I haven't mentioned it because I hadn't seen the evidence in the rock yet, but now I have so I will. Haitch and McCarthy are engaged, and the subject line refers not to any conversation or visit, I am happy to say, but to the design of the ring. The extremely sparkly stone--that's clarity, right?--is tension-mounted in titanium so there is no metal beneath or around it. Light can enter it from almost any point except two, at 9 and 3 o'clock where the band touches the…rim or whatever you call the transition from the round top to the pointed bottom.
We toasted them with the champagne KREL and her husband gave us in France (that I schlepped in my carryon wrapped in my nightgown, so I'm glad that went well) and fed them raspberries from the garden (yesterday's take made two layers in the bottom of the same style of bowl). Also I gave her her French KitKats. And she gave me my birthday presents: a chocolate and raspberry candy bar, a book of essays on northern New York (I love local books), and moose cookie cutters, big and wee.
I brought them into the kitchen to join them with my other moose cookie cutter. "Oh, I didn't know you already had one," said Haitch, perhaps disappointed.
"But now I have a whole moose family!" I exclaimed. All three have the giant palmate spreads of antlers that mark them as meeses, so it's quite authentic in the lisaverse that they're a bull, cow, and baby. When SEM discovered in college how squeamish I was about giving birth, he accessorized the worst possible baby for me: claws, tail fins, and velcro, and there might have been antlers.
We had dinner at Mizuna, which used to be Aubergine. I don't know why I was the designated driver on the way, except I had had only a sip of champagne while the others had finished the bottle, since I cannot parallel park, even by Braille, unless the space is big enough for a yacht.
Mmm, food. RDC had made me tea in the post-dirt pre-dinner hosing-off period, and I sucked down some Advil, so I was even awake for this meal. I had a goat cheese and morel and some green sprouty thing salad with my first fava beans; RDC had paté; Haitch had some kind of potato and corn pasta; McCarthy had macaroni and cheese, at Haitch's request, so I could try some.
Macaroni and cheese is one of my continued finickinesses. I didn't like noodles or cheese as a child, so after I was grown and loved both and lived with a good cook, I figured hey, pasta, cheese, what can go wrong? I don't know, but I still didn't like it, until last night. It maybe helped that this mac & muck, as my sister (whose favorite food it was) called it, was made with mascapone cheese and studded with lobster. Maybe.
Then RDC and I had prosciutto-wrapped scallops with a shiitake-potato-fava garnish and McCarthy had halibut and Haitch a vegetarian sampler, and we all finished with a flourless chocolate cake covered in crême fraiche. How do you spell that? Whatever.
The restaurant did crumb the table and refold your napkin if you left the table, but it did not provide the far more practical service of a valet with a handcart to roll you back to your car.
Besides that I'm a freak who wakes up early when she doesn't have to and that it's the shortest day of the year, that is.
A family of magpies in the cherry tree outside my bedroom window. Five baby magpies whining mag? mag? mag? mag? mag? etc. while their parents ate and tried to encourage the babies to eat instead of begging to be fed. The babies have short tails and are scruffy but already have their adult white bibs and black hoods.
Now, them I don't mind sharing the cherries with. But yesterday I staggered into the backyard to find a squirrel sitting up on its hind tentacles in the grass beside the raspberry canes, just scooping fruit into its fiendish little mouth. I shooed it off, but it just looked at me; I stomped and yelled scat so it scurried--slowly, but it's a squirrel--first to the vegetable garden, with me quite close to it, clapping my hands and saying "Shoo!" and "Scat!" and "Git!" (so much better with an i than an e in that context) until it finally hopped the fence. Blighter.
Which reminds me that Haitch said she had considered a squirrel and nut set of cookie cutters before the moose ones but then realized that wouldn't be such a welcome thing. No, probably not, except then I could bite a whole bunch of squirrel heads off, not in the messy geeky way either.
Which also reminds me that Haitch is about to read Geek Love. Good. "When your mama was the geek, my dreamlets…." What a great book.
Okay, now I'm getting up. Dirt and Order of the Phoenix and yet another deceptively sunny day that will cloud over at 11:57 a.m. await.
I had shoveled and barrowed enough to be tired when I got to the pool; I did two laps with a kickboard and one of sidestroke in the slowest lanes, among the vastly pregnant and the old and the abbreviated before finding my stride. That lost my time so I did only 16 laps altogether instead of 20, one mile instead of 2 K. But it was a glorious day, a wonderful swim, right for the first day of summer.