yonmei

12:32 am: I just read this on my friend's journal....
"...and I must follow him because I am meeting yonmei for breakfast tomorrow 2 hours earlier than I usually wake up."

I am still awake, and likely to be awake for another hour at least, as the first layer of cake is baking (maple! yummy delicious) and ideally I need to have all three layers of cake baked before I sleep. (I can then force myself to wake in time to meet afrai for breakfast at the farmer's market, buy the butter and cream and cream cheese I'll need to ice and fill the cake, and eggs for more scones, and take myself home to bake scones, get ready for PARTY, layer the cake (marmalade-with-whipped-cream filling) spread the icing (this may be as uncomplicated as plain icing sugar made briefly liquid with orange juice and maple syrup, probably), and wait for it to almost set before I decorate it with maple sugar candies. Or possibly, if I have time to stop off at the Sicilian bakery, marzipan fruits. In which case I shall probably not put any maple syrup into the icing.

The point is it has to be a BIG cake. A street party is not a party unless there's a cake so big the children dream about it months later and no matter how much cake they eat they cannot eat it all. *beams* And I made a cake like that last time, so I need to do it again this time, because that's how traditions happen. Yay.

I also have to make more sesame seed scones with cheese. I may try making the next batch with the end of a bottle of red wine. Why not?

I'm running late because of my parents, and then a neighbour who came round. She's also baking for the party and has killer period pains and she's running late because she went to a workmate's husband's funeral today, so I feel a bit bad about complaining.




Tags: baking, breakfast, cake, imaginary friend meetup, scones

06:10 pm: Just My Life Really
On Tuesday evening, which is cheap night at Vue, I went to see Star Trek. It wasn't good. It was the sort of kind of film where, having taken care to check how long it lasts, I keep glancing at the clock on my phone to establish how much plot there must be left.

There were three women in the film who had names and lines, and a fourth who I think wasn't named: an Orien green cadet who has sex with Jim Kirk and a few lines of dialogue and let Kirk see Uhura in her underwear. One of the women existed to give birth to Jim Kirk, and is thereafter never seen or heard again (she wasn't even allowed to be the voice on the product-placement phone telling Kirk not to steal the car and drive it to Arizona). One gives birth to Spock, and is thereafter used to make Spock go apeshit: she gets pushed into a metaphorical refrigerator fairly early on. One is supposed to be Nyota Uhura, and exists to be appallingly, skeletally skinny, be hit on by Kirk, prove that in the modern Starfleet men don't obey women officers (in that bar fight? If the real Uhura had yelled at them to stop the redshirts beating up Kirk, they'd have stopped), and to hit on Spock, thus (the director and scriptwriter and stockholders presumably hope) forestalling the slash fans taking hold and writing the K/S for this universe. Because these are het guys. Straight, straight, straight. Hell if it'll work: I say Uhura and Spock are totally cousins. The young Bones was OK even if the old joke got taken away from him and replaced by a new and much stupider joke referring to one of the few other women in this AU; Baby Sulu and Baby Chekov and Baby Scott were ... okay, I supppose: Janice Rand and Christine Chapel and Number One, the first First Officer of the USS Enterprise, were... absent. (See also: feministsf and jekesta being brilliant.)

Afterwards I wandered home and Bob was missing and it turned out a neighbour had accidentally shut her into his bike shed, because late at night when the street was quiet I went out again and heard her yell and it was too late to wake up my neighbours, so I left notes in their door and on their fence, and went to bed and slept badly. My Twitters are full of me Not Panicking. She got let out first thing the next morning, and is fine, though very clingy: but the part where it turned out I have the nicest neighbours in the world?

The neighbour who had shut her in the shed (by accident! I know he wouldn't have done it on purpose!) came round on Wednesday evening with a card and a bottle of white wine to apologize. Which I found myself without a polite way of refusing, though the bottle of white wine is still lying on the couch where I put it (the card is on the mantelpiece) and fills me with helpless rueful giggles whenever I think of drinking it. Because, after we were dialoguing on the step and he was saying how sorry he was and I was saying "Thank you for letting her out!" (it was actually his partner who had slipped down first thing and let Bob out, as soon as she saw the note) and then Bob wandered out. And I picked her up (she feels terribly light and thin these days, which I'm worried about, because this reminds me of Cally, but she's still eating....) because I did not want to let her go wandering again... and my neighbour started chucking her under the chin and apologising to Bob. So I accepted the card and the wine, and still think I have the nicest neighbours in the world.

Thursday I had a meeting in Glasgow, and after the meeting I went to the SH[OUT] exhibition in GOMA, which was absolutely fantastic and I want to go again. Maybe I can persuade Ajay to come with - it had several things I thought she might like, especially a picture of a Thai man, a prostitute, standing on a stage, not quite looking at his audience - but the whole picture was so richly painted, and the frame was ornamented, and it looked as if he/his image was a gift to us. The other I remember vividly was a picture of two older women, who had been burlesque artists in their youth, painted as they lay holding each other on their bed. It was the kind of oil painting that looks more real, has more depth, than any photograph could. But, speaking of photographs: the Mapplethorpe photo. I'm told there was some dispute about including it, and its inclusion was probably the main reason the exhibition has been banned to children under 12. But I am so glad to have seen it. I had read about it - it's a famous photograph, politically as well as artistically, the depiction of a standing man pissing into the mouth of a kneeling man, which a court case formally established as having artistic merit and therefore (in the US) protected under the First Amendment. But words and reproductions do not do the photo itself justice: it is an extraordinary work of light and shade, balanced images: it is simultaneously a depiction of a sexual act in pornographic detail and it is a work of art. In many ways the exhibition felt like a series of windows into other exhibitions, that I wanted very much to see as well - if there had been money to produce a catalogue, I would have bought it.

After I had looked round the exhibition, I wanted to see if I could get my T-Mobile dongle to work, and after trying unsuccessfully and calling the helpline, it appeared that the problem was I'd put the wee card in the wrong way round - and it was fairly jammed. So I asked the helpline to find me the nearest two T-Mobile shops in Glasgow, and set out to find the one in Buchanan Street. (On the basis, as I told them frankly, that if someone were going to break the card getting it out, I had rather it was someone working for T-Mobile than me.)

The T-Mobile shop was in the Buchanan Street Galleries, which are just above the Buchanan Street Tearoom, where one can get a very nice cream tea for £2.50. So, after I'd got my dongle working (oo-er) I went there and had tea and a scone with cream and two sorts of jam, and it was very nice. (They supplied me with butter as well as jam: I ask you, what kind of person puts butter and cream on a scone?

Then I walked round the GOMA exhibition again, to fill my eye with it a second time, and caught the 4:15 train back to Edinburgh (safely in the cheap zone) and surfed the net and wrote a bit on the way home. I was due to meet my parents and the young man who is helping them clear out their flat (a bit) at the Ann Purna that evening.

We had a nice meal: my mum told me about seeing a sign in Bakewell, where they'd gone for their holiday, about marriage between a man and a woman being the law of the land, and she said she'd wanted to add a sign about civil partnership but hadn't had paper/tape to do it. Still. It was nice of her to want to.

Friday has been a fairly ghastly muddle, in which I got not enough done and that too late. But I am drinking wine and eating nice food, and TGIF: it's the weekend now.



Tags: bob, glasgow, i want a cup of tea and a tonne of sympa, just my life really, scones, star trek, yarg

02:58 pm: Parsley scones are good


Flour, fresh parsley, butter, and a couple of tablespoons of grated parmesan. Yum.

PS: Look, I got one of the cloud dragon eggs!

Tags: scones

08:39 am: I made soup!
In the box that came last Thursday there was a bunch of what I thought was coriander, and I tucked it into the fridge and have been planning happily the soup I would make with lots of fresh coriander. And this morning, I chopped a lot of onions, and one potato, and some green ginger, and a cute little chilli pepper, and a cupful of red lentils, and and then I took the bag with the coriander in it out of the fridge and opened it up (it stays fresh if and only if you leave it in the bag) and realised it was curly-leaf parsley.

Bugger.

What I would happily have made with fresh parsley is parsley scones, which are exceedingly delicious.

Oh well. At this point it was too late to go back, I was on the slippery slope down to the soup with no turning and no changing my mind, so the parsley went into the soup and, well, that's that. I'm sure it will be nice, it just won't be the same.

There was some leftover stock from when I cooked the beets, which I'd put in the freezer, so that's in the soup too. All in all, not that disappointing. I just need to be better at spotting my herbs by sight instead of sniff.

---
Update, 9:42pm, having just had the first bowlful. Eh. Would have been better with coriander. Needs Thai Yellow Curry Paste. Fortunately, that's what I have.

Tags: chilli, eating some delicious food, my recipes, scones, soup

11:26 am: I won a prize!
Seriously. I did. I am so proud.

Last week the local fruit'n'veg co-op had a baking competition/bake sale (that is, you brought in something you'd baked, it was judged, after the prizes had been awarded, the baked somethings were auctioned off, the money went to the pensioners' social group fund - I guess they figured mostly the pensioners would be doing the baking, and I think mostly they were right...).

I made a basketful of scones - hemp/wholemeal scones, with a bit of cheese and mustard, to Aunt Margaret's recipe.

They won! I was awarded a voucher for £5 to spend on fruit and vegetables (so I treated myself to a melon and a pineapple) and a large hardback glossy food-porn type cookbook, the sort I never buy: Jamie at Home: Cook Your Way to the Good Life. It's supposed to have gardening tips as well as recipes, and somehow I doubt I'll be using it much: but I won! *is proud*

Then I got into work (late, because, um, I had to stay and listen to the fruit'n'veg co-op workers praising my scones...) and there was no one here to listen to me bragging, so you get to hear about it instead.

Tags: bake sales, baking, scones

04:01 pm: Cramond
Went out this morning to go to Cramond with Catmunk. We've been going there 20 years now: we used to build sandcastles and count coppers to figure out if we could afford one scone and a pot of tea for two, now we contemplate what a scone apiece will do to our thighs and share one.

Freezing, freezing wind. Came home to have lunch and haven't gone out again except to hang some stuffup on the washing-line.

Tags: edinburgh, scones