I am an idiot

I put a box on the spare bed in my study, intending to fill it with fifteen copies of Being Small, fifteen copies of Bitter Waters, forty-eight paper plates, forty-eight plastic forks and a whole heap of paper napkins.

It now contains a cat. Of course it does. What was I thinking?

Deployment

The best thing about having a food processor? Is having a dishwasher too.

The second-best thing about having a food processor? Is having a shelf that it can stand on, right next to a power socket, where it can always be plugged in and ready.

I've had food processors for thirty years or so, and they lived in cupboards and I seldom took them out, because that was a process that began with the need to clear a space to stand it on, and then to find a free socket, and neither of those was ever easy; and all the time knowing that once used, there would be the need to wash every last little bit of it, and they are so not designed for hand-washing...

So, yeah. Now I use it freely, frequently.

The third-best thing about a food processor? Is keeping a jarful of whizzed garlic in olive oil always in the fridge, and a jarful of whizzed ginger beside. You don't even have to peel the ginger: just chunk it up in its skin and whizz away. Use by the spoonful, and you'll reach the bottom of the jar before ever it thinks of going off. (I didn't use to use too much ginger either: what with all the peeling and the slicing and the slivering and the chopping, so much effort, so much time...)

And the fourth-best thing is that it gives you something to blog about, an almost-confession, that nicely takes your mind off a rapidly-approaching gig that you might just be a little nervous about, what with a new venue, new crowd, new country...

A state of preparedness

Okay. I have evicted cat, and packed box. I have baked cake. I have new hat, new jeans, favourite T-shirt. I am only taking my phone in order to make a conspicuous virtue of turning it off; everyone who has this number is expected to be in that room.

Whether anyone at all will actually come - well. I have played to empty rooms before, when I was expecting full ones. We do try to have no expectations. (But a dozen of us are booked for dinner after, and people don't usually flake out of dinner. And for book-readings? A dozen is a crowd, I tell you.)

What I most want now is a drink.

Or two. Preferably two.

[EtA: knives. Knives to cut the cake. Good catch, me.]

[EtA2: ah, gin. A reliable friend to an anxious man. The glass that cheers and - yippee! - inebriates.*]


*My mother used to have a caddy-spoon that was engraved: Tea: the cup that cheers and not inebriates. In my head, for the last forty years or so, it has read ...not alas inebriates...

Transparency

Dangerously cute cat is fully aware that something is up, and thinks there should be early tea factored into the equation.

Dangerously cute cat is dangerously acute.