Sweet sufferin' kitty-cats

I should have taken a photo last night, of our Poor Sick Boy turned out none the less for guard duty, dragging his ouchy carcass into the kitchen window to protect us all from evil birdies. Tragically, I didn't have my phone with me, so posterity is for ever denied a record of his brave endurance against the pitiless odds of his broken body.

Etc.

He slept all night in a nest he made in Karen's study. I was worried that he might stiffen up and not want to leave it this morning; but once I'd fired up the computer here in my own study and started checking e-mails as one does, he came steadily through and sat in yesterday's box for a bit. Then, when I headed for the kitchen to make coffee, well:



Half an hour early, but it's best to be prepared. Especially when breakfast is in the case. He knows he's moving slowly; he wouldn't want Barry to eat it all before he got here.

What did we ever do, to be cursed with a thinking cat?

(Also, as I was distributing breakfast between the bowls, he made his regular leap up onto the laundry basket to supervise the distribution. A little hesitantly, as a cat might who remembered that he couldn't do that yesterday, but then decided to go for it anyway and found after all that he could.)

Shrimpagundi

Tonight's dinner will be a shrimp salad with mushrooms and bacon and broccoli and French beans and spinach leaves and asparagus and avocado and baby tomatoes, all tossed in a lemon and garlic dressing. I invented this last weekend, and it was delicious, and on the way to the store just now I was just thinking "if I ever do write that cookbook, I'm totally putting this in; I wonder what I should call - oh, wait..." as I remembered that there was a word already, and it was salmagundi and I hadn't really invented it at all.

Still. There is nothing new under heaven, Horatio, tho' an endless number of things; and this one has no anchovies, because my heretic wife cannot abide the anchovy, so it's barely a proper salmagundi anyway; so I shall call it a shrimpagundi and put it in my putative cookbook anyway. Which will almost certainly remain putative to the end of days anyway, so.

Status

Barry has a sunshine. Mac has a green bean. There is peace in the kitchen. (It was rather nice to have little furry-face tickling my calves, begging for a bean; he'd been hissy and uncomfortable at noon, which is the bottom of his medication cycle (one pill a day, ie, delivered at lunchtime). Then he vanished for a few hours. Now he's back. Yay.

There may be peace in the kitchen, but my own head by contrast is a seething turmoil of discontent. Today's words disallowed by the online Scrabble dictionary: uninvited and adulatory. I am so mad I could spit. I gave up playing Words With Friends because it wouldn't allow perfectly legitimate words; must I abandon Scrabble also? Bah humbug, say I.

Otherwise, the day has been quite charming. I have cycled, I have watered my own garden and Becky's too in her absence, I have read widely on the internet and in Seveneves, and now I am preparing my shrimpagundi. Well, alternating preparation with glasses of wine and more Stephenson. There's not really that much to prepare: peel the shrimp, tail the beans, snap the asparagus. (Is there any truth, I wonder, in the argument that asparagus always snaps just at the perfect point, where the stem starts to get woody? I go along with this because I rather enjoy snapping it stalk by stalk rather than chopping at an arbitrary point; but I am inveterately dubious, and can't help thinking that if I applied pressure in a slightly different way a given stem would surely snap at a different point, and thereby shatter the entire philosophy...)