canister, yes. I'm hoping this is because it's trivial and they'll just say "here you go" rather than that they aren't prepared to handle this issue. (It's plastic, and broke in a way that is almost certainly not glueable, at least not usefully or stably.)

I also did some freelance proofreading, but that doesn't even require me to stand up, let alone lift anything heavy or fragile. So, again, it's work, but feels okay to have done today, though a full day's proofreading would not have been.

I had an excellent weekend with adrian_turtle, and now I'm back home with cattitude (and julian_tiger). One attempt at seeing other people in Boston fell through because I never got an answer to my email asking about locations. Instead, Adrian and I spent yesterday evening at the home of some friends of hers (nice people, one of whom I'd met before) who have a hot tub and are happy to share it. Aaaah!

We were happily domestic, which included me getting a no-longer-functional air conditioner out of her apartment (I do the heavy lifting when possible). We each cooked, and I did something that resembled my standard pilaf recipe, using leftover roast chicken from the night before. I say "resembled" because I'm not sure it really counts as a pilaf without the noodles. I like it better with white rice, but Adrian prefers brown, so that's what she has around. She doesn't keep bay leaves, so I used some thyme and some basil. That worked quite well, and I'll probably try it again.

It was good weather for walking around, cool but not yet cold. Some of the leaves have turned red and yellow (more than down here in New York), but the trees aren't brown or bare yet, and we saw many sunflowers and morning glories. Also a pair of almost-grown cygnets, still pale gray, swimming next to their bright white parents.

On the way home, the bus driver decided to detour around a bit of traffic by leaving the highway in New Haven, thus providing a good view of the partially demolished New Haven Coliseum, which interested me because I walked past the building many times as an undergraduate. We also went into/through a weigh station, which surprised me less because I hadn't known buses were expected to go be weighed than because I'd about concluded that every weigh station in the Northeast, if not the world, was permanently closed, never before having seen one open. (It's a dull process as we did it: drive moderately slowly along a lane that includes a built-in scale, keeping at least a fixed distance from the truck in front of us, and then going back onto the road. There was a separate area further from the road, marked with a sign that said "scales." I saw a large tractor-trailer waiting to exit that area.)

Perhaps too mighty, based on the state of my right shoulder. But we had duck egg drop soup for supper tonight: the carcass of last night's Chinese roast duck, simmered with carrots and celery and an onion and the usual spices, including more than the usual amount of ginger. Egg drop soup because there was very little meat left on the duck, and I wanted to thicken it and add a little protein. It was good. Two out of two cats agreed with me.

I also now have duck stock in the freezer to cook with, and I clarified a couple of ounces of duck fat, ditto.

The "perhaps too mighty" isn't from soup making, it's from dyeing three short-sleeved silk shirts purple. One of those is for adrian_turtle, the other two for me. (I washed the remaining two white shirts, and will either use them as white shirts or dye them blue. papersky, how do you feel about light-weight short-sleeved shirts for summer?) The "easy" method of dyeing cotton or silk involves a fair amount of stirring of dye-soaked shirts in a bucket of water-and-dye (and chemicals).

It's very pleasant just to hang out here with cattitude and adrian_turtle, drink tea and talk, play Scrabble with him while she hangs out and watches quietly, listen to them laughing together while I'm in the kitchen making tea, or drying off after my shower.

The "unwell" part is shortness of breath. I am coming to suspect that the episodes of bronchitis, and case of pneumonia, in the last few years have left some residual, long-term damage. The current episode is, I suspect, triggered by the cold snap: not that freezing is that cold, but it's a change from what I have been experiencing, and breathing, over the last weeks.

Under "accomplished," file a shopping trip to pick up some useful Thanksgiving supplies and a few things that we've needed for a bit that the most local supermarket doesn't stock, and -- this is the main thing -- I got the super up here, and the kitchen faucet no longer leaks.

I have taken cleanser to it, to deal with such black spots as accumulated in the damp. The next step will be acquiring and using some anti-rust stuff, but that's either a job for cattitude, in which case he gets to schedule it, or one that I'm going to hold off on, given the shoulder (not as happy in the last few days, though the physical therapy went fairly well today) and the not yet entirely grown back fingernail.

I am now going to get (another) clean shirt, and drink my tea in the satisfaction of a day both somewhat restful and somewhat useful, a fine balance that is not always achieved.

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Both porcinea and roadnotes have sent me email recently that didn't reach me, at least not on the first try. (One got through in the form of a forwarded version of the original message; in the other case, the third email containing the information in question came through.) It is probably coincidence that both messages contained telephone numbers. I don't know what's going on, but it doesn't seem related to the LiveJournal move and related email delays; Roadnotes at least used the redbird.org address. I shall probably investigate this, but maybe not until next week; in the meantime, if you expected to hear from me and haven't, it's possible I never got your message. rysmiel, I suspect yesterday's difficulty was at the Hotmail end, but I'm less sure of this than I might like to be.