C-fret

So all this year I have been fretting about my lemon tree, because it is only tiny and last year it fruited quite heavily and this year it has done nothing at all: no new growth, no leaves, no blossoms. Many bare and ravaged twiglets. I thought it was curling up its little self and dying on me.

This morning's good news? New leaflets! Yay! Baby steps, but hey. It's only a baby.

It's actually quite remarkable how delighted I am. About the whole garden, actually: I have little tomatolets on my tomato plants, and half the veggies are flowering in a purposeful way, and most of the sugar snap peas and all of the edamame are surviving and putting on growth, and half the boysenberry canes; and the sage and rosemary are conspiring to take over the world, and I have blisteringly hacked back the oregano, and and and. I love my garden.

If all I had to do was grow stuff and cook it, sometimes I think I could be quite happy that way. (Also, I came back from Santa Cruz this weekend with a copy of Silvena Rowe's Purple Citrus & Sweet Perfume. This is just the ultimate in gastroporn, and I want to cook everything.)

Except that then I go and dream a dream about writing a YA fantasy, where my girl protagonist has penguins for her familiars. Penguins. Is there no escape? (In my dream, Karen scorned the notion. In fact, when I told her about it this morning, she was all over the idea.) (No. I am not going to write about penguin familiars. No.)

Hee

So there I was at the kitchen table, just me and my edit of Pandaemonium and my beer and Mac and the sunshine; and I was half inclined to take a photo and post it, except that you-all have seen a lot of photos of the cats helping to edit in that non-transparent way they have - and then Mac realised that the sun was moving in that irritating way it has, and he rolled over to get himself back into the fullness of it.

And he rolled himself right off the table.

People, I may have lol'd.

New things! Good and not so good!

Good: I have cut a purple cauliflower into florets, and it was just so much fun. And no, I am not being ironical at all. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Also good, but oof: I have made pizza dough to rest in the fridge overnight and be ready for a build-your-own party tomorrow. Never done that before. It is both sticky and stiff; I should probably have worked it for longer, but oof. That was as much as my shoulders were good for, never mind my hands.

Possibly not good at all: I'm not sure yet, but Amazon may have let me down. They say my package was delivered at 9:02 this morning; I say it was not. Certainly I have no package. They also say that occasionally their deliverypersons may bleep a package as "delivered" when what they mean is "loaded onto the van for delivery". I have spent all day believing this, and waiting with ever-decreasing optimism to see if a package manifests. If it doesn't, then urgh and sigh and so forth, and we will begin to unravel the oy-where's-my-stuff? process. Forward to which, you may gather, I am not looking.

Calling for a redefinition of the word "good"

When you have access - through the heedlessness of one of your people - to the whole damn chicken, and all you take is a single bone that's already been gnawed free of flesh? I call that pretty damn good, and I applaud the boy.

Without quite managing to understand him, mind, because that is one pretty damn good roast chicken. Also the roasted purple cauliflower was good, but none of that remains; neither the roasted fingerlings (I loooove fingerlings, and the way I do them), nor the gravy either. Nomming was.

So I have put the chicken somewhere slightly safer (in the cooling oven, since you ask, the fridge being entirely full of pizza dough and toppings and accumulated other stuffs; I should probably clear out some of it tomorrow, at least enough to make space to put beer in), and I am busily putting the wine somewhere very safe indeed before Karen decides she wants some (hey, I had to open a bottle, for the gravy needed a splash - how else was I to deglaze the pan? - and I did offer her a glass then, but she declined; and I'm not at all sure how many times I can go through to where she's digging mines or slaying orcs or whatever and say "d'you want some wine now...?" without sounding like an alcoholic needy for company to drag down with him, so I think it's better if I just drink it, y'know?).