Sometimes I think the worst part about getting old is not being able to sleep. My normal pattern for the last few years, since I’ve been over 55, has been waking up every two or three hours – on a really good night it’s four hours; once in a long while I’ll sleep five hours straight. But even worse than that is the days when I wake up at 4:30 or 5:00 AM and I lie there worrying and I can’t go back to sleep.
Wednesday morning last week was like that. I had some work stuff I was dreading. I’m trying to remember what I made for dinner – maybe we just ate leftovers. I know there was one night I ate a small dish of ice cream with fudge sauce and another night I had a Nutella and graham cracker sandwich – sneaky late night snacks, because dinner wasn’t enough.
Thursday I made pasta for dinner – zucchini and peppers and onions and tomato, and the last of the basil puree I took up to Door County and back, and I poured in some half & half and reduced it down. I added cooked penne and all the leftover grated cheese I could find in the fridge, like three tablespoons of cheddar and a little bag of parm and Swiss, mixed, and layered it with goat cheese and baked it.
On Friday after work I caught a bus out to Sundance and met Mark to see The Drop. By then the sore throat I woke up with last Tuesday was now a full blown cold. We had dinner at Pasqual’s sitting at the bar. I had a bacon, lettuce, tomato, & avocado quesadilla, and brought half of it home. John fought traffic to get here from Chicago, and didn’t arrive until almost 9:30.
Friday night traffic on the beltline
On Saturday, Mark and I went to the Farmers’ market first thing. It’s getting to be the time of year when it’s hard to not to buy everything. I got:
Cheese curds from Wili Lehner; big red peppers and 3 poblanos from Sung Haven; apples from Ela; raspberries, potatoes, Roma tomatoes, purple onion, and baby dill from the stand that I like at the top of the square; mixed lettuces and another purple onion, the torpedo kind, from Jones Valley; pork chops from Pecatonica; a mixed bag of fruit – 2 kinds of plums, peaches, apples and apricots from Door County; more tomatoes from Matt Smith; Gotham bagels, and beef jerky from D&G.
Back home, took John to pick up his car and I biked over to Willy Street for the rest of the groceries, and to see the grand reopening after the remodel. I ate some free strawberry ice cream from Sassy Cow, and talked to a bunch of people and little kids.
Then John & Megan and I had our “lets move furniture to get Megan out of the basement” date. The first step was getting the white sled bed out of Megan’s room, and into John’s old room, that is now Rachael’s when she comes here every month. It was kind of a shitshow, as Al would say. We resisted taking the bed frame apart as long as we could, but we finally figured it out. We moved a lot of furniture and had things at all kinds of crazy angles, me and Megan mostly – John helped from the couch. I had a haircut at 3:45, and went to the pet place to look for a covered litter box like Megan & John’s cats have, for Katie kitty. They didn’t have any good ones – Megan got hers at Target – so I got Katie some food and came back, and good thing too.
Because the Alec Soth artist talk that I thought started at 7:30 was actually at 6:30, and you were supposed to be there at 6:00 to get a seat. This was the second time I’ve seen Alec Soth. He’s a nice polite Minnesotan and I’m sure that’s why he can go out and do what he does – people let him take their pictures and he’s able to make a living by taking photographs, and making books. In the words of Doug Fath, Austin’s dad, who’s preparator at the MMoCA, “Of course, we all wish we could be Alex Soth. But we can’t. But I’ve had a good life.” I say, Alec Soth’s awfully smart and nice and he works really hard, but he’s also really lucky.
We were home by 8:30ish, so it was my chance to finally make the browned-butter-Nutella-stuffed-sea-salt-sprinkled cookies I’d been reading about for years. Mark and I ate ours warm and gooey with vanilla ice cream, but I think I like them better when they’ve had a chance to cool off.
Salted, Nutella-Stuffed, Chocolate Chip Cookies
And I made a small, vegan, peach pie for Dorla. I was a little frustrated by how hard the all-vegan shortening crust was to roll, and I was making the pie in a bendy foil pan, and sort of dropped it when I was trying to get it onto the the pizza pan to go into the oven – but it all worked out, as we shall see.
In the morning, I got up and went out early to Target for the cat litter box, and then Sentry for heavy and bulky stuff like fizzy water and flour and sugar and toilet paper. Nothing like Target at 8:30 on a Sunday morning to make you feel like they sell the solution to all life’s problems, made out of plastic.
I sort of put the groceries away, and made a pear cake – Megan drove John over to get his car this time.
Then Mark and I biked to the Willy Street Fair, to see the parade and give Dorla her pie – which I smashed a little more trying to get it strapped to the bike. We watched the parade, and I told Dorla she’d have to get spoons to eat her pie – but she was actually able to cut four nice little slices for herself, me, Claire and Mark. Pie for breakfast. We walked the length of the fair, listened to two Yid Vicious tunes, and came home. Mark was getting too hungry to be out fooling around any longer, and I didn’t want to stop at a coffee place.
I wanted to go see Andy’s Paul Vanderbilt show opening – but I had my second date to clean out the basement while everyone else watched the Packers. I had to make sure there was at least a clear path around the furnaces so we can get the new ones installed next week. I didn’t, as Mark asked, achieve organizational perfection, but I did get the path cleared. I didn’t throw away nearly as much stuff as I should have, nor get the little sitting room area for Megan set up, that I want down there. But it’s better.
My nose was running like crazy the whole time, and I was hot and miserable. I got cleaned up and then I made bean and corn salad, and pork chops, and salad with raspberry vinaigrette for me and Rachael and John and Megan. Somewhere along in there Mark had to leave for Chicago for his work week. After dinner I made a hot toddy and watched Boardwalk Empire upstairs to keep Mark’s cat company. I was completely surprised to find everyone else gone to bed when I came back down. And the Packers won. So in the end a good Sunday.
Monday I went to work despite my cold, and it was a cold, grey, dreary day. I had lots of odds and ends to deal with and a student crying in my office. And I just felt kind of cruddy. Rach & Megan got their own dinners, which was good for me, because all I wanted was a bowl of oatmeal. And I made the rest of the cookies, and we all ate some. I’ve been needing a new series, since I finished the Wire, and Rach got me started on Last Tango In Halifax. I think it will do nicely. Better than nicely – I like it a lot. And now it’s actually TUESDAY – and my glasses are smeary and my bladder is full and it’s time for me to walk away from the computer and get into PJs, and collapse on the couch again if I ever expect to recover from this cold.
