Dear Diary:
Nude With Violin

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As the afternoon wore on, I wore down. Not getting enough sleep (for who knows how long) began to tell in irritating ways. I was clumsy, for one thing, or clumsier than usual. I chipped the spot of an everyday teapot. What was new about that setback was my immediate decision to toss the ruin. I did not even think of filling it with soil and using it as a planter out on the balcony.

I had lunch with a good friend who was shockingly ill-informed about Astor-Marshall family history. To begin with aboriginal issues, she didn’t know how Brooke came to be “Astor” while her son Tony was “Marshall.” Heavens! Filling her in was a treat even tastier than my croque monsieur. (I must have looked exactly like a hairdresser of a certain age.) It occurs to me that what one really wants in these times is Ruth Draper’s summary of the trial. “So often, that’s how trouble starts!” I’m so glad that this intriguing family imbroglio wasn’t wasted on the Bush Administration. One’s attention would have been so divided. Now that we have a president who reads Netherland for fun, we don’t have to worry about Washington — not in that dreadful, Bush-era way.

For dinner, I roasted a chicken. Rather later than I ought to have done, I tossed halved baby Yukon potatoes into the roasting pan. At the last minute, I steamed a bunch of asparagus spears on the stove. I have been steaming a lot of asparagus lately. It is available year-round, but I’ve been trying to treat it as a seasonal vegetable. As with popcorn, I have stopped worshiping false cooking methods and returned to the laws of my youth — when, it is true, I didn’t know that asparagus naturally snap at the frontier of tenderness. For years, I followed Barbara Kafka’s microwave technique (no water!), which was problematic because I rarely cooked the pound for which the method was timed. Then I took to standing unsnapped asparagus in boiling water. I can’t think where that dismal idea came from. Now I steam asaparagus for something between six and seven minutes. It may be exhausting me to death, but working harder at The Daily Blague than I have worked on anything before, and doing so day after day, week after week, has cleared my brain. I can distinguish between a potentially preferable alternative and an utter waste of time at fifty paces.

In order to dine at a reasonable hour, Kathleen came home on the early side, planning to do a bit of work after dinner. Unfortunately, she got sidetracked by a number of technical problems (her cell phone seemed to be missing; her camera needed downloading, and the battery was drained — should the charger’s indicator light blink or not?). The combination of late hour and advanced age made all of this nettlesome. The pictures are beautiful, however, the phone can be dealt with tomorrow, and we’ll hope that the battery charger doesn’t explode.

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