contentious carrots and other minor skirmishes

The rain has been a constant drumming down, down, down. I had to rip the corner of my bedroom rug up off the floor because there was a massive and yet mysterious leak that was actually seeping upwards from the middle of the tiles, but directly related to the crumbling door frame. Luckily I thought to put in a work order and there was a big dehumidifier chugging away in my bedroom upon return. I don't really mind the wetness otherwise, the cold a little, especially while biking in a short skirt, but the collateral damage is an unfortunate reality. It seems that you forget what it was like when there was eternal sunshine, and yet the depressive fog that had settled over me has been lifting steadily, the sadness remains, but not the depression. I tried to explain that to the psychiatrist today who was eager to medicate me, just in case, and who I carefully sidestepped, for now. (She claims that if I have a history of depression I am likely to become depressed again, and that indefinite mood enhancers are the only way to ensure its abatement. The problem is, of course, that when I am happy, wait, have I ever been happy, yes I must have been, when I am happy I lose my drive, and that is problematic, not to mention the lack of control thing. Maybe now it the time to retry St. John's Wort?)

So, on other fronts, I am forcing vegetables on I. more and more because I feel that her palate is fertile for change. I made her favorite mexican pasta soup yesterday: sauteed onion and garlic and alphabet pasta, then pureed tomato sauce, and chicken broth, and today she ate carrots, raw unadulterated carrots, with ranch dressing (alas) and a goodly sized portion of lasagna that I made the other day. I made a very small lasagna, as we are very small eaters, and I didn't have mozzarella, ricotta, or parmesan, but substituted by pureeing with my handy dandy hand-held blender a cup of cottage cheese, and decorating with flourishes of romano and provolone (more commonly available in my fridge.) I was very happy that she sat at the table and ate (while I ruminated on my salad) everything except the mushrooms (it was a meatless mushroom sort of lasagna, with a leftover ragu that I made a few weeks ago and supplemented with pureed tomato.) I am not sure I like the no-boil pasta that everyone and their brother seems to be pushing these days, there is nothing quite as satisfying as boiling the long wrinkly edged noodles al dente and then slurping them dry through rigid fingers before laying them decoratively in the glass pan, not to mention that the consistency of these other thinner noodles isn't as satisfying when masticated, but then I was just using up the end of a box, it will likely be another year before I have the desire to make that again.

So now it is off to Narnia and bed... al this reading until the wee hours is catching up with me, and when I finish the Sonata de Otoño, fraught with withering love and paths of error, I will retire for the evening. One novel is enough per day, for now.