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Dear friends,

While I adjust to the novel thrill of writing in our freshly air-conditioned hovel, to say nothing of showering praise and kisses on Lloyd for getting the damn a/c up the stairs, through impassable passageways and into the window, please indulge me in a bit of gloating over the creation of my own little baby meme.  Apparently I’m not the only one with a dirty mind and a song to light it up.  Goliard at popcultureatemybrain and David at noise to signal, they have something to say.  I *love* it when that happens.

Now this is how you start a summer.  My lovely pal ‘mouse just received his new copy of the great old dirty blues compilation Raunchy Business:  Hot Nuts and Lollypops, an old favorite of mine I hadn’t heard in years.  In fact, it’s been so long since I’ve heard it that I’d forgotten all about Lil Johnson’s My Stove’s in Good Condition, a song that, for some mysterious reason on which I can’t quite put my finger, I find incredibly cheering.  Fortunately, ‘mouse knew that my memory could use a jog and my strut could use a cut.

I’ve got a range in my kitchen, sho’ bakes nice and brown
I’ve got a range in my kitchen, sho’ bakes nice and brown
All I need is some good daddy, who turns my damper down

I don’t want no charcoal, if you can’t bake my biscuits brown
I don’t want no charcoal, if you can’t bake my biscuits brown
When my wood gets too hot, I swear you’ll have to turn my damper down.

(Lest you think that this is unnecessarily smutty, let me assure you that this has nothin’ on Lucille Bogan’s “Shave ‘Em Dry #2.")

The weekend, let it commence.

Brickhenge? Litterhenge? United Cairnworkers of Astoria?

Dear friends,

In exactly three weeks from this moment, I will be sitting on the porch of my suite at the Writers Colony at Dairy Hollow Farm, slathered from forehead to heels in bug repellent, watching the sun set behind the Ozarks, contemplating the paper I will be researching and writing over the next four weeks.  It is three weeks away, and yet it seems as far off as it did on that frigid January night when I opened up my e-mail and read “Congratulations!  You are our 2004 fellow!”, as remote as Neptune, particularly when I am at LuthorCorp, talking to people all day long, saying absolutely nothing worth hearing.

These are odd days at LuthorCorp, a mix of weird, sad and uncertain.  The company has hired a consultant.  She is a friendly and pleasant woman, but I don’t really understand exactly why she is consulting for us, what the company is looking for, from her or from us, and thus her presence makes me the slightest bit edgy.  Given the choice between edgy and sad, I’ll go with edgy, but unfortunately, we were not given the choice.  One of the three salespeople I report to lost her brother over the weekend, an apparent heart attack at the age of 37.  This morning I learned that one of our estimators died yesterday after a long illness; this afternoon I learned that our QA manager contracted a weird blood disease that almost killed him, and even though he is recovering, he is still far from better.  Not quite as dire, but still sad to me, is this coming Friday’s departure of one of my favorite sales guys, a guy who has been with Funky Little Company for 10 years and in the industry for 17.  He is a standup man, smart and funny, a lover of good food and an encyclopedia of music trivia, and when he leaves, yet another piece of the heart and soul of Funky Little Company will be gone, a vacuum that LuthorCorp will rush to fill, but will be unable to fill properly.  My office buddy Mich and I have been exchanging haunted looks and murmuring about how this is it, the time is coming, the time is now, Marvin K. Mooney, can we please go now?  Today we made a pact that by this time next year, we need to be working somewhere else.

Fortunately, at the very moment I really needed some good news, I got it.  My excellent pal Goliard, creator of the much-missed silly girl, is blogging again at popcultureatemybrain.  Do stop by and say hello to her.  Do not miss the picture of her neighborhood gator.  I also learned this week that one of my favorite baking books, The King Arthur Flour Baker’s Companion is the recipient of the James Beard Foundation’s 2004 Cookbook of the Year award.  Check out the lovely picture of my dear friend and mentor, PJ Hamel, at the Beard Awards.  On Sunday night, I was lucky enough to be invited to a stoop picnic on the Upper East Side, hosted by the kind and splendid Bunni and her neighbors, who offered me a place at a very welcoming table indeed, and fed me like a champ.  And tomorrow I am having lunch with two friends from an e-mail group I belong to, friends who are in town for a conference, including one who is on her first trip to New York.  It is at moments like this that I can look squarely at that lingering existential viral cloud and stare it down until it either slinks away sheepishly or shatters into a thousand fragments.

Dear friends, in exactly three weeks from this moment, I will be as alone as I’ve ever been in my entire life.

An advisory:  This is a bit of Sunday morning mental housecleaning for the week ahead.  If someone else’s brain droppings are not your idea of fun, you may want to give this a miss.  Don’t worry, I won’t take it personally; nor will I obsessively check my stats and referrers to see who of you takes me up on this. 

I was going to follow up on Friday’s post about the proposed rule banning photography and videography in the New York City subways with some nice comforting words about how this was not a law, but rather a rule that needs the approval of the MTA board, which at any rate won’t even vote on it until the fall.  Then I read this.  Uhhh, never mind.  I’m still carrying my camera with me, simply because I’m too ornery to take “excuse, me, miss, you can’t take pictures in here” for an answer.

Even though it is approaching 90 again today, and even though we have yet to replace our air conditioner (we are gambling on a nice big fat Memorial Day sale next weekend at PC Richard), I have decided that I can’t wait any longer to bake the monster, two-fisted cream cheese chocolate chip cookies that Theresa posted last week.  I don’t know what it is about warm weather that compels me to fire up the stove; it could be because I like to make preserves and pickles, and all of the best stuff to preserve is harvested during the hottest months of the year.  Admittedly, baking isn’t preserving, but in the end, as far as our kitchen goes, heat is heat.  Maybe it’s because there’s something a bit twisted in using the oven in hot weather.  When the weather is cold, you can run your oven all day and feel virtuous doing it:  Look!  I’m keeping us nice and snuggly *and* we’ll have four loaves of bread to show for it!  You can’t fool yourself that way when you cook in the summertime.  I suspect I’m not the only one, though:  Molly O’Neill’s New York Cookbook includes a flan recipe from a former cook at Benny’s Burritos in the East Village.  Lisa Chernin learned to make flan at Benny’s during the summer of 1988, which was particularly nasty, and she confessed that she always got the urge to make flan when the weather became particularly “furnacelike.” Now, that, to me, is commitment, as you not only have to run the oven for flan, but you also have to reduce the milk that goes into the custard by 50%.  This translates to a lot of time standing over a steamy pot, stirring constantly to keep the milk from boiling over or scorching on the bottom of the pot, stopping just long enough to pin your hair back so it doesn’t stick to your forehead, feeling sweat run down your back.  You have to make a caramel, too, and you can’t let yourself get addled by the heat, because if your attention flags at a key moment, you can give yourself a wicked burn.  I’ve been burned by caramel.  Once.

The rhubarb and strawberry conundrum has been solved.  In the end, nostalgia won out, and thus does a quart of Mormor’s Rhubarb and Strawberries sit in the fridge.  I just had a bowl for breakfast, cut with Greek yogurt.  Unfortunately, I got to the market too late yesterday to get more strawberries, so I’ll just have to find another use for the four pounds of rhubarb I bought yesterday.  Jamie sent me a recipe for lemon rhubarb turnovers that sounds grand, so I may take a bash at those.  This might also be a good time to try the rhubarb schnapps in Nigella Lawson’s How to be a Domestic Goddess. This is a recipe I always look at and think “Oh!  I want to make that!” Unfortunately, I usually have this thought in October or November, when local rhubarb is just a distant memory, and the imported Dutch forced rhubarb that sells at extortionate, side-hurting prices has yet to arrive.  Incidentally, I was so pleased with yesterday’s market haul, the rhubarb and the spinach (to be sauteed and dressed with butter and nutmeg) and the mustard greens (sauteed, dressed with oyster sauce) and the puntarelle (bitter Italian green, eaten raw, dressed with olive oil, lemon juice, egg yolk and anchovy, all pounded together) and the tarragon (for roast chicken, for bearnaise sauce, for strawberry shortcake—odd but true, tarragon and strawberries are brilliant together), that I just had to get a picture of it.

Random Amusement #1: Having decided to bake cookies, I took the butter and cream cheese out of the fridge to soften, then settled down to have my coffee and watch some cartoons.  What a coincidence!  Billy of Billy and Mandy decides to bake brownies after Mandy destroys his Pat the Baker videogame.  The best line in the toon comes from Billy, deep into gaming rapture:  “All right!  Pat the Baker is kicking butt and taking names!” I want to embroider this on an apron now.

Random Amusement #2: I shared Snowball’s witty and perceptive review of her film festival experience with Lloyd.  After making the appropriate noise about the butchering of the Iliad, he then asked, and I quote, “So, where is the IMAX version of The Passion of the Christ?  I want to see strips of flesh 18 feet high!” No, lovemuffin, thank you.