The kind where you can stay in pajamas as long as you like.
I woke up at 6:00, and really didn’t want to be awake, but knew that it was supposed to turn rainy, and thought I should get out for a walk. Laziness took over though, and reflecting that I had gone for two shortish bike rides and an hour walk – to Sundance to see Mad Max, and back – yesterday, and I stayed in bed until almost 7:30.
Then I got up and made these scuffins – I used wheat germ instead of ground flaxseed, so they’re a little LESS healthy. The wheat germ was in the back of the fridge, and the expiry date was 2013 – it smelled a little funny but tasted OK. Half are peach and half are black raspberry, American Spoon jam. And I made pie dough – going to make blueberry pie, also an attempt to use up old stuff – blueberries frozen last year – and then tomorrow I am going to defrost the freezer. Anyways, my hands still smell nice and buttery as I type, especially the left.
Choice of peach – the ones where it looks like no jam, because the peach preserves blended in – or black raspberry
For our Memorial Day festivities, I’m planning the blueberry pie, as above, and burgers – like the Bru Burger I ate in Indianapolis, when I was there for DPLA – with Taleggio cheese, caramelized onions, tomato jam (more American Spoon) and bacon. I think I’ll make a bunch of bacon, to eat with the scuffins, for breakfast, and save out enough for the burgers. Also something with potatoes – salad or roasted or grilled – and asparagus. I’m trying to be conservative, because there aren’t many of us. A few kids are around, still sleeping – John & Megan came to Madison, but Al’s still in Chicago. Hannah and Corey are sacked out in the basement, but I don’t think they’re eating with us.
We got word that John & Al’s grandma, Jeff’s mom Bette, died yesterday morning. She was 92. Pretty much everyone agreed that she was jast about the annoying-est woman they’d ever known, so it’s really odd to feel that annoyingness gone from the universe.
And more life passages – Last night when we got home from the movie, I was goofing around on the Internetz, trying to find old artist friends from Pittsburgh. There was a houseful of artists who lived across the street from me, when I lived in the student apartment that my father liked the least, because it was me and 5 boys, on College Ave. in the Shadyside neighborhood in Pittsburgh. Which is looking to be an odd combo of falling down and gentrified at the moment – the house we lived in was pretty much falling down in the late ’70s, and nothing historic about it. While I was still living there, the process began to build a high speed busway – Ellsworth Avenue, the commercial street that College dead-ended at, that dead-ended itself in a weird way, or just didn’t connect up because of old railroad tracks in the way, and the dread Penn Circle, failed 1960s urban renewal, in East Liberty, was closed. While Ellsworth was under construction, city buses were rerouted on narrow College Ave., which was alarming, to say the least. Across the street there was Bruce, who was a painter studying at Carnegie Mellon, and Chris, also studying at Carnegie Mellon, more of a conceptual artist, played music, did sculpture, and did a tiled ceiling in one of the campus buildings, and Marian Monk, called Chipper – older than the rest of us, and who I most admired, and stayed friendly with for the longest. Even though I slept with Chris, albeit briefly.
So it was pretty chilling to find that Chipper died in 2008, although I couldn’t find much more than this picture.
Marian Anita Monk, 1948 – 2008, courtesy CJ Biller on Find A Grave
