1) I made some headway on the scary task.

2) I redeemed myself in the kitchen with a delicious Not-Hungarian* Mushroom Soup which I am eating right now, with a spoonful of sour cream swirled in.

3) Ross will be home in less than three hours.

4) I still like the way my hair looks, even when I am being silly.

New Hair Shimmy from meeralee on Vimeo.

*Lacking Hungarian paprika, I substituted Spanish sweet. I also skipped the dill it called for because I couldn’t find any fresh. Email if you’d like the recipe; it’s very simple and very yummy.

Okay, I’ve had a supremely unproductive, slothful, and slightly sick week, I’ve been literally afraid of starting a particular task for the entirety of that time (Today’s the day! I can feel it! Sort of.), I’ve been underwhelmed by my cooking efforts (new recipes are so tricky), I miss Ross to pieces, and it’s still kind of cold here. Yeah.

BUT!

I just watered the dwarf Improved Meyer Lemon tree in the sun room. And! I was admiring all its lovely little new leaves! And then I noticed that besides leaves, it also has tiny white and pink BUDS on it! That damn tree is about to FLOWER. It probably won’t fruit this year, but it’s going to flower and be pretty and smell so good and YAY!

I’m so excited, I can almost ignore the fact that I have a feeling the nasturtium and cilantro seeds are never going to sprout.

I have one.

Ever since Monday I’ve been plagued by the unholy trinity of throbby-head, inexplicable fatigue, and sore-throat. I keep dropping off for long stretches of time after sitting down, and every time I bend over to dry my hair or pick something up it feels like a painful ectoplasm is filling my skull cavity. Since as you will recall I was ill just last month, this must be the universe’s way of making up my several sick-free years to me. How thoughtful of it. FYI, it’s no fun being sick when Ross is not around to mollycoddle me.

After a bit of a dry spell, I did receive two inquiries today about work and am feeling good about that. Good, but nervous, because I can’t take on both things and it’s possible I’ll have to decide which one to commit to before knowing enough about either. And we all know how much I like uncertainty. Wait, maybe I’m the only one who knows how much I like uncertainty. (Hint: I don’t.) In the plus column of my life, however, my Kafka class tonight was the best one we’ve had yet, because we finally seem to have made it through most of the historical lectures she had planned for us, and started talking about one story in detail (”The Judgement”—it is so very very good). As I was walking towards the building where my class meets my eye grazed over a playground fence whose design Sarah and I had talked about last week, and I missed having her here. Come back soon, dearest!

I’m off to get myself into more comfy clothes and crawl into bed so I can rest and recover with tissues.

—Arty Photo of Tissues stolen from my beloved Greg

In the week she was here with me in Chicago Sarah and I accomplished the following:

1) Visited and spent money at four different bookstores—five if you count the one in the Newberry Library—and wandered up through all nine floors of the Harold Washington Public Library in downtown Chicago, until we reached the sunny winter garden at the top.

2) Drank one small, dry cappuccino each at Intelligentsia, three times (two different branches).

3) Explored two museums, one spice store, one garden store, and several funky little whatchamacallit/thingamabob stores.

4) Cooked for each other: she made an amazing lime-cilantro-basil-peanut beef stir-fry from her latest holiday cookbook, and I made Thai curry (with Ross) and risotto. We have video of the production of the beef stir-fry, and when I look at it now it makes me weep that there is none left. I ate the last of it this morning with a scrap of challah. I nearly expired from happiness.

5) Watched Bette Davis smolder like a beautiful, bitter candle on the big screen at the Music Box Theater.

6) Consumed copious amounts of vodka, Wensleydale cheese with cranberries, peach cobbler ice-cream with fresh mango, and various other things that are good for both body and soul.

7) Watched seven episodes of Buffy (what? Sarah’s making her way through; it wasn’t my fault. Honest).

8) Photographed the city and each other using five different cameras, in snow, rain, and sunshine.

9) Talked for hours of cabbages and kings, food, creativity, life, love, the past, the present, and the future.

In the twelve hours since Sarah left me in my quiet house without Ross (who has gone to Spokane to see his family, and without whom I can neither be relied upon to eat nor to sleep according to a reasonable schedule), I have accomplished the following:

1) Cut my hair.

Seeing Chicago with Sarah is fun.

This morning Sarah proclaimed that she was imbibing the best cappuccino she had ever had in her life, and this evening her moans as we ate dinner were interpreted to mean that she was now consuming the best pizza of her life, as well. She’s actually on the phone with her boyfriend right now explaining the virtues of said pizza.

We are hoping that these two experiences will make up a good part of a compelling argument that she should move to Chicago immediately.

I arrived in Barcelona on a Friday afternoon, tired and thrilled; I navigated the bus to the busy square where I was supposed to get off, and after only three or four false starts down one or another wrong avenue, finally found myself standing at the mouth of the narrow street upon which we’d rented our apartment—though I still wasn’t sure I’d found it, since in Barcelona the street signs (though plentiful) are placed in inconsistent locations high on the walls of buildings, where they may sit in the shadow of a carved Chinese dragon or become obscured by graffiti. I was frowning hard as I shrugged my bag back into a more comfortable position on my shoulder, eyes seeking out the word Boqueria on the stone edifices, when suddenly Avi appeared right in front of me, emerging from the crowd of babbling tourists and siesta-bound Spaniards with a grin on his face and his arms opening wide to enfold me in a hug. It was a wonderful beginning to a wonderful weekend.

It would take too long to tell you about everything we saw and touched and ate and drank and smelled and said and smiled over, but I can report that it is a fine, fine thing to drink a bottle of wine a day for three consecutive days. We had a Cabernet (which traveled with A. from Israel) on Friday, some Cava (which we learned upon its arrival at our table is Spanish champagne) on Saturday, and an unidentified bottle of white (which sat in a silver bucket by our table, pleasing Avi very much) on Sunday. There was also a good deal of beer and whiskey and grappa, but the wine was the thing. There is nothing more convivial than a bottle of wine shared with an old friend.

Barcelona’s only significant flaw, so far as I can tell, is that it attracts far too many tourists. If we could find a place in the city close to its heart and far enough away from the throngs, I would settle down there. No question about it. The city has charm coming out of its ears. Even its trees have personality.

And now there are but hours to wait until I am the one enfolding the lovely Sarah in a hug and lending her an extra sweater to keep her warm through these late winter days in Chicago. ;-) I am lucky beyond words.