Susan Arthur

Fruit cobbler with ice cream for breakfast... yum. It's really easy to make, too. I will say, though (and this was a 'duh' moment) if you use frozen fruit you really should thaw it out before adding it to the batter. It works fine, mind you, but it nearly doubles the cooking time. Like I said, duh.

I'm also posting a link to an entry I wrote a few days ago but originally had friends-locked. mstra_margarita and I talked about it last night at the potluck and decided that it really didn't need to be locked. I thought, given that there's a Baronial polling coming up, it might be of some interest.

Since it was written days ago, however, I don't think it would show up where anyone would see it, so here's a new link to it. Sorry if this seems puffed-up of me.

I spent yesterday in bed, I suspect recovering from the Kentucky marathon. I had the worst migraine I've had in forever-- right up there with, and maybe worse than, the one I had Christmas day. I would get up to check email, eat, and use the facilities, and that's about it. As long as I didn't have to move my head I could distract myself from the pain and wooziness. Lots of non-head-moving yesterday. I didn't even feel well enough to go to the library, even though I was out of fresh stuff to read. Fortunately, I have begun to collect books that I like well enough to re-read, and yesterday I binged on Tony Hillerman-- I read 7 books. I'd already read them, so I didn't have to pay a lot of attention to details. It had been a long time since I read the early ones, though, and it was interesting to note things like how many books there were before he mentioned Leaphorn's wife, or before Leaphorn and Chee worked together. As you might expect, the cats were thrilled to have me back where I belong- in bed, petting them.

Today I'm doing much better. I've been shopping and to the library. I've been reading the Sandman series, and I'm up to book 9 now. I don't recall the title, but I think book 4 was far and away the best. I also went to the grocery-- for several days I've had a dish called Pot au feu on my mind. K used to make Julia Child's recipe for it. It serves over a dozen people if you make her recipe, so needless to say, I'm not doing that. It calls for a beef roast, pork roast (or was it ham?) a whole chicken, and kielbasa, boiled together with lots of vegetables and served with several sauces; he usually made a mustard sauce, a tomato-cream sauce, and maybe a white sauce. I have absolutely no idea why I've been drooling over this recently, but I have, so I got a tiny round steak, a thick pork chop and a pound of kielbasa, and I'm thawing a couple of chicken breasts. I got onions, potatoes, carrots, parsnips and a turnip, and I'm going to throw it all in a pot tomorrow with some stock, and let it cook all day. Oh, man, I can't wait. I just finished eating dinner and I'm already hungry for it. I see from this article that Julia's recipe varies noticeably by adding the other meats, and I had forgotten that K put in a bone, chopped in half so the marrow is accessible. I'm gonna skip the bone. In fact, I can't find the recipe he used, so I'm kinda winging it altogether.

On a more serious note, I was concerned when Molly Ivins' column wasn't updated after Nov 23-- I'd check every Thursday when it normally appeared. Today I googled her name and read what Wikipedia had to say, never dreaming they'd have anything as recent as this in her bio. I was wrong, though; the article notes that she was diagnosed with stage III breast cancer in 1999, and had recurrences in 2003 and 2005. She is taking off the month of December for another session of chemo. Send prayers, or white light, or whatever goodness you believe in, her way, please.

Good thing I was sitting down for this one. Who on earth would every have thought that such a thing could happen?http://link.toolbot.com/nytimes.com/13583

Yet another column about the criminals in DC. (Dem Criminals?) I remain disgusted. I talked to a friend the other night, who is an apologist for this administration. Or do you call them apologists when they see nothing to apologize for? He admits that W just wanted an excuse to invade Iraq, though at the time all I heard was "WMDs! WMDs!" (The sky is falling, the sky is falling!) Now, however, the war is justified because of the terrible things Saddam was doing to the Iraquis. Which to my mind were terrible, but no worse than countless other examples, many still continuing.

Anyway, I find it interesting that this column is from the Christian Science Monitor, which is hardly a left-wing rag. Unless someone forgot to tell me? Wouldn't it be lovely if something were actually DONE to the leakers? As if.

The same friend called the Clinton administration the "most corrupt" in his memory. I wonder... if there was really so much corruption, why weren't there lots and lots of indictments? Like there were during, oh, say, the Reagan administration. But no, we're supposed to kick Clinton out of office because he can't keep his dick in his pants, which is the only thing they ever proved him guilty of. Personally, I thitnk screwing 'em on the Oval Office desk would be better than concocting excuses to start a war that has mainly served to turn half the world against us. Or perhaps I should say, even more against us. As a nation, we haven't gained a damn thing, and we've cost a hell of a lot of lives. Shameful.

Edit: From a NY Times opinion by Frank Rich (who always says it better than I can):
This case is about Iraq, not Niger. The real victims are the American people, not the Wilsons. The real culprit - the big enchilada, to borrow a 1973 John Ehrlichman phrase from the Nixon tapes - is not Mr. Rove but the gang that sent American sons and daughters to war on trumped-up grounds and in so doing diverted finite resources, human and otherwise, from fighting the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11. That's why the stakes are so high: this scandal is about the unmasking of an ill-conceived war, not the unmasking of a C.I.A. operative who posed for Vanity Fair.