chemistry experiments

January 22, 2003


Returning to the life of washing litter boxes and attempting to write (can't return to the driving kids to piano part because the new teacher comes to the house) is proving to be harder than I might have imagined had I been imagining it. Working at startup pace and then suddenly not is a little like jamming on the brakes when you're driving at highway speed. I keep wanting to accomplish something every day.

The trouble is what to accomplish?

I picked up the newsletter at the printer first thing this morning in the freezing cold. The printer is conveniently located next to Perfecto's so was able to get coffee too. Not that that counts as accomplishment.

Roy's got his own system for washing the dishes and litter boxes now and I have to learn to do it his way. I ended up drying the dishes and then folding laundry and loading the washer and dryer this morning before sweeping the office floor and returning home to stuff newsletters into envelopes. I spent the afternoon drinking tea and stuffing envelopes. A fitting thing to do in the freezing cold.

Have I mentioned it's freezing cold? I don't think the temperature has got into double digits here all day and now with night closing in the cold is penetrating into my house. Brrr.

So one of the things I've been doing to get a feeling of accomplishment and to keep warm is making soup. I'm trying different soup recipes at least once a week. Last Tuesday I made miso soup with kale. It was pretty good right off the stove but much much better on Wednesday when it had a chance to sit overnight. Yesterday's soup was hominy corn chowder. The hardest part of that was finding canned hominy - not exactly widely popular in New England but I found it in the "International" section of Market Basket. The chowder was fantastic! The only thing it lacked was a little black pepper.

It's not that I don't have any black peppercorns on hand. Nope. It's that I haven't used the pepper mill in ages, since before joining Starship Startup, and it did not want to function. Not only were the batteries dead but the compartment where you put the peppercorns was stuck shut. I could not get it open to insert peppercorns. Then once I got the peppercorn part open the battery compartment stuck shut, which is weird because when I first took the mill out of the cabinet the top of the battery compartment fell off and I had just put it back on. Not having anything I could use to improvise a mortar and pestle, I left out the black pepper. And like I said the chowder was fine. I just reheated today's portion (all these soups make enough for several meals for one) and garnished it with grated pepperjack cheese and it was awesome.

My cooking adventures are a lot like chemistry experiments, requiring precise measurements of ingredients and cooking times. It must be the engineer in me. I can't just throw a bunch of ingredients together intuitively and have it work.

The chemistry experiments give me a feeling of structure and accomplishment that I am not getting from writing lately (or ever?). It occurred to me that yesterday's entry, unlike yesterday's soup experiment, just didn't cut it. If I needed more proof that I can't write, that was it. I'm fine when I write about software, hardware, even birds or funny travel stories, but when it comes to expressing deep personal emotions like heart-pounding fear and anxiety, for example, I fall flat. Y'know I'm just the kind of person who says "Drink plenty of fluids, wear sunscreen, and duck when the shooting starts" instead of "I love you, come back from the war alive."

At least the chemistry experiments are promising.

Today's Reading
One Whaling Family by Harold Williams, The Measure of All Things by Ken Alder

This Year's Reading
2003 Book List


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Copyright © 2003, Janet I. Egan