DAILY RAMBLING

Lydia slept through the night last night, still somewhat rare but getting a bit more frequent as she gets older. She's having a lot of fun with her days, learning to pull up (though she needed assistance for the above photo, Dave said that she got pretty close yesterday) and to clap her hands, which appears to be the most fun thing ever. It took about a week for her to learn; now she seems to think that having her diaper changed requires a hand-clapping. It's really kind of appallingly cute; I try not to go on and on about her, but my goodness.

There was a hint of color in the sky this morning when I got up at five. I resent the fact that Daylight Savings is soon going to bump me right back to utter darkness, though I know I'll get it back again soon enough.

Of course, I might not need to get up at five any more after tomorrow. I am not reassured by a meeting yesterday, during which our manger reminded us that we should take our floating holidays first, because we don't get paid for them as we do for vacation, in the event that.... Well. Also, during the course of the meeting, it became somewhat obnoxiously clear that there really isn't much for us to do, at least as far as some other departments are concerned. I was offered the thrilling task of editing training PowerPoints, and leaped at it only because I have been excruciatingly bored for weeks now. Not good. Tomorrow afternoon we should finally find out what's going on; I have to say that announcing this meeting, at which unspecified "restructuring" would take place, three weeks in advance was one of the stupidest things I have seen a company do in terms of employee relations. No one is talking much, but when they do, they seem to be nervous. The meeting yesterday was supposed to talk about how to prioritize the training courses we're organizing; well, it's hard to do that when we don't know who's going to be in charge, since they will of course be the ones to determine what the priorities are.

Bleah.

Amber is eating into my writing time by demanding to be petted. Darn cats.

Well, on to a more cheerful topic: food! My stream of consciousness generally leads back to that, given enough time. Maybe I shouldn't be writing first thing in the morning, before I've had any breakfast, after all. Last night's dinner was North Woods Bean Soup, a delightful, easy (or is that redundant?) meal. I don't know why I don't make soup more often; they're simple to make, relatively inexpensive, and don't require side dishes. This one involved carrots, onion, some turkey kielbasa (yum), two cans of beans (cannellini and black beans, since I didn't have any Great Northern and thought the color contrast would be nicer than all white), a few generous shakes of a pizza seasoning mix that seemed like a reasonable substitute for "Italian seasoning," some pepper, and broth. One of the major canned broth manufacturers, I can't remember now if it's College Inn or Swanson (so much for branding!) has a quite good and reasonably priced vacuum box of organic broth out now, both chicken and vegetable; haven't seen organic beef broth yet, but I would imagine it's on the way.

I'm five or six essays into Best Food Writing 2003 and quite enjoying myself. One of them is about a man in Germany, a convert to Islam who nevertheless continues making the best organic sausage to be had, apparently, anywhere (organic being the link that brought my wandering thoughts to the book from our dinner). There was also a delightful bit about a man's quixotic quest to organize his kitchen (I understand the urge, though I have yet to follow through on it, and am quite amazed at the idea of someone owning nine different types of sugar, but now find myself wondering if some of them aren't worth looking for).

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