Thursday, November 11, 2010

The right stuff

Domestica take front row this evening. Where to begin?

Hen of the Woods mushrooms collected in the park yesterday and eaten on our pizza last night. The unwrapped duck prosciutto revealed and tasted at last, today. Alexandra Fuller's book Scribbling the Cat, bread dough from Patricia Wells, butternut and apple soup tonight and potatoes roasting in the duck fat from the prosciutto, and pear cake about to made, with Madagascan vanilla and American butter. It's dark at 5 o' clock. Talking to Pedro the butcher about making pancetta and where to buy curing salt (it has bad stuff in it, but we are resigned to it). Cat sitters found! Dinahmow of moreidlethoughts will be flying from Northeast Australia via Seoul to look after the kitty for the long haul. Yes, really. We are delighted. I am sure stranger and more wonderful things have happened. I just can't think of any. And we are meeting Lucy, who is local, for the Christmas stint. Last night my laptop died in the middle of my Coney Island post. Just like that, with barely a murmur. It was unresponsive. It was old. I was quite calm at first. I had saved all my photos to an external hard drive three weeks ago, at Vince's insistence, and the book I am working on is saved in Google docs, in the cybersphere. If these two things had not been true...I wondered about my poetry manuscripts. Later I found them on a disk. Only when I had a mouthful of Hen of the Woods pizza did I start to cry. Just because of the ending of it. Of the money to be spent on a new one. After supper, and some hours of work, darting back and forth between the computers, Vince brought it back to life, from nothing. Now I will save anything else I treasure. I'll put the Frenchie on an external hard drive in case he crashes. Breakfast this morning of flowering quince jelly made by Ellen, on warm baguette - her best yet, delicate and tart and perfectly fragile. I realise that I can link to most parts of my life.

The potatoes are sizzling, the butter and sugar must be creamed, the pears are cooling with their fragrant vanilla seeds and I must edit pictures. The cat will be looked after, friends remain priceless and wine must be drunk.

11 comments:

  1. Wow! What a 24 hours. All the cooking tonight sounds wonderful (as usual), but we can all relate to a computer crash. Sounds like there may be some life left, but perhaps a visit to the Geeks is in order before it all goes to cyberland. Good luck.

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  2. I don't suppose there'll be any left-overs?

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  3. And the nearly two weeks spent without my laptop after the Blue Screen of Death appeared nearly sent me around the bend. Fortunately it was fixable, but at almost the cost of a new one. I have somethings backed up on CD's but the smart thing to do would be an external hard drive also.

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  4. Wow. I was still chewing over the beautiful, informative Coney Island piece wondering how to phrase my thoghts, when this post popped up.

    Never a dull moment in Brooklyn. Nor a dull meal.

    Vince continues to reveal himself as a superhero.

    As does Dianamow. Life is good in blogland.

    xo Jane

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  5. Wow! Wonderful news! I am so happy that Vince was able to resurrect your computer. I, too, am very lucky to have a husband who is an IT genius, and he has saved my sorry butt numerous times.

    And very great news that Dinahmow will be minding The Don! I can stop worrying now ...

    Keli'i

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  6. That's awesome that you found a catsitter!

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  7. Great about the catsitting arrangement.

    I can't help but wonder whether there is a computer shut-down virus doing the rounds! Our desktop iMac blinked off in the middle of something a week ago. Would not come back on but we suspected it was a video board so accessed the drive with a fireware cable in target disk mode, and transferred lots of the files that had not all been back up in a consistent way. Now we have to decide whether a repair is worth the cost. What, other than transferring files, did Vince do to wake yours up? Maybe ours will wake up too.

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  8. So glad the computer is back and limping along. It sounds like you handled it with great equanimity.

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  9. Computer gltches-arggh!
    In the middle of applying on-line for a visa approval, I lost my connection!

    And thankyou, folks, for the lovely comments about the cat-sitting.

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  10. Computer death, not even bluescreen. Black screen.

    Pam - he used a Windows XP bootdisk. He'd be able to tell you more.

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  11. Just visiting from dinahmow's blog - and I find the line of the year.

    "friends remain priceless and wine must be drunk."

    Thank you.

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