Shutting Down and Revving Up

--So the Republican government which controls the House, the Senate, and the Presidency couldn't come to agreement and now the government has a partial shutdown.  My grandmother, when truly disgusted, would pronounce the word with a special emphasis on the G.  Let me just say, "I am DIS--Gusted."  If I did my job only half as badly as those folks, I'd have been fired long ago.

--We shall do what we planned to do anyway today:  cook!  We are making a brisket for our delayed family gathering tomorrow--the Texas kind of brisket, not the Jewish kind.  I will make a pot of some kind of beans.  I've already made a pot of a corn chowder for my quilt group that will assemble at my house later today.  One of our friends who was bringing bread has taken sick and can't come, so I'll make a pan of cornbread too--it will work well with what we're having both today and tomorrow.

--This morning while cooking,  I pulled out the garlic mincer and reflected on how rarely I mince garlic these days.  Once, influenced by the Frugal Gourmet (a PBS chef and cooking show in the 80's), my dad bought a Susi garlic press, and he loved it so much that my parents got me one for a stocking stuffer.  That was over 20 years ago, and it's still working just fine.  Amazing.

--Before I started cooking, I wrote a poem.  I had the idea for it in mid-December, as a colleague described the dining room table items she used (ostrich feathers) and the present she bought for a friend:  napkins that shimmered because of Swarovski crystals sewn into them.  You may remember that I wrote about the experience in this post, along with the glimmerings of a poem.  I went on vacation and promptly forgot about it.  Yesterday as I drove from store to store getting the items we would need for cooking, the idea flitted through my head again.

--The poem is somewhat different than what I first intended.  I put in a stanza about my grandmother's dining room table, always covered with a linen cloth, but rarely used, like the china in the cabinet that matches the table and the sideboard.  If I never published another poem, I'd keep writing them, because of the delight of the unintended and unexpected.

--Because I've been going to spin class more regularly, I have more music in my brain.  Unfortunately it's not always music I would want to have in my head:  "Met her in the backseat of a taxi, on the way to the club."  Sometimes I've discovered cool music that I wouldn't have met without spin class.  Some days, the music I hear makes me worry for the health of my country--same as the antics in Washington, D.C.