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Dear friends, I’m working on two separate posts.  This post is neither of them.  This is a housecleaning post, the kind of post I hate to post, the kind where you’re having a good time, mingling with your guests, listening to party jokes and eating excellent hors d’oeuvres, only to notice that somebody from the kegger next door has wandered onto your lawn and started puking in your birdbath.  I do not like writing these any more than you like reading them, but alas, sometimes the jackassery of others makes them necessary.

Dear Others, As my boyfriend Bruce Campbell once said so famously:  All right, you primitive screwheads, listen up.  I do not care how well-intentioned you might be, or how good you are at pretending you read this page:  If you come here by way of a Google search on a word, any word, plus the phrases “Remember my personal information” and “Notify me of follow-up comments,” I will delete your comment the instant I find it.  If you post it while I’m asleep, I will delete it the instant I wake up.  If you post it while I happen to be online, well, just watch my smoke.  This includes you, Mr. or Ms. University of Connecticut, Storrs-Mansfield campus. I have your IP address, I have your server name, I have a whopping great brace of nerve, and I have plenty of time on my hands.  Your efforts are for naught here.

Cheez Whiz.  In the time I spent writing that, I could have been making barley sugar cookies.  I hate it when I have to use cookie time to clean the house. 

There is no way I can do justice to the past week without resorting to hyperbole, or, conversely, understating the case.  The response from friends, family and well-wishers to our news has been illuminating, and, for the most part, deeply gratifying.  It might sound disingenuous, particularly coming from someone who checks her stats as many times in a day as I do, but I honestly had no idea that so many people had been following our story and wishing us so well.  I want to thank you all, properly, and I will, at a time when I am not quite so addled by the speed at which things are progressing—and yes, now that we have made this decision, things are progressing very, very rapidly.  “I guarantee that even though it feels like a long wait, you will be shocked by how fast the time will go,” said Lloyd as we went to bed last night.  He’s not kidding.  Things are still happening, but because they’re up in the air, I have to be kind of cagey about disclosing them.  (Since there’s such a thing as being *too* cagey, though, I will say this:  it’s not pregnancy.  I’m not pregnant.  It’s nothing like that.  Whew.)

Truth be told, I’m in something of an overstimulated state right now.  Most of it is due to happiness, excitement and the promise of change, but I’d be lying if I said that no tears had been shed.  There were tears, and plenty of ‘em, this weekend, and I’m not entirely sure that they’re behind me yet.  There’s also, to be frank, some laziness in the mix.  The next three months are going to be busy, busier than the past five months have been, and as a result my engines seem to have ground to a complete halt, as if I were a hibernating bear.  If I weren’t going to Maryland Sheep and Wool with Momerina this weekend, I could easily see myself sitting around my living room, watching the fourth season of Alias on dvd with Lloyd all weekend long, with only occasional breaks for food prepared for us by other people.  ("How morally opposed are you to pizza again?") It’s a weird sensation, this combination of racing brain and torpid work ethic, and I’ll be glad when these extremes stop feeling so, erm, extreme, when they move toward a convergence point that will enable me to get some damn work done.

Until I get to that point, though, I’m going to be a scoundrel, and resort to cheap, easy methods of entertainment.

Yes, it’s cookie porn, but it’s really excellent cookie porn.  (I am fully aware that by adopting this terminology, I’m inviting the attention of degenerate googlers, but considering that on any given day I get hits from searches on “ballerina shoes spanking” and “do the hairs on the back of your neck stand up during orgasm” [is that the editorial “your,” or me specifically?], to say nothing of the infamous “humiliating games with duct tape,” I figure that things can’t get much more degenerative around here.)

Ahem.  Sorry.

Ever since the magnificent Bee sent me a copy of the hilarious and inspiring A Nice Cup of Tea and a Sit Down (from the blog of the same name!), I’ve never been without at least one type of cookie/biscuit (waves to the Commonwealth readers) on hand to dunk in my tea.  From time to time I’ll buy a box of Petit Ecolier or Choco Leibniz biscuits from the Italian deli where I shop almost every day, but for the most part I’m still baking my own.  My cookie of choice has been the French honey wafers from Maida Heatter’s Brand New Book of Great Cookies, which are terrific made with orange blossom honey and even better made with tupelo honey, but I bet will be outstanding when made with the Tasmanian leatherwood honey that is once again available in my neighborhood.  I’ve also had a constant supply of Maida’s Cornmeal Shortbread Fingers from the same book, partly because they’re so good when dunked into tea, but also because you get to pipe them through a pastry bag, which, in my opinion, is about as much fun as you can have while still standing up. 

I could probably live happily on both of these all spring, or would have, if I’d hadn’t spent a weekend at Momerina’s reading her copy of King Arthur Flour Whole Grain Baking, which filled me with a blinding desire to buy my own copy immediately, and then make every single recipe in the book.  Eventually I *will* make everything, but I keep finding myself getting stuck on the Salted Cashew Crunch cookies, which might be as close to my own perfect cookie as anything I’ve found.  I love them so much that I have not even succumbed to the temptation to bake a batch, temper some chocolate and then coat the bottoms, to see if the chocolate enhances the sweet/salt idiom of these particular cookies.  A little chocolate might make a good thing even better, or it might be overkill, or worse yet, acceptable but unnecessary.  My natural tendency to fiddle is not tweaked by these cookies.  They really are close to perfect on their own.

The recipe is not at all complicated, but you do need some equipment.  The cookies are made from rolled oats that have been ground in a food processor for 30 seconds.  If you don’t have a food processor, or a blender, you can use oat flour, but in that case I would definitely recommend that you weigh, not measure, the oat flour, so that you can be sure you’re getting exactly 7 ounces of oats.  (I have not tried leaving the oats whole; my sense is that it would produce a lacier cookie, one more prone to spreading and burning, but that’s just a guess on my part.  Maybe one of these days I’ll try it.) If you have two cookie sheets and can fit 15 cookies on a sheet without cramming them too closely together (about 2” between cookies should be fine), you can bake the whole batch in one pass through the oven; no waiting for cookie sheets to cool down, no trying to find space for additional cookie sheets *and* cooling racks.  It takes less than 10 minutes, including the grinding of oats and chopping of cashews, to put the dough together, which means that you really can go from no dessert to “ooo!  cookies!” in half an hour.  The recipe yields about 30 cookies, which sounds a bit small for a batch of cookies, but these little gems are rich, so a little goes a long way. 

We will not talk about the day I missed lunch, and ate half a dozen in one sitting.  No, we will not.  I do not make a habit of this, and certainly don’t encourage it in others. 

Salted Cashew Crunch Cookies (from King Arthur Flour Whole Grain Baking:  Delicious Recipes Using Nutritious Whole Grains [Countryman Press, 2006])
makes 30 cookies
(As always, the recipe is that of the good folks at King Arthur, paraphrased and annotated by me.)

Note: The original recipe specifies baking them until they’re “light golden brown.” The first time I did this, I got nervous, and ended up with cookies that were delicious, but slightly underbaked.  On the next batch, I baked them for 15 minutes, until the bottoms were slightly darker (not burnt, though).  By pushing the baking time a bit, I was able to get a deeper, more caramel flavor from them, reminiscent of salt caramels, which just might be my favorite sweetie of 2008. A cookie full of the things I love—oats, cashews, butter, sugar, vanilla and salt—baked to a salt caramel flavor palate:  what more could a nice cup of tea ask for?

Note: Dearest friends, the following post comes on the heels of a tremendous amount of deep thought and emotional blood/sweat/tears.  Since I announced that this year would be the year for law school, and that I’d have to make some tough decisions about what to do and where to go, I have received a staggering amount of comments, emails and phone calls offering advice.  Some of you have known me for a long time; some of you are new friends.  To say that I am gratified and moved by your concern and your care is to grossly understate the case.  I thank everyone for caring enough to share their experiences and advice with me.  Having said that, please know that Lloyd and I came to this decision after hours and days and months of talking and weighing and planning.  We’ve made up our minds.  We’re happy with, and excited by, our conclusion.  It is entirely possible that, were you in our place, you would come to an entirely different conclusion, and think that ours is dangerous and ruinous.  By all means, you are certainly entitled, nay, encouraged, to come to your own conclusion.  But if I receive any incendiary commentary about how our conclusion is stupid and wrong and marriage-ruining—seriously, I am not exaggerating when I say that I have received email telling me just that—I’m going to cut it off at the knees.  We have made our decision.  If we change our minds, it will only be due to factors that affect us, and no one else.  Thank you all, dear ones, for respecting our decision.

Additional note: This is *not* the official travelogue I keep promising.  That one is on the way. Really.

Where does one begin?  If that one is me, one begins with fits, starts and hiccups.  Three times have I drafted an opening sentence; three times have I deleted it, muttering “no, no, no.” I returned home from California yesterday morning, bringing with me some brilliant things, all of which will be described in the lavish and overwritten style you have come to expect from PTMYB.  (I also brought home a little sunburn on my chest and a mild head cold, which are somewhat less brilliant, but I have applied Lush Dream Cream to the former and Theraflu to the latter, and am now just fine for going out and playing in the fresh air with Lloyd, who is off from work this week.) So I’ll start with a teaser and a confession.  Here’s the teaser:

This would be my adored and splendid hostess, Grace Davis, sliding down one of the neatest hidden gems of a city ever to be found, the Seward Street slides, a concrete slide situated in a lot between two buildings in the Diamond Heights/Castro area of San Francisco.  There is a story to tell about this slide, and about the other wonders my dear friends shared with me so generously, but it will take me some time to tell, particularly since I also came home with 207 photos to sort and catalogue and dream over.  So for now I will limit my observation to say that it was a clear joy and an unadulterated hoot to watch and listen to Grace as she rode down the slide on a piece of corrugate.  On her first trip down, she cried out “ohmygodohmygodit’sfastIT’SFAST!,” and we’ve found a hundred reasons to say it ever since that moment. 

Did I ride down the slide myself?  Nope, I didn’t.  Even as I know how berserk this sounds, I’ll confess:  I thought the contours of the slide were a bit narrow.  I am not narrow.  I was afraid that I would get stuck.  Grace thinks I need to get over it and just ride the slide already.  She’s right, of course.  I do need to get over it, and I will.

Now for the confession:  Whatever virtues I might have, patience is not one of them.  (That clicking sound you might be hearing now is the sound of a thousand foreheads being smote by a thousand friends and readers.  “Tonight’s contestant is Bakerina.  Her chosen subject:  That Which is Manifestly Obvious.") Every time I sit down, take a deep breath and get into the quiet writerly space, a noisy little gremlin pops into my head:  “Come on, come on, get to the good stuff!  Why are you writing about the taxi ride to the airport?  When do we get to the news?  You have news!  Say it!  Say it!  Sayitisayitsayitsayit SAY IT.” It’s obnoxious, that gremlin, but it’s right:  I do have news, and I don’t want to barrel breathlessly through a narrative that deserves full attention and care in an attempt to get to the good stuff.  If I’d wanted to do that, I would be a scriptwriter for the adult film industry.  (Cheez Whiz, that sounds like a setup for a joke.)

Dear friends, I am happy to announce that after a lot of discussion, trepidation, tears, laughter, questions, answers, travel and a liberal dose of crossed fingers, the geographic smackdown is over.  Bay Area wins.  Come August, I will officially matriculate at Santa Clara University School of Law.

Although I am thrilled with the decision, particularly since Lloyd and Momerina are thrilled right along with me, I hasten to add that this was not an easy decision to make.  It was not a battle among unequal opponents.  Northeastern is a terrific school in a terrific city with a singular law curriculum.  If you are contemplating a law education in an East Coast city, I can, and will, recommend Northeastern with enthusiasm.  I met some truly smart and funny and impressive people there, and yes, I regret that we will not be playing together in the fall.  Likewise, the decision not to attend Pitt Law doesn’t come easily, either.  If anything, that was one of the hardest decisions I’ve had to make in this whole process.  I received my undergraduate degree from Chatham College (now Chatham College for Women, the undergraduate school of Chatham University) in Pittsburgh.  I adored the city then, I adore it still, and I know that I will feel more than a little pang when I visit my dear friend Sharon (who was my roommate at Chatham) when I visit Pittsburgh later this spring.

By now you’ve probably guessed that I am well-embedded in the concentrated urban milieu, and you would be right.  You might also have guessed that the Bay Area and Silicon Valley are a far, far piece, both geographically and emotionally, from everything I have ever known.  You’d be right there, too.  You might think, further, that for me to pursue a strenuous education in a new place, I’d have to find the school in question to be pretty damn special—and there, dear friends, is your hat trick.  I’m not only East-Coast-born-and-bred, I’m citified to the core.  My family is from Philadelphia, a place embedded in my blood, bone and marrow.  Even when I was growing up in the Poconos, a good three hours’ drive from Philadelphia, I still felt that Philadelphia was my true place, and that all this small-town nonsense was getting in the way of finding my authentic self.  Neither Boston nor Pittsburgh are Philadelphia—I will assert until my dying day that East Coast cities are *not* interchangeable, and that they’re not all wishing they were New York City or Washington—but they do share enough of a common taproot that, with a little time and patience, one can find one’s feet and comfort zone pretty easily.  Santa Clara (and San Jose and Santa Cruz and Redwood City and the other towns I visited last weekend) are a far, far piece from my own visceral landscape.  (San Francisco, by virtue of its citified nature, comes closer, but the geography of the city is so unlike that of any city I have ever lived in or visited that it still counts for me as a completely new milieu.) The quality of light is unlike anything I have ever seen.  The geographical markers, the vegetation, the very air itself is different, and I went into instant sensory overload, disoriented and enchanted all at once.  It is spectacular, but it is not yet comfortable.  It will be, though.  I know it will.

Of course, brilliant weather and splendid food and lush vegetation and sunsets that break your heart open, while lovely, are not the stuff for which law firms look when you come to them with your spiffy new J.D. degree and your bar certification in hand.  You still need a decent education, and based on what I saw on Law Preview Day, Santa Clara provides much, much more than a decent education:  if the 3L students I met on Saturday are any indication, the education it provides is not decent, but magnificent.  If my fellow 1Ls are anything like the crowd that was in the moot Ethics Law class in which I participated, I’m going to have to work hard to keep up with my peers.  These people are *smart*.  Why, no, I’m not intimidated.  I’m challenged in a healthy manner.  Really.  (breathes into paper bag) Seriously, though, I was impressed, deeply, with the moot classes, the faculty lectures, the current students and the incoming students.  And yes, I did have a moment of worry ("These people are too smart for me!  I don’t belong here!"), but it turned almost instantly into something more exciting and, ultimately, powerful ("That was *cool*.  I want to learn how to think like that").  I haven’t had that “I want to do that, too” moment since my restaurant externship after culinary school, when I saw pastry cooks bake cakes, freeze semifreddos and do complex chocolate work simultaneously, exhibiting the coolheaded grace of dancers, or air traffic controllers.  As soon as I had that moment, felt that desire, I knew what my answer would be.

This is not to say that I felt any kind of finality, or certainty, at that moment.  There was still plenty of wheel-spinning.  ("What about not seeing Lloyd every weekend?  What about the distance from my family?  God, I miss Lloyd so much right now—what will this be like when we can’t see each other for six weeks at a time?  What about all the flying?  My god, I’m going to have to make peace with flying once and for all! [Those of you who’ve known me for a long time know that I’m not the most phlegmatic of flyers, and that “peace” and “flying” are often mutually exclusive where I’m concerned.  That shit stops right now, though.] What if I want to quit?  What if Lloyd wants me to quit?  What if I end up alienating everybody I know and love?  My god, my god.  Maybe a beer would help.") Poor Grace was a witness to a lot of this wheel-spinning; for this, if for no other reason, she deserves a Purple Heart for letting me live in her house for four days.  She held my hand, literally and metaphorically, she walked me through a lot of this anxiety, she hugged me tightly and put me on the plane and assured me that, whatever I decided, good things will follow.  I spent the next six hours reading and dozing and watching tv and turning over my thoughts as the plane zipped over our motley landscape, riding home from JFK in Tuesday morning rush hour traffic, navigating the cabdriver who took a wrong turn on Astoria Boulevard and damn near took us onto the Triborough and into the Bronx, and finally hurtling myself, missile-like, into Lloyd’s waiting embrace.  I held on like I would never let go.  He held on with me.  And then we sat down and made a plan.

There was once a time when we had thought that regardless of where I went to school, we could keep our home base in New York.  I would go away, I would come back, we would always have a home here.  We’re not blind, though.  We can see what’s happening in New York.  The economy is in the tank, the job opportunities available for us are largely terrible cubicle-farm jobs where the retention prospects are tenuous at best.  You can’t walk two blocks in this city anymore without running smack into construction on new buildings full of apartments we can’t afford.  The neighborhood in which we live has officially been discovered by real estate watchers.  Our neighborhood message board, and the coffee bar from which much of the discussion generates, is full of commentary from young New Yorkers who have tried for months, years even, to find an affordable apartment in Astoria from a landlord willing to rent to them.  All around us, we see signs of tightening, the best of New York being parsed for those who can pay extravagantly for it, the rest of us being squeezed out.  Eventually we will be forced to leave.  We’d just as soon go of our own free will, thanks.

So this is our immediate future.  I will scramble for loans and scholarships and any other means to pay for school.  (Thankfully, I will not have to scramble for work.  I have a part-time job waiting for me in San Jose.  A nifty prize awaits the first reader who can ascertain where I’ll be working.) I will cross my fingers and hope that on-campus housing comes through.  School starts August 11.  To get there, Lloyd and I will go on our long-discussed, long-desired cross-country road trip at last.  We will share the driving and eat road food and look for real homemade pie, much as I wanted to do after reading Pascale Le Draoulec’s American Pie four years ago.  He’ll get me settled in, he’ll fly back to New York, we’ll talk every day, we’ll fly to each other as often as time and money will allow...and then, once he is fully vested in his pension next spring, we will pursue transfer and/or new job opportunities, anything it takes to bring him to me.  It may be later rather than sooner, but Lloyd is coming to California, too.  Once I’m finished with school...well, there’s the bright shining question mark.  In general, where one goes to school determines where one will stay to practice, so the odds of living permanently in California are good...but they’re not a given.  We could end up in Seattle.  We could go back to Philadelphia, where Lloyd and I met as bookstore clerks on a day that feels like yesterday.  We could see the world.  We could go anywhere.

Where does one begin?

(Thanks to Snow for the title.)

Dear friends,

I am working on the Complete and Utter Tale of Bakerina’s Really Big Adventure Out West, but it’s going to take me a while.  Hopefully I’ll get it finished before I fly home tomorrow night, but in the event that it has to wait until I’m back in New York, I can at least offer the following teasers:

1.  Everything I said on Friday morning about Grace’s being the hostess with the mostest?  To quote the late and much-missed Madeline Kahn, it’s twue, it’s twue!  She has been spoiling me utterly with magnificent food, she has driven me all over San Francisco twice in three days, and she has been a kickass conversationalist through it all.  If you have a problem and you need someone with a clear head and a wise heart to listen to you, Grace is so absolutely, positively your girl.  And she’s an awesome driver.

2.  If you have ever been to San Francisco, then you understand why it’s so important to have an awesome driver showing you around—or to be an awesome driver yourself.  I have lived in hilly places (hi, Pittsburgh!) and I have visited mountain towns at staggering elevations (hello, Estes Park!), but I have never, ever, ever in my life seen anything like the hills in San Francisco.  I will confess that the first time Grace drove us down a hill in Pacific Heights, I instinctively put out my hands in a way that caused her to say “honey, are you all right with this?” Even though I knew that there was more road on the other side of the tipping point, I just couldn’t see it, and half expected us to shoot off the road into empty air.  I got over that quickly, though, and can now ride down steep winding roads with the best of them—but I’m still glad Grace is doing the driving. 

3.  I have been reading Jo Spanglemonkey‘s blog for such a long time that even though she and I have exchanged email and commented on each other’s blogs as well as on our beloved Scrine, I still view her with the openmouthed, wide-eyed awe that even the most hard-bitten New Yorkers use when they see David Bowie at the art supply store.  I really, really hope that I didn’t have that expression fixed on my face when Jo and Grace and I all went out for fish tacos at lunch.  Luckily for me, Jo is every bit as warm and whipsmart and funny in person as she is en blog.  And her hair is fantastic.

4.  As I’ve mentioned here before, ‘mouse is one of my oldest friends on the internet (in a years-of-acquaintanceship sense, not in a chronological-age sense).  He has been a font of wisdom, a champion, a cheerleader and the kind of friend that makes me think that I must have done something good in my past life to deserve having him in this one—like, say, saving a busload full of nuns and orphans from careening off a cliff.  Dear friends, I got to meet this kind and excellent man on Saturday.  The only reason I am not bubbling over with fulsome, enthusiastic praise for his overall excellent self is that I hardly know where to begin.

5.  Enough suspense.  I know what the $64 question is:  Now that you’ve been to both Northeastern and Santa Clara, have you made a decision? I would dearly love to say that I have, but the fact is that I was blown away by both of them in equal measure.  They both have a terrific curriculum, an awe-inspiring faculty and an impressive, engaging student body.  I have a scholarship waiting for me at Northeastern and a job waiting for me at Santa Clara.  I’m going to have to pick one of them—or say no to both and either go to Pitt or hope that Cardozo gives me an admission offer soon.  Lloyd and I are going to have to make some decisions.  I will be home on Tuesday morning, and as soon as I’m done embracing Lloyd hard enough to crack a rib, we’re going to do just that.

Proper travelogue will follow, hopefully sooner rather than later. 

Dear friends, there is more and better text to come, and once I return home, there will even be pictures to go with it (curse this desire to travel light and to leave the laptop with the photoediting software at home!).  I’m just sending up a flare here to confirm that despite the best efforts of pre-rush-hour traffic and terminal construction at JFK to thwart me, I made my flight by the skin of my teeth, flew across the country without incident (save a little bumping around in the midwest, which is, apparently, something I’ll need to get used to if I fly this flight path on a regular basis), and am now being spoiled, utterly, by the amazing and wondrous Grace.  I would natter on about what a joy she is to talk to, how sweetly she’s been taking care of me ever since she picked me up at the airport, how beautiful is her house and how lush is the view from the patio, but to do so would cut seriously into our sourdough-pancake-eating time.  Grace is taking me out for sourdough pancakes, and then we’re driving to San Francisco together.  I’m having such a blast that for the first time in my life, I don’t care if I sound gloaty and obnoxious.  Oh, yeah, you wish you were me right now.

With any luck, this will pass, and I will settle down enough to write something pleasant to read.  Until then, dear ones.