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At last! My birthday presents are here! New kitchen scale! New silicone pastry brush! Woo-hoo!  (Ahem. I mean, neato.)

Dear friends,

I'm still feeling a bit pasted by LuthorCorp, but I have the feeling that tomorrow will be better, and if it won't, Friday will. Thanks to the Gina Mallet book I mentioned last night, I'm feeling about ready to visit a favorite old topic of mine. I'll give you a hint.

Until I'm ready to rant about the sad state of eggs in this country and explain why pasteurized and irradiated eggs do us no favors continue the egg dialogue, I suggest that you spend time with Steve at Blog d'Elisson, who continues the pie dialogue. It's lovely, fun reading, but you should probably make sure that you keep a Key lime pie close by as you read. Trust me.

There are worse ways to make a living.  I have done a few of them.  I have worked retail, specifically in a now-defunct bookstore chain, and while there is something to be said for being a bookworm and working in a bookstore, any bookstore, I have filled my lifetime quota of answering questions such as "I'm looking for a book, and I don't know what the title is or who wrote it or what it's about, but it was on this table last week and the cover was green and it looked interesting."  (I was also the children's book buyer, and thus was additionally treated to, on an almost weekly basis, a passel of righteous indignation, the general theme being "why do you sell such filth to children?", which I heard about the Carl books by Alexandra Day, the whole Roald Dahl oeuvre, and the greatest picture book ever written, Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith's The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales.)  I have worked in Defunct Bookstore Chain's Still-Existing Music Division, where I was once screamed at by a guy who couldn't believe that the artists' name was Sounds of Blackness and the album title was The Evolution of Gospel, rather than the other way around.  (Shameless blatant plug:  If you ever find this album at your local, pick it up.  Godless soul I may be, but the singers on this album are brilliant and joyous, and there is a cover of Sly and the Family Stone's "Stand," produced by Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, that is, as my lovely Michael Palin would say, truly something other than else.)  I have worked as a temp in a Red Cross-run emergency homeless shelter for families in East New York, Brooklyn, where I spent my day trying to run a switchboard I could barely suss out, explaining to nearly everyone who called that all I could do was transfer their call to the recipient's room, and if the recipient wasn't in, I was not allowed to take a message.  I used to feel mean and dirty when I would get home at the end of the day.  I had another temp assignment at a Big Insurance Monolith in the financial district, where the Xerox machine was password-protected.  I also spent summers and holidays in college working at my mother's title insurance agency, not the worst job in the world, but if you have never worked for your parents before, trust me:  no matter how much you like your parents, it is not a barrel of monkeys working for them.  It's true that the boss's kid is treated differently from the other employees:  if you screw up, your parents will have no qualms yelling at you in the same tone of voice they use for yelling at you when you carelessly leave your bike in the driveway.

Even these jobs are not the worst ways in the world to make a living.  I can be thankful that I've never worked in meatpacking, or hog rendering, or any kind of industrial job that sounds like it might be fun but actually is an invitation to years of breathing particulate dust that eventually wreaks havoc on your lungs: processing cocoa powder, making Mike & Ikes, making ketchup.  (If you have your own homemade ketchup recipe, and you love the way it makes your kitchen smell, trust me when I tell you that it's an entirely different thing to ride a PAT bus past the Heinz factory on the North Side of Pittsburgh on a stifling day in August.  I'll bet you ten to one that the thought that springs to mind is not "Mmmmm, hot ketchup."  I have never had to clean up after circus animals, work in a sewer, make telemarketing calls, handle medical waste, run a cash register at the local Krusty Krab, or spend 14 hours a day in a dark, stifling diamond mine.

These are all worse ways to make a living than the one I have now.  In addition, I have a swell boss -- scratch that, I have three swell bosses -- I pull a salary that is not fabulous, but decent, and definitely better than anything I could make writing full-time, or would be making if I were still fighting the good fight in restaurants.  Thanks to a nifty benefit in our benefit package, I can buy or sell a week's vacation; since I always opt to buy, I am now eligible for four weeks of vacation a year.

I just have to keep reminding myself of this if the rest of the week shapes up to be like the beginning of it.  I know that I have book recommendations to share, further musings on eggs and industrialization, general salutations to friends and beloveds, a happy dance to do over the new kitchen equipment I picked up from Dream Company thanks to the gift certificate my mom and stepdad gave me for my birthday.  I have all of these things.  I also have a vestigial writing muscle, a mind full of worry and a heart full of dread at the thought of getting up in the morning and doing it all over again.

Because I don't want to leave tonight with nothing but moaning about the box factory, I will at least give you a preview.  The new books, which were made possible by a gift card from my brother and sister-in-law, as well as checks from my grandmom and my father-in-law (I'm still scratching my head over this, but as Alexander Pope said over and over and over, 'tis not ours to understand, nor to change, but merely to accept!) are yet another book of food essays, written by the terrific Canadian journalist Gina Mallet, yet another book of pie recipes, written by my own personal pie guru, Ken Haedrich, who has not just one wonderful plan for my life, but 300 of them; and not just another food history by the editor of Food History News, a careful scholar and a gorgeous writer who has written a careful and gorgeous book on a vastly underappreciated strain of American cookery.  I promise you, all of this makes for fun reading and even better discussion, which I will share with you as soon as the sinking feeling in my heart and the shooting pains in my head go away.