Rain Soaked Notes From Home

The rain is raining all around. It falls on field and trees…can’t remember the rest. But truly, it is abundantly raining, if gently, and will be all day. Which means I’m saved, I guess, from puttering around in the garden. Thank Heaven. I Finally have a whole day to exclusively focus on all the work Inside. The laundry, the dusting, the returning of emails and sorting through the mountain of bits of important paper that I have thoughtfully accumulated on and around the floor near my desk. Thank goodness there is no warm sunshine to distract me from my duty.

And the children, of course, will love to stay inside another day quietly reading and sorting out the rubble of their toys. No one wanted to go to the park or anything ridiculous like that.

After my anti laundry screed yesterday I did roust myself to shove some things in and out of that magical machine. Of course, I don’t hate doing laundry any more because I don’t have to go to Sheol to do it. I stand in my very pleasant laundry room looking out over a sweep of hills and into the windows of my neighbor’s beautiful house. I mean, I try, of course, not to look in the windows…I mean, I can’t see in. If they would just leave the lights on…well, then, I would close my own blinds because I’m not that sort of person.

But truly, doing laundry was not the high point of the week. The high point, along with sleeping, was finally making Chicken and Dumplings for the child who’s been asking for them for hundreds of days. I did the Joy of Cooking recipe for the dumplings, as usual. It works well. The soup/stew part I just made up. Lots and lots chicken cut into bits, stock, sweated onion, and then carrots and peas because that’s what I had. Truly, the whole thing was more like a shepherds pie without the lamb or the pie or the shepherd or the potatoes. But I did realize, as I was going along, that a good piece of advice, and one that you might want to tuck away for future reference, is that making chicken and dumplings in a wok shaped pot is not brilliant. I know, it seems obvious when you say it like that, but when you’re standing in your kitchen in a more than the usual stupor, putting all the chicken and whatever into the pot that you have in front of you, you might not even notice that it’s the shape of a wok until you’re wondering why the dumplings around the edges aren’t cooking. And then you’ll look at the pot more carefully and realize that it’s shape is not what you thought it was. You’ll also realize that you made enough chicken and dumplings to feed the whole west side. So much that you can’t lift it off the stove and have to call in a man, or at least someone who self identifies as a man, to lift it for you. Fortunately I wasn’t so tired that I forgot salt or anything. It was delicious. Or should it be they were delicious?

And now I guess I will get cracking on all that housework I have no reason to avoid. What a charming day this is going to be. Pip pip.