11 July 2004

It's raining. It's pouring. I haven't checked on The Old Man, but I have my suspicions in his direction. It's a lovely firm definitive rain; it woke me up several hours ago with a thunderclap, and I muttered a sincere, "Oh good!" and went back to sleep. Either it'll stop by the time we get to Stella's or it won't, and if it doesn't, we'll picnic in the living room there (Mark and I will take allergy meds) or in some deli or restaurant nearby. It'll be fine no matter what. We'll get time with Stella and Mike and Roo and Elle and Matt. So: good time predicted for all.

I really don't Don DeLillo's Libra so far. The dialog, the plot, the structure, the characters...so far pretty much all of it. It was a present, and I figure it must have been a present for a reason, so I'm going to finish reading it. But so far, not my favorite book. I had a similarly negative reaction to Cosmopolis, which was not a present. I'm afraid it's going to be a two strike rule instead of a three strike rule here. If I was merely indifferent to these books, I might give him three if there was a reason to try the third. But I dislike them. This is my last DeLillo.

I made wild rice blueberry pecan bread yesterday. My mom renamed it "fiddlydamn bread," after I got on the phone with her and said, "Oh, Momma, this is the fiddliest damn bread ever!" Seriously. You have to cook wild rice in advance and grind wild rice flour and let the bread rise about a million times, and when you try to knead it, you get projectile blueberries every time you land a good punch. It's tasty, but very lumpy (which should be obvious: each of the ingredients in the title is a small lump). I think it was about five hours between starting to cook the rice and being finished with the bread, and I used minimum times on a lot of the steps. Compare that to the bomber bars I made last night after dinner, which I had whipped up in the time it took the oven to preheat. Part of that is my psychic knowledge of bomber bars: I don't have the recipe memorized yet, but close. But mostly it's just that they're quick and easy.

More thunder. Wheee! I'm so happy with thunderstorms. We didn't have them in California. They're so lovely when you're safe in your house or car. Or Stella's house. Or some nearby structure. Etc.