Snow, Glorious Snow

Gainesville

Pretty good day. The Tree is now all undecorated, everything packed away. Need only to seal the boxes and get them back to the store room. Will need Bill's help to disassemble the actual tree-- I could assemble it myself, since that just involved dropping the segments into place, but yanking the segments upwards is more strenuous. I could manage it with a step ladder, if necessary. Will be glad to have that space back again.

Spent time revising my weekly routines, and think I have a workable set, or at least a draft. It will take a few weeks to ease into them and see how it goes. Also decluttered the Control Journal while I was at it. Less is more-- it was become unwieldy, so I was using it less.

A triumph at dinner, for a change: needed to use up the rest of the bag of potatoes I bought for NY day's "That Salad," so made the FC #83 Stir Fried Potatoes, another of their Indian veg stir fries. It was AMAZING. Maybe one of the best ways I've had potatoes ever. The mis en place took a lot of time (Sandy's gifts came in very handy here), and turns out I was nearly out of cumin and coriander, but I made do with what I had. Substituted some crushed red pepper flakes for the whole dried pepper. It was so good I was licking up bits that fell on the table, let alone the pans. I recommend this dish most highly!

With it I had a Leanne Asian Salad -- spinach, cubed leftover chicken (last week's Indian Chicken, in this case), diced red bell pepper, peanuts, and some excellent bottled Asian Dressing mixed with chopped cilantro and shredded ginger-- individual servings topped with mango slices. It too was outstanding, so much better than the ad lib spinach salad I did last week.

How interesting that you got to visit Yugoslavia while it still existed as a single country, Mom. I know more about it than most, because of my very first library job at Cal-- student assistant to the Slavic Area Bibliographer. Cal's part in a library cooperative effort to cover global affairs was Yugoslavia, so I got to check in all the various books we got from there by default, and figure out how to dummy up order cards (how quaint) for things we never ordered that were sent to us free. The better I did this job, the easier it was for the catalogers down the line. Of course, I didn't realize this until later, but I did get very good at my job-- which led directly to my next job at UF. The rest is history.

Hey, congrats on some actual SNOW at last. Enjoy. Neil is rejoicing too. It's sad to think that global warning is making snow a scarce commodity, except in sudden blizzard dumps that foul things up, as in Denver recently.

Gotta get up early tomorrow and go in to the frakkin' library, of all places. Spend a whole frakkin' day there. Go to a retirement party, 3-5. Trying to ease myself into a mind set of going in once a week to do work with the comics collection. It's a hard sell. Not going anywhere still seems very sweet.