C.B. Potts's Blog, page 20

Tuesday Morning

A list of things that helps with the Not Screaming:

Coffee works, or tea, or anything hot and steaming and comforting in a mug. Beef broth, if you can bear it, is not a bad thing.

Turn everything off, at least for a while. TV pundits are contra-indicated for the Uneasy Mind.

Fuzzy things are good.  Not for eating, for wearing. Generally, one should not eat fuzzy things. Peaches obviously excepted.

Do simple things, the best you can. This can take a while, but your floors will look fabulous.

I...

Monday Morning, Here We Go

I have decided this morning to do myself a kindness. I am not going to do anything terribly emotionally complex until my uncle dies; there are several loud, sharp-edged, attention-demanding edges running through my internal narrative at the moment and it is taking a lot of what I've got dealing with them. I don't have to do anything else. I mean, there's all sorts of things that must be done, and I will do them, but a not-inconsiderable portion of today may be spent Not Screaming,...

Saturday Night

Today I read a game-changing line; it was in a story about two art critics in NYC, they are married to each other - the type of life I'd thought I'd like once but am fervently glad I've avoided now; marry me to anyone, my friends, save another writer! - and in there there was a bit that said, "Doubt is so essential."

Doubt is so essential.

Do you know how regularly I've beaten myself up for doubting things over the years? I'm a rather profound doubter; I tend to di...

Early Wednesday Morning

You know how they say "You should listen to your body?" Well, this morning my body said, "Hey, guess what? Those yummy potatoes you had for dinner last night? THEY HATE YOU AND WANT OUT NOW!"  Maybe other peoples' bodies say more interesting things, but I doubt they're more insistent.

So here we are, wide awake even before Tim had to leave for the restaurant. It's snowing again, and this morning, it's actually a pretty, fluffy crystalline snow that spar...

Tuesday Morning

So here is a thing I was thinking about this morning. I've been having all of these conversations surrounding the relationship between middle age & timidity: without a doubt, I'm not the fearless I-don't-give-a-damn firebrand I was in my youth. This is probably a function of experience. Too much not giving a damn has consequences, which are often expensive or painful or both.  But you know how they say you can have too much of a good thing? What if that applies to good ju...

Monday Morning

Sometimes you really have to stop and marvel at the depth of communication that is possible between the human being and the cat. Voodoo is fascinated by the bathroom sink; she'll drink the running water - but the water must be running at exactly the right speed, one hairs' breadth faster than a steady drip but no more than that. Over the years, she's trained me to the set the tap properly and also leave her in peace to enjoy the entertainment; when she is done she will let me know...

Early Friday Morning

Ladies and gentlemen, I bring you, at long last, the grapefruit cake!  It certainly doesn't look like the picture in the magazine, but then again, I'm a writer, not a food stylist.  What you can't see properly in the pic is that the grapefruits are broiled and have lovely little bits of caramelization around the edges. However, between the glaze and the broiling, the grapefruit has lost a lot of the grapefruit taste: it's sort of mellowed into a generic citrus sweet....

Thursday Morning, Here We Go!

Rise and shine, my freaky darlings. Rise and shine!

I am still tangling with this stupid cold; it's the first time in forever that I've taken ALL the medicine & needed to send Tim out after more. But hope is on the horizon. My lungs aren't protesting every breath; the coughing is less severe. I no longer feel like one of those tragic "dying of consumption" heroines.

Which is good, for I'm far more Jo than Beth by inclination. Poor Beth. Her entire reason for being...

Early Wednesday Morning

Up very early this morning; Tim's off to work at the restaurant and I figured I'd better get up, rather than risk sleeping through waking the girls up for school. Such things haven't yet been known to happen, but if they were going to happen, today would have been the day.

It feels like days are going by so fast lately. You wake up, turn around, and before you know it, it's three days later. Usually this is how the summer goes, but it's hardly summer now. But if February wa...

Monday Morning

I wonder about the impact of On-Demand culture on collective memory. There's something to be said about the inadvertent shared experience and the role that it has in forming bonds among people who otherwise have no point of commonality. Shared experiences are the first glue of society.

One of the horses the Amish have is a big white mare. She's heavy but not a draft horse; they use her often on the dairy run. This morning when she went by I noted that her belly and the back of her off...