the icy windshield cometh

So familiar, this morning's chipping of the stubborn ice... but rare in these parts. Came out to it often in Baltimore. The ice storm and freezing rain thing occurred in a Charm City winter more often than any form of snow, let alone the dry wafty lovely flakes we so often get up here.

This kind of winter, though longer, is better than that kind of winter.

the icy windshield cometh

So familiar, this morning's chipping of the stubborn ice... but rare in these parts. Came out to it often in Baltimore. The ice storm and freezing rain thing occurred in a Charm City winter more often than any form of snow, let alone the dry wafty lovely flakes we so often get up here.

This kind of winter, though longer, is better than that kind of winter.

stir-fry, books, etc.

My tofu veggie terriyaki stir-fry has never been, if I do say so myself, better.

I have a cookbook coming. It's a cookbook that somebody bought me last year but that never showed up---it was going to be a surprise, so I didn't notice its not arriving. (She said "I thought you would have said something...") So I was ordering this book for the birthday boy of today, and realized I still hadn't gotten the latest Dykes to Watch Out For, so I put that in my cart, too, and then I got to thinking that I oughta have that cookbook. I'm a struggling student cook, still, again, after all these years. Though I was thinking tonight how bloody many onions I must've cut up in my day. I have techniques with onions, even. Yeah, plural techniques.

It's like some kind of holiday, with all this home cooking I've been doing, and my Christmas present from my brother arriving (I'm saving it to open once I've straightened up the living room), and a box from T last week, and two more boxes on the way---a box of books, and a box with a cell phone in it.

I was also thinking, while I was chopping onions and pondering how many onions I've chopped, about how all us onion choppers'll be dead soon enough, and thinking on how my mother probably chopped a lot of onions herself, and thinking on all the dead people who chopped onions, maybe a lot of onions, before they were dead. It's kind of preposterous, all the onion-chopping dead people. Chop lots and lots of onions, but still a finite number of onions, who knows when you'll be chopping your last, and then you're dead, and your onion chopping joins the onion chopping of the dead. It's funny how many of the onions that have been chopped were chopped by now-dead hands, and that the chopping of onions is an activity we animals engage in with our chopping boards on our kitchen counters and our knives and our techniques.

This was not sad thinking about dead onion choppers, I should perhaps point out. Just thinking. Letting it run off leash. Some of it a little anthropologist-on-Mars-y, some of it from the POV of this onionchopper. The mortality may have entered just then partly cuz today's my sister-out-law's birthday, too (as well as Jeffie's), and I talked to her this afternoon, and she's turning 60, and she was talking about being dead soon enough, and worrying about my brother being dead soon, and I've also been thinking about being dead soon enough. (Of course I've been either thinking about that or avoiding thinking about that for as long as I can remember thinking about anything.) And here I am, chopping onions, so mundane, but curiously also in its very mundaneness/mundanity almost the opposite of thinking about being dead. I bet, out of all the onion choppers of all time, I am right up there in onion-chopping thinkers about the chopping of onions, being dead, and being dead having chopped onions.

stir-fry, books, etc.

My tofu veggie terriyaki stir-fry has never been, if I do say so myself, better.

I have a cookbook coming. It's a cookbook that somebody bought me last year but that never showed up---it was going to be a surprise, so I didn't notice its not arriving. (She said "I thought you would have said something...") So I was ordering this book for the birthday boy of today, and realized I still hadn't gotten the latest Dykes to Watch Out For, so I put that in my cart, too, and then I got to thinking that I oughta have that cookbook. I'm a struggling student cook, still, again, after all these years. Though I was thinking tonight how bloody many onions I must've cut up in my day. I have techniques with onions, even. Yeah, plural techniques.

It's like some kind of holiday, with all this home cooking I've been doing, and my Christmas present from my brother arriving (I'm saving it to open once I've straightened up the living room), and a box from T last week, and two more boxes on the way---a box of books, and a box with a cell phone in it.

I was also thinking, while I was chopping onions and pondering how many onions I've chopped, about how all us onion choppers'll be dead soon enough, and thinking on how my mother probably chopped a lot of onions herself, and thinking on all the dead people who chopped onions, maybe a lot of onions, before they were dead. It's kind of preposterous, all the onion-chopping dead people. Chop lots and lots of onions, but still a finite number of onions, who knows when you'll be chopping your last, and then you're dead, and your onion chopping joins the onion chopping of the dead. It's funny how many of the onions that have been chopped were chopped by now-dead hands, and that the chopping of onions is an activity we animals engage in with our chopping boards on our kitchen counters and our knives and our techniques.

This was not sad thinking about dead onion choppers, I should perhaps point out. Just thinking. Letting it run off leash. Some of it a little anthropologist-on-Mars-y, some of it from the POV of this onionchopper. The mortality may have entered just then partly cuz today's my sister-out-law's birthday, too (as well as Jeffie's), and I talked to her this afternoon, and she's turning 60, and she was talking about being dead soon enough, and worrying about my brother being dead soon, and I've also been thinking about being dead soon enough. (Of course I've been either thinking about that or avoiding thinking about that for as long as I can remember thinking about anything.) And here I am, chopping onions, so mundane, but curiously also in its very mundaneness/mundanity almost the opposite of thinking about being dead. I bet, out of all the onion choppers of all time, I am right up there in onion-chopping thinkers about the chopping of onions, being dead, and being dead having chopped onions.