Life Goes On

Today it is quite windy again and doors slam shut with the breeze that rifles through the house from open windows. I just reread John Steinbeck’s The Pearl last night which is set in La Paz. He describes the wind blowing the sand around just like it is doing today, although he doesn’t mention all the white caps on the sea. His prose is always so good and his stories are always so depressing.

The gardener has stripped the Virginia Creeper off the tall wall that angles around the kitchen so now I have this huge blank canvas starring me in the face. My first thought is to paint the wall blue and put a mermaid on it that would face the kitchen window.

Such an exciting thing happened yesterday! Sr. Jueves my errand boy and grocery runner found a big bag of beautiful Salinas, California, grown romaine lettuce (we can generally only get abused heads of iceberg) and a 2 pound box of fresh mushrooms. I am vacillating between making clams and linguine or a mushroom tart so that I can use them up before they are over the hill. To bad Esperando won’t be back until Sunday as I don’t believe they will last that long.

The cook seems to have a knack with my dessert recipes, so I have been continuing to feed her new recipes. This part is really nice because I don’t make desserts at home as we are always dieting. It is nice to have someone else make them and have them turn out well, you don’t have to do the work of making it, just sampling it. And since my guests like desserts I can feed it to them and have a taste along the way. Today we are making a coconut cake—something I always drool at in magazines but never make since I am the only coconut lover I know of in my immediate family.

Little Frida has taken to wetting on our sitting room couch. Fortunately I caught it before the couch was ruined and our room inundated with the smell. I have a cloth throw over the couch to control animal fur, but had not anticipated the excitement of added new fragrances as well. I have been putting a split garbage bag down under my cloth throw, but after last night—no more. She is banished to the bathroom permanently. I washed the throw three times yesterday after multiple episodes, and then she and Sour Pickle started tussling on my bed at 4 AM. Then she started pouncing on my feet. Somehow she doesn’t realize that the top of me, which frightens her, is attached to my feet when they are covered with a blanket. I finally put both of them in the bathroom so the dog and I could have some quiet sleep. I have decided to call her Little Pickle. She may end up an outdoor cat after all once she is spayed if we can’t get on top of this peeing thing.