desperance | Yan tan tethera

Finding me too cool for school, or else too hot to trot, m'wife is keeping me callously tethered to the couch today. In the restless manner of invalids everywhere, I am alternating three - no, wait, you can only alternate two - I am alternating two novels, and reading in a cookbook in between. There. Satisfied for grammar and accuracy both. In a perfect world, those would be the same thing, he said contentiously: but then what would we do for fiction, if the language could only describe what was in fact the case? You'd need two languages, I guess.

Having only the one, I am - as any fule could have foreseen, from comments yestereve - swapping out Jacey Bedford's Empire of Dust with Patrick O'Brian's Master and Commander, for one can be happily ensconced in two worlds simultaneously, I find; and betweentimes I am looking into Bar Tartine. I haven't yet reached the recipes; we're still on techniques. Black garlic powder! Fermented honey! It's all joy. Except that half these methods require numerous environments where you can guarantee not merely narrow temperature-ranges night and day - which we can't - but also humidity levels. Which I don't even know how to measure. It's a hard life, when your reach exceeds your grasp. Even when you're only lying on the sofa.

Back to it, then. Is it time for my first toddy of the day? Or grog, maybe. Maybe a four-water grog, against the scurvy...?