This evening was the rehearsal for Mozart's Requiem with the orchestra. This is one of my favorite evenings of the year, second only to the actual performance on All Soul's Day at the Mass for the Dead. The rehearsal is tiring, but exhilarating. The music, of course, is heavenly. The All Souls Mass will be celebrated at St. James Cathedral on Saturday at 7:30PM. I guess I didn't need to tell you that because it says so in the announcement.
Here is a recipe for the pudding we made yesterday.
Here is a picture of Maria, the diabolical kitty, looking out the window. Like many diabolical folks, she is cute and can be charming, but Rachael and Tom are the only ones she has ever really loved disinterestedly. She generally pays me no heed unless I am cooking. Then she sits by and offers encouragement, and as soon as my back is turned, she samples whatever I am making. Today she helped me make some bread pudding which I had promised Rachael. I used my BBB pudding recipe, but put in two chopped pears instead of the blueberries. Rachael had wanted a pear dessert with cinnamon, and I had planned to put some in, but forgot. We agreed that it was better without.
The frost is on the vine, the leaves are turning scarlet and gold, and the household vermin think it is time to start sleeping under the covers! My little Leslie was an expert at subtly slithering under the blankets without waking me at all. Once, when my parents were visiting, and my father was sleeping in my bed, Leslie (I can’t believe that he didn’t notice it wasn’t me in the bed) crept under the covers in his usual inconspicuous way. At four in the morning, one of Leslie’s many enemies – the newspaper – flopped onto the front porch. Leslie erupted, as he did every morning at that time, barking and ferocious, to save us from the invading intruder! My father, starting awake at the uproar, as he later told us, thought that he had died and woken up in hell. Now this is ridiculous, because my father was holier than the pope, and if he woke up anywhere, it would not be hell. My mother was quite rude and thought the whole thing hysterically funny. She welcomed Leslie into her bed, but my father was a more fastidious type.
Suzanne came to lunch and I made barley soup and pretzels again. Here the pretzels are, in their initial balls, formed into footballs and looking a bit like the poop of patients with severe liver disease, being dipped into lye, and finally coming out of the oven. Aren’t they beautiful? Unfortunately, they stuck to the parchment paper I baked them on, but after a while, the paper took on their character and became edible like the rice papers on those wonderful Asian botan ame candies.
had filled out the form and sent it in!!!!!!! I pointed out that I couldn’t fill it out without knowing who it was, but they didn’t seem to see that this might be a problem, 
and just kept repeating that they couldn’t tell me till I had filled out the form. And this was nothing whatever compared with dealing with his bank! Grrrrrrr!!!
One day in the spring, Tom and I were sitting quietly doing crosswords when there was a frightful crash. All on its own, my grandmother’s mirror had fallen off the wall! Fortunately, it had come apart at the seams, but the glass had not broken. Putting it back together was going to be difficult because it had broken in the past and been reassembled poorly, i.e. obtuse angles where there should be right angles. One had to decide whether the ugly bit would be on the top or the bottom, as it would not go together properly at both ends at once. Fear of failure kept me from starting this project, and I fretted about it for a month or two. However, finally I got tired of looking at its
pieces, with the help of my auntie, put it back together – but this time there were even more obtuse angles, and the whole thing seemed awfully fragile. The next problem was to hang it so that it wouldn’t fall again. It is heavy, and the weight of it had pulled the little wire-holding nails apart which was the reason it fell. Another delay of a month or two ensued while I thought about how best to solve the problem. Now it sits on a little shelf, and is firmly attached to the wall, and I can cross one thing off my guilt producing “to do” list.
On Monday, I spent the morning in my usual pre-work do-nothing-whatever mode, so as to conserve my energy for the upcoming ordeal of work. I lay about, knitted a bit, read a bit, prepared my work lunch, and then, thanks be to God, I looked at my calendar to check on something else. To my surprise, I was not scheduled to work at all that day, but rather, the next. Since I was firmly in do-nothing mode, and hadn’t planned anything for the afternoon or evening, I am afraid that I stayed in that mode for the rest of the day. Then on Tuesday, since I really was scheduled to work, I had to be in do-nothing mode yet again. Work was trying, and I had a headache -- was work trying because of the headache, or was the headache because work was trying? One cannot say! In any case, the headache was still there this morning. I didn’t have any real projects planned, other than more of the odious phone calls regarding Tom’s estate, and I feared that I would be unable to flog myself into any sort of activity yet again. However, I strove womanfully, and, to my surprise, I succeeded. There was a terrible hole in the wall in our sitting room, put there by the heater men, maybe two years ago. Rebecca covered the hole with cardboard and duck tape, and I managed to ignore it most of the time. Sadly, the prospect of fixing it was more unpleasant than the prospect of averting my eyes and pretending it wasn’t there. John, who has been helping me get some fixing up done, felt that the hole was something too horrible to ignore, and so he fixed it, but it still remained to be painted. The can of paint has been sitting next to the former hole for several weeks, just waiting to be used. Well, I decided that today would be the day, and forced myself into action. The worst of it is collecting the tools and materials, and once I did that, I was on a roll. Like so many of those tasks one puts off and off and off, it was far less a chore than anticipated, and putting my pictures up again after so long, made me quite happy. There is no “before” picture, because, as I said, I was in denial about it, and one can’t deny what has been photographically documented, so one carefully does not document it, but here is the “after” picture.
