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.