Note to undergrad roommates: Friday I was remembering the spring break where none of us went anywhere, but we got in Gil’s car with the top down and got on 64 with all the lucky vacation-goers, waving at other cars like everyone else who was leaving town, and drove down to the next exit and got off and came back. And did it again. Remember?
It was cold and rainy Friday, so we wouldn’t have done that this year.
That's ok bc there was a good happy- hour celebration of the start of spring break. High faculty turnout, if you can imagine.
Now back to Spring break, first day. Just to prove that if I don’t update, it’s because nothing much is going on.
Betsy woke me before 7. Damn dog.
It was a pretty morning. We had eggs and leftovers—leftover corned beef hash and leftover sweet potato hash. We had to go pick up the car from the shop (nothing serious) and on the way we drove by houses coming up for trustees’ sales. There are a few listed that are both cool and cheap—or at least, the opening bids are cheap. I have no idea how this all plays out in reality, and we don’t have piles of cash sitting around, obviously, if we just kept our thermostat on 54 degrees all winter so we could pay the oil bills, but just in case we should generate cash at any point, I like to watch this stuff.
So we drove by 2 houses –one in Jackson Ward, 1 in Ginter Park—and then went to pick up the car in Lakeside, and went our separate ways.
I went over to the West End Antique Mall with a mission. I knew there was someone there who has a stack of china that matches my grandmother’s violet china that I love so much, but it is too $$$ for me. And my mission was to remind myself how much it was, and gloat, bc I just scored a wad of it on eBay fairly reasonably. (Not that I have $200 to spend on china. But it was so relatively cheap that I knew that I would kick myself forever if I didn’t get it. I made vows about taking my lunch to school for the rest of the semester to offset the extravagance.) Anyway, it would have cost me an extra $500 to get it from this dealer, and another $200 on top of that to get it from the biggest antique dealer online, so I feel no guilt, only a pressing need to invite 17 people to a dinner party soon.
Then I reviewed my to-do list for spring break:
--Library (Vance just found 4 very overdue books and I wanted some cookbooks)
--Ruby Red Beauty supply store (blowdryer quit working Tuesday and Mom expressed desire for pretty headbands)
--Walgreens (three itchy spots on body. Some rash, doesn’t look like poison ivy, more like weird hives, but better pick up Zanfel just to be sure)
--Food Lion (usual stuff)
--make oatmeal bread
--do 5 week’s worth of laundry
--Grade things
--clean things
--rake things
--mulch things
--rewrite things
--read things
--Write things
The Library won. I went and was sitting with a stack of cookbooks, narrowing them down to a manageable load (and I would like to emphasize, for anyone who thinks that I already have too many cookbooks, that this is the only reason I don’t have more) and was choosing between 2 party cookbooks, and a Middle Eastern one vs a Turkish one, and trying to find the German one we had in January bc Vance needed to copy a recipe for our proposed German Night, and I was also sorting through some Cuban cookbooks to see if there was a recipe for Tres Leche cake, when the power went out. I had to abandon my books and leave with everyone else.
The wind was picking up—that might be what took the power down—so I went home. And the wind was crazy! I saw it blow shingles off a house on Nine Mile Rd. After I got home, it blew open the kitchen back door—not the outside door, which was locked, but the inside back door. Enough wind got into the back porch that it flung the chair that also is propped on the door aside, bam.
I started to make oatmeal bread and realized that my yeast has finally died. Twice I started over, proofing it, and twice nothing happened, and once I didn’t realize until I had thrown molasses in, which meant I didn’t have enough molasses for the bread and had to sub in some honey. The yeast was looking weak the last few times I used it—this was a 5 pound bag I got years ago, so it owes me nothing, but its death was holding up the bread. Vance called from the store, luckily, and I got him to pick up some yeast (Food Lion doesn’t carry the right molasses, so he couldn’t help me there).
While I was waiting for him to come from the store, I realized that the house looked really cool in the gazing ball that Hillary and Mike passed on to us before they moved. So I took about 30 pictures of it.
And then Vance got home. So I was able to start the bread, and while it was rising we went back to the library and refound my books, and also picked up a bunch of movies, and came home and watched movies and waited for the bread.
We watched a BBC detective show—Campion—the sort of thing you would like if you like their Detective Poirot shows, and then a Peter Ustinov Poirot movie, which was terrible. I chose those 2. The we watched The Howling, which Vance picked up because he couldn’t remember if he had ever seen it, and I couldn’t remember how it went, although right after it began, we both remembered the ending. It was fun to see it again, except I think they were a little too proud of their special effect back then, bc it took about 20 minutes every time someone changed into a werewolf.
And we ate bread, finally.
That was the day, in detail.
