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I was standing in the coffee room at work, waiting for my asparagus to finish nuking, and wishing for a ham and cheese sandwich. I was really trying to convince myself that I was being good by eating my veggies and I didn’t need to walk down to the cafeteria and spend money on a grilled ham and cheese sandwich when the cafeteria food nearly always leaves my with a faintly upset tummy anyway. Then, a pretty woman in a brown dress brought in a box of leftovers from somebody’s meeting. Ham! Yay!
I’m faintly tempted to walk around my floor and see who my new fairy godmother is, but I fear it might make me look like a weirdo.

There was a dead hawk in the backyard, caught between the fence and the wisteria, when I got home from Thanksgiving weekend. I found it last night and did what any grown-up would do; called my mom. Call animal control, she said. Sadly, budget cuts in my county mean that animal control doesn’t deal with dead things in your backyard. If I wanted to put the body in a bag and leave it on the street, they’d be happy to pick it up. I asked a few questions and they weren’t going to get all CSI on it, so I decided against leaving it out for the school children who walk past my house to find this morning. Some teacher at the local middle school probably had a much duller Show And Tell today. Pity. It was a large and beautiful hawk and would have been quite educational.

I put on work gloves and lined the trash can with the biggest bag I had. GM was dispatched to the shed to get shovels and rakes and implements of destruction. I bravely got close enough to place the trash bin directly under the hawk. In the moment my back was turned to pick up the rake, GM poked the dead thing with the shovel and dropped it directly into the bag.

Being both a boY and a knight, I should have known he’d fix any problem that could be solved with a stick.

It’s been a good week, outside of work. We had Aasa’s early birthday at Wednesday dance practice, with a celebratory sour cream and raisin pie (my link button no workie!  http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Sour-Cream-Raisin-Pie-14458). Actually it’s been pie week all around, as GM made a chicken pie and I made cherry pie for dinner on Saturday.

Inside of work, it’s been a frustrating week of people who don’t know what they want, but want it right now. I’d like my job better if I was allowed to enforkenate the deserving. There’s at least one person who would look like a hedgehog afterwards, but I would feel much better, I’m sure of it.

As usual, I have no idea what to get my mother, or my mother in law, for mother’s day.

I think the spiders are trying to take over the house. The garden is full of spiders with white bellies, and the house seems to have more than usual of the tan-colored leggy ones. They must be eating something, but heck if I know what. At least the roses are blooming, and GM seems to have succeeded in his plan to actually have grass in the back yard. The shed is in dire need to fixing, we’ll need to do that Sunday.

This year’s vacations plans have shifted, we’re not going to Germany. :(  Hopefully the Germany plan is just put off to 2014. We’re going to Denmark/Sweden/Norway instead. Anybody got any can’t-miss destinations for the medievalist in those places?  

I like the Friday five, it’s nicely alliterative, and lets you know what is going to be here, even if my numbers are a little off.

Last weekend we got a lot of bookcases out of greatsword’s old house and moved them to my house. GM had wanted new bookcases, and somehow the idea that we were getting a lot of new bookcases never caused me to think that we’d need to, ya’know, clean off the old bookcases and move all books to the new ones. Needless to say, I spend all weekend moving books. But the good news is, you can  actually see all of GM’s science fiction books. Bad news is, we need to move all the history books to the back room. Tonight we’re taking two empty cases to klwilliams so she’ll have more space for Chaz’s books.

My handout for the Culinary Symposium is slowly coming into shape. I need to put together a power point slide deck for the trencher class and another for the PPF: How We Did It class, but that should be easy enough. gormflaith and I have a date for Monday to go over each other’s class handouts, hopefully she’ll catch whatever I missed in editing.

The dance ball is tomorrow. My foot is still bothering me enough that I won’t be teaching this year, so I’m considering being a total slacker and not arriving until the pre-ball dinner hour. There’s no reason for me to go early; zoccolaro has plenty of volunteers for gate, and I have little interest in decorating the hall. Maybe I’ll stay home and make a more interesting contribution to the potluck.

I’ve (mostly) been able to keep the weight I lost October off, so I’m going to try a second round of the crazystupid diet after President’s day weekend.

The household dinner went pretty well this year. GM and I made Mexican food, mostly with recipes from Rick Bayless’s TV show Mexico: One plate at a time. My favorite was the Enchiladas Especiales Tacuba Style. We had Mexican Wedding Cakes made with dried cherries and pistachios for dessert, I ate more of them than I should have. Yummy!

GM and I should really replace the old, inefficient wall heaters in the house with an actual heating system that works. We had a guy out to give us an estimate, and it was a little cheaper than I thought it would be. He also gave us an estimate for putting in air conditioning at the same time. For those of you who have bought/sold houses recently, how much does an air conditioner add to the value of the house?

1) This weekend will be my first weekend at home since May 7th. GM has a plan to fire up the smoker, and I'm going to weed the garden before my poor basil plants give up entirely. 2) The funniest thing I've read all week, Towels or Chicken, time to decide. 3) Half my coworkers are angry, and half are doing the I-told-you-so-Dance. Best quote so far:

Why am I not in charge of these things? The serial commas is a good thing—good for readers. Sometimes the last two items in a list constitute a pair, and sometimes they don’t, and readers shouldn’t have to waste even a single brain cycle figuring out which case it is. 

4) The trencher project continues apace. I've almost completed reviewing all the sets I saw in England. I am so glad I live in the age of Google and searchable bibles. If I had to find all those verses in hard copy I would have given up by now. I was dimly aware renaissance bibles had more books in them because of all the paintings of Tobias With His Magic Fish and Suzanna and The Pervy Elders, but there's another book I'd never heard of, Sirach. 5) GM wants to go to the SCA's Board of Drirectors Meeting and BBQ on the 9th. Are any of ya'll thinking about going?

GM and I did end up going to South Dakota last weekend. The visit to my brother's family went smoothly, and we all went to the WalMart portrait studio to get a picture taken. Mission Accomplished. We also went to see my eldest nephew in a community theatre production of Fiddler on Roof.

This weekend, GM's in Wisconsin at the Ring of Steel reunion. RoS is his old stage-combat troop. I hope he's having fun. I know I'm old&dull now; I woke up Saturday morning and realized the only constraint on my behavior (other than G-d and peer-like qualities) was 2,355 miles away and my next thought was ooo! I could have egg salad for lunch!

I made a veggie lasagne for next weekend {the usual sauce and no-boil noodles 1) drained ricotta with goat cheese, thin-sliced garlic, sliced zucchini, 2) cheese, pesto, chopped artichokes, chopped white-only leeks  3) portabella mushrooms cooked down with shallots, milk, and provolone, 4) chopped fresh basil, cheese, green garlic-stuffed olives, fresh tomatoes}. I also made Alton Brown's crepes. They are sadly disappointing.

The garden is in a terrible state. I've paid little attention to it all summer and the weeds are taking over the herb garden. Even more unhappily, last Monday I went out to look at the plum tree and thought "I should pick those this weekend" and when I went out Saturday morning, they were all gone. Not sure if it was the squirrels or the birds but not a single plum is left on the tree.