We're baaa-aack

While we were planning to hike down to Boston Saturday night and catch the tail end of gaming/drinking at Glen’s, Kate got held up at work by 25-week-twins until 10:30. (Not “held-up” as in “mugged,” you understand, though it’s an amusing mental image, these two teeny little babies with teeny little switchblades, lurking around the corner from the hospital ATM.)

Even when she got home at 10:30, Kate had another hour’s worth of work to do from home, so we punted driving down until Sunday morning. Got up, split a cinnamon-bun-as-big-as-your-head from Twigs, and headed south through the pouring rain listening to This American Life’s show about the number of civilian dead in Iraq. I wish this kind of reporting was more widespread (though it takes the always-wanting time and attention we collectively seem to lack, these days) and I wish the rain would come down as snow, but all indications look like we’re getting spring early this year, and ineffective bumblers in office for the foreseeable future.

Marcos, our mostly-awake instructor for the knife-skills class, taught us a number of tricks I hadn’t known about before, as well as a few I had. The sharpening techniques are going to prove very useful, as will the mincing and chopping skills. We chopped a metric load of carrots, onions, leeks, peppers, potatoes, and garlic, most of which got used to make stocks later that afternoon. (The only veggies that didn’t make it into stock got made into potato-leek soup for us to eat at the end of class – tasty, no doubt due to the cream, butter, salt, and chicken stock involved.) Nobody cut themselves, our classmates were affable; Kate, Glen, Ted and I all thought it was time and money well-spent, and we’re looking at the CCCA catalog for the next thing we’d like to try, perhaps something more cuisine-oriented.

The big thing I wanted to learn was how to cut with my knife sliding along my knuckles instead of perilously close to my fingertips, and that, Marcos said, simply feels unnatural until you’ve practiced it a lot. So no magic bullet there.

Then we went and had a little brunch at the West Side Lounge with Robin, meandered back to Glen’s house to exchange my copy of “Blink” for his copy of “Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norell,” went to Davis Square for coffeeshop drinks and shit-shooting with Jason Haas, and headed for home around 5. Kate worked on reviews, I finished reading Last Call , played a little of GTA:San Andreas (my brother got it for me for Christmas; I’m finding the characters laughable, the controls clumsy, the racial stereotypes a wee bit problematic, and generally not nearly as much fun as the hype would have it), watched an episode of Mythbusters, and went to bed with Kate around midnight.

Now I’m intending to not take my car further than the grocery store for at least a week.