An Outing to San Rafael and, Subsequently, Almond Cookies

Last Saturday morning, Tom and I went to San Rafael to visit his mother, Ann, and her husband, Mac, at the assisted-care place in which they have taken refuge for several weeks after a confluence of medical mishaps. It’s quite nice. It reminded me of a club where my grandmother once took me for lunch in Dearborn, Michigan.

We had lunch and did an errand or two and generally hung out. It was extremely pleasant. They are moving to Sacramento soon. It will be sad to have them farther away, but we go to Sacramento often, anyway, so we can just go even more often.

At the end of the afternoon, we came back to San Francisco and had Thai food for dinner and saw Live Free or Die Hard, with Bruce Willis, which was excellent. The crowd was large and enthusiastic.

Back at home, I made the mistake of turning on the computer to do a little something, and next thing I knew, it was two in the morning, as always. Here’s a problem: I can hear Snakenet Metal Radio online with no problems at home, but I can’t hear WRIF, a Detroit rock station, unless I’m at work, where either works fine, as proved by a brief test.

I meant to get up on Sunday at eleven a.m., but ended up hitting the snooze button until one p.m., and just then Lisa M. called, and we had a nice chat.

Thus it was nearly four p.m. before I left to go to Rainbow. I was going to get grated cheese to put on top of pasta and tomato sauce, but realized most of that stuff comes from Italy; the closest I could find was from Wisconsin, and that was in a plastic container, so I decided just to skip it. I’m buying less and less packaged food and still spending kind of a fortune, so I know prices must be rising precipitously.

Back at home, I made split pea and barley soup, using a recipe from my favorite cookbook, 366 Delicious Ways to Cook Rice, Beans and Grains. As always, the author tried to sneak a fat-free recipe past me, but as always, I remembered to pour 1/3 of a cup of olive oil into it. The recipe also called for a dried chipotle; I put in two. The result was pleasing.

I also made almond cookies: butter, flour, sugar, vanilla, almond flavoring, and finely ground almonds. The last time I used my mixer, to make the ill-fated “coconut” bread, it was emitting a terrible burning odor, so I wasn’t sure it was going to work again, but it did.

I’m continuing to sift through my filing cabinets looking for pieces of paper I may be able to live without. I came upon a note from Frances Mayes (Under the Tuscan Sun), who was one of my teachers in an undergraduate creative writing program at SFSU, in which she said that her directed writing section was full, but that she would make an exception for me if I wanted to work with her on a one-on-one basis. I didn’t do it; I can’t remember why. I felt slightly regretful seeing this evidence of missed opportunity. She also told me that she hoped I was going to go to graduate school. I didn’t.

But now I have this fantastic blog! What could Frances Mayes or graduate school have done for me? My dear friend Elea is in graduate school for writing right now; we met in that same undergraduate program, whose department head was poet Stan Rice, husband of novelist Anne Rice. When Elea is done with school, I’ll ask her if it was worth it.

I was able to part with several inches of “free writing” without rereading it. I gathered all of my own poems and recycled the extra copies of each. Maybe I’ll start putting them here, if there is enough space to avoid breaking lines in the wrong place, since this is probably the only way most of them will see the light of day, though I did come upon one that absolutely belongs in The New Yorker, if I can get the first three quarters of it whipped into shape. I imagine you’ll see it there in a couple of weeks.

It was kind of interesting to come upon the beginnings of various poems, a line or phrase from weeks or months before the poem was actually written.

A couple of weeks ago, I was flipping my new mattress over per the specified maintenance schedule and discovered that one of the big stitches that goes all the way through the mattress, helping to keep it flat, had burst.

Such defects will be fixed for ten years under the warranty, but the customer must pay for transportation to and from the factory, so I feared they were going to say that for $200, they’d come and get it, fix it and return it, and was very pleased when they said that’s something they can fix in my apartment. They ain’t done it yet.