Now done:

Meats and cheeses

Veggie platter

half-boiled taters to roast under the bird

bird defrosted

gravy set

green beans ready

Black beans rich and chocolaty

Cornbread: done

Rice: done (yesterday)

Speckroches (yesterday, kinda regret not making the bread part by hand, but the filling came out good)

Stuffing: done (this should be YUMMY, cornbread based. I had a flash and added a tiny bit of curry and used only wine as the liquid)

on deck: black beans

to prep:

staging for gravy and beef stock

green beans

cold platters:

cheese / crackers / etc

Emmentaler

Gruyere

Beechers (local artisanal, yum)

prosciutto

finger veggies (looks like I missed the boat on getting something from my garden in here, dang it, and I forgot some kind of dip. i have dill and mmmmaybe enough yogurt)

carrots

broccoli

celery

The damn bird is not thawed, thanks to my over-cold fridge, so I’m babying it along too.

I kind of think I should cook the pies tonight but if I do that it bogarts the smell, so maybe not.

Veggies trimmed, washed and wet, awaiting fate in the dark of the fridge, but for the green beans.

Speckroches done, cooling, to bag and tag.

Oysters not obtained, may be a push, which irritates me, but DAYUM I gotta lotta food.

One of the kitties decided that broccoli florets are THEE BAST for cat toying, dethroning wine corks. She, the mischievous one, is also a climber and surreptitious counter cat. I gather she is determined that it bee HER toxoplasmosis that occupies our brain stems rather than others. In service of this goal, she has taken to sitting demurely on the lid of our flip-top kitchen garbage can, attentively observing me as I chop and thaw and steam and roll and season. When I turn my back, she makes her move: into the sink! A daring pounce upon the chopped food (thankfully, I got her before litter box paws did any damage)! A snaking sneak to camouflaged hiding behind the toaster and the paper towels! I must needs keep the spraygun handy, I think.

I like having the tiny audience, but the participatory nonsense has the potential to wreck dinner. Dominance and training. A loving hand.

Right, today is shopping.

Taters

Rice

Smoked Salmon

Bacon

Oysters

Prosciutto

Sausage

Green beans

Green pepper

Tomatoes

Mushrooms

Broccoli

Celery

Lemons

Limes

Eggs

Cheeses

Yogurt

Ice cream

Cornbread mix

Stuffing mix

Croissants

Pies

Cranberry sauce

Wines

Pitcher

Large ziploc bags

Ah, the start of a five-day unwork week.

What?

—-

I’m hosting a bird feed on Thursday; tomorrow shall be to market. I had thought to mow the lawn, in order to mulch the leaves, but it started raining about when I had intended to fire up the mower. They do say this week is to be a bit drier than it has been. Hopefully on Tuesday. I have been waiting until nearly all the leaves are down, and it looks to me as if they are, finally.

I need to pull in the rest of my garden harvest, too. I have about four peppers of various kinds, most mostly ripe, some excellent-looking and very colorful Swiss Chard, some past-its’-prime kale, a ton of parsely, a few onions, tarragon, verbena, sage, and a ton of largish Roma tomatoes that have been coming off a late-season volunteer plant, a monster that popped up in September and shot up to five feet or so before I racked it and wrapped it to keep the cold off.

The heatwave and the deck-replacement project quite thoroughly screwed up my fall succession planting, so no squash or winter potatoes or broccoli this year.

—

Last night Viv and I watched and enjoyed the somewhat-confused 2004 (?) Ricky Gervais comedy Ghost Town, clearly intended as a programmatic inversion of, among other things, The Sixth Sense and Ghost. Of course, it is also a platform for Gervais’ inspired squirm-inducing improv and the film was at its’ best when he was doing his thing. However, I have to say I admired the rigor of the film’s inversions. The bereaved widow’s new boyfriend, for example, is a sterling fellow. The ghosts aren’t kept hanging around because they have unfinished business but because we, the living, hold them here.

There’s a scene which as shot struck me as the film’s intended closing – Gervais’ character has resolved the attachment problems for a series of ghosts, and so they leave him alone, and in v/o he muses that we die just as alone as when we enter the world, which is certainly my worldview. Of course, what kind of major-release romantic comedy would ever embrace pure, unsympathetic existentialism in whole? The film is also confused with regard to its’ position on the supernatural – each of of the in-narrative points regarding the existence of the film’s ghosts is essentially extrapolated from an atheist position, yet here we are, interacting with the dead in the, um, grand tradition of the films Ghost Town is seeking to take down. It’s forgivable, I suppose. I laughed a great deal.

One more thing that I enjoyed was a scene shot in the Met in NYC, in the glorious gallery of the Temple of Hathor, which I last visited in very early spring, 2001.