medora is having adventures.

1.  We have definitely settled on a house.  Three bedrooms, two and a half baths, three floors of built-out living space, a full basement, and a roof deck.   Come visit us when we’ve moved in!

2. I just ate the most perfect peach that I have ever eaten.  We got it at the Headhouse Farmer’s Market — I took a backpack to save my shoulders, and one of the white peaches accidentally got left in the bottom of the bag.  Three days, apparently, is exactly what it takes to get a peach perfectly ripe.  Perfectly furry on the skin, absolutely, almost cloyingly sweet at the surface, and just a pinch sour at the core, because if you wait until it’s sweet all the way through, you get bruises.  

It was amazing. 

1.

We’ve pretty much settled on a house.  Three bedrooms!  Two and a half baths!  I think my biggest regret is that if we have kids in this house, the kids won’t have a particular tree that they grow up with in the same way that my sister and I both grow up — we didn’t get the one on the edge of the lot, but it’s pretty unlikely that tree would be like the dogwood outside my sister’s window at my parents’ house, which just filled the room with pink light from both windows every spring when it bloomed, or the old Norway maple (I know, sigh) that I used to listen to every night going to sleep.  

This makes me sadder than I thought it would, but I guess it’s what happens when you decide to buy a house in the city.  

2.  

I was at the King of Prussia on a boondoggle a while back and picked up a Henri Bendel Black Currant candle because I was convinced that was the smell I’d been thinking about for days, but I got into the story full of the crazy tack, and got two surprises.  First!  The candle was (only, hilarious) thirty bucks, and second!  It didn’t smell a damn thing like I remembered.  So I was convinced that my nose has changed a lot, and I was sad about that until I was clearing off the coffee table just now, and I remembered the name. 

Baies!  By Diptyque!  And the reason that the $30 candle seemed comparatively cheap was because Diptyque’s candles run $60 for about three-quarters of the burn time.

On the other hand, Jesus fuck, Baies smells like nothing else on Earth, and now that they apparently have Diptyque stores plus! a! La! Duree!, I just need to go and roll around in having disposable cash.  

Coming from Forks, WA: whitewater rafting in the morning, lunch at a not very good pizza place, dessert at an acceptable pastry place, then Rialto Beach and Second Beach, followed by a hilarious attempt to buy smoked salmon, followed by baths and showers all around, followed by dinner at the local burger joint, followed by lying about for a while, then a group decision to go to bed early, so that we can get a start on the Hoh Forest and Hurricane Ridge in the morning, followed by Seattle in the afternoon.

Spring definitely in the works in Philadelphia.  We’ve been going househunting every weekend, and it’s frightening stuff: children, future, going that deeply back into debt.  It’s a frightening thing.

On the other hand, it’s spring, and it was seventy degrees outside today. 

1. An old theme, previously covered: momma, don’t let your children grow up to be biglaw attorneys.

2. An expansion on an old theme: I spent more time at work this weekend than doing anything else. That is literally true. On Saturday, I worked more than I slept by a fairly significant margin, and today, it was almost the case. It’s a little galling if I think about the reason why I had to spend so many hours of my life compiling essentially useless spreadsheets, but I will focus on the following exchange with the truly excellent Mr. A., who came to the rescue this weekend by taking me out for our Valentine’s Day dinner on Saturday (we ordered as much for the two of us as the table of four next to us ordered for… their four), and then making me not one, but two delicious stews (peppery fish, and a faro risotto that was a fair replica of what we had at Barbuzzo the night before.

An exchange, occurring while I was standing over the stove, admiring the lovely farro risotto:

A: I put so many different kinds of fats into it! Would you like to know what I put into there?
M: … let us draw a veil of ignorance over it. Good god.

It was delicious; I am lucky.

3. There is video of Meryl Streep winning a BAFTA, and of losing her heel on the way up to the stage, and Colin Firth fetching it for her and helping her back into it, and then Stephen Fry commenting on them being Cinderella and Prince Charming.

I’m going to focus on this when going into work tomorrow morning in, oh God, eight hours.

1. My new Timbuk2 bag today came! In place of the much-beloved, but ultimately impractical Filson tote, as the Filson tote commits the sins of not having a zip or velcro closure, insufficient internal organization, and not being cross-the-body. Apparently, totes will mess me up almost as much as a shoulder bag.

2. The biggest incompatibility that A. and I have is over food. He wants more ingredients! I want fewer ones! He wants to use the quantity of ingredients, and the specific ingredients called for in the recipe! I want to use the ones that are at hand/do not offend my sense of expense, which means that left to my own devices, I will never buy bell peppers/to use the whole container because otherwise it will go to waste! He figures that even if there is wastage of what you don’t use, at least you will have one tasty dish and stuff you throw away instead of … a mediocre to downright inedible dish. He believes that homemade pizzas should be round and have both sauce and cheese, whereas I find square pizzas easy to make, especially if there is no sauce or cheese!

So we compromise: I buy bell peppers, and let him have his head betimes with Western food or recipes that I did not grow up with. He largely accedes to my fanatical rules about food and brand purity in Chinese food. It works.

3. Hour-long meeting at work today to talk about my future at the firm and marketing and all that stuff. It was, on the one hand, nice to hear that the people in my department like me and like my attitude; it was, on the other hand, pretty terrible to sit there — a two partner deal, and there was this one partner who having a conversation with is a lot like panning for gold. You have to stand in goddamn cold water forever and shovel a lot of crap and put up with a lot to occasionally get a nugget.

Nuggets were in stunning non-abundance today.

4. I am writing this in bed on the iPad with the bluetooth keyboard. Mr. A. is next to me; we have the flannel sheets on the bed and the down comforter. Mr. A’s houserobe is in the bed with us because we have a queen bed, because thanks to years of falling asleep in my narrow dorm room bed with textbooks, I am able to fall asleep on top of almost anything, and because our house is cold in the morning. Having it in the bed makes it warm. Also, he likes throwing it at my sleeping head in the morning, since I get up an hour or so after him.

We had Chinese sticky rice and low but gao made by mother. It was as good as you expect, oh God.

1. What can you ask for in life except flannel sheets and comforter and husband on a cold winter night? Not much more, though if said husband had his parents get the two of you an electric mattress pad to put under the flannel sheets, it is nothing short of pure heaven. I may have gone back to the bedroom last night periodically and stuck my hand between the sheets and made ecstatic little noises.

2. Good holiday, and not even all in all. Friday, we went down to my parents for my father’s sixtieth birthday hotpot dinner with grilled! oysters! and had homemade gravlax for brunch the morning after. Then down to A’s parents for Christmas Eve, with a side trip to go bowling with A’s high school friends. Christmas Eve dinner was crabcakes, and Christmas dinner proper was this fantastic mix of chaos and delight with a last minute addition of four guests constituting Andrew’s best friend from high school, said friend’s brother, said friend’s employee/Argentinean drinking buddy, and said friend’s mother, as the roof in their condo had caved in. Lamb, potatoes, Brussels sprouts, nut bread, with peri peri chicken from A’s friend’s mother, who married a Ugandan man, and a last minute croissant bread pudding from me and A. Sunday night and Monday morning, the new Holmes movie and spending time with the Hive.

Not bad.

3. The new Holmes movie is so. much. fun.

What can you ask for in life but flannel sheets on a winter night, rain on a solid roof (or at least one that us dry enough now and you won’t have to pay the bills to patch up in a year or two), and the feeling of being sleepy and being able to go to sleep anytime? On your flannel sheets, under your comforter?

Not much except a husband who loves you and is, even now, coming into the bedroom.

1. Our refrigerator, stuffed full of food on a Sunday night after the cleaning and the grocery shopping and cooking and post-cooking cleaning are done, makes me irrationally happy. 

2. Work is terrifying and depressing and anxiety-making and occasionally not so bad.  Tomorrow, I have most of the day at a CLE.  

3. Food this week: A’s lasagna (ground buffalo, spinach, mozzarella and ricotta and tomato sauce and sliced tomatoes, and maybe a little of the left over Indonesian hot sauce), and my split pea stew (some bacon, yellow split peas, pint of chicken stock, two ham hocks, garam masala, and maybe some pork stock).

It’s part of what is making our refrigerator so stuffed.

4. http://birdscalgary.wordpress.com/2011/10/26/weasel-wednesday-2/