I will confess to being a bit sheepish about posting these, dear friends. Once again, the plan for tonight's writing was considerably more ambitious, and once again, my laptop, which had been behaving itself yesterday, turned into a cantankerous little bugger for about two hours tonight, sapping all of my ambition in the process. Ah, well, tomorrow will be a better night, and in the meantime, I can show off the new jam, which is actually one of the oldest jams in my repertoire, a conserve made from rehydrated dried apricots, sugar, hazelnuts and brandy. It's not quite as heady and vibrant as the fresh apricot jam that 'mouse makes every year, but it is pretty gorgeous nonetheless.
Had the day gone as I had planned it, dear friends, you would be reading a few thousand words on the vagaries of New York City weather. A frigid, blizzardy February led to one of the driest Marches on record; the cold snap that blew into town at the top of last week has been replaced with warm breezes, low 70's temperatures, and -- dare I say it? -- humidity. I broke from my Saturday routine by taking the bus into Manhattan, over the Triborough Bridge, across 125th Street, down to Columbia University, where I switched to another bus that deposited me almost directly in front of Zabar's, source of some of the best-priced mason jars in town. By the time I had picked up the mason jars, a few things at Lush to make my bathwater smell of oranges, and my Saturday groceries from the farmer's market (eggs, kale, fresh chorizo sausages, salad greens, hydroponic grape tomatoes, a bottle of homemade Korean barbecue sauce and ten pounds of Pink Lady apples -- did I mention that I'm a little berserk with the farmer's market shopping?), I was more than a little bedraggled, sweaty and ready for lunch. As I rode home on the N, knitting the heel flap on my new socks all the way, I began to hatch plans: I would take the bowl of Meyer lemons, which I had sliced thinly and macerated in sugar last night, and turn them into Shaker Meyer lemon pie. I would take the big bowl of dried California apricots, plumped overnight in water, and turn them into a new batch of jam for Bakerina Kitchens. I would finish the long-overdue letter I owed the Bakerina Kitchens subscribers. I would stop talking about booking my flight arrangements for the Egg Tour, and for my trip to visit Snowball in June, and actually make the damn bookings, already. Best of all, I would write. I would sing the praises of spring in New York City, of trees in blossom, of kids so excited by being outside without jackets that you can almost see the energy bursting from them, of local tulips and paper-white narcissus for sale at the farmer's market, of the crabbed, cramped weekday hostility melting from people's faces as they walk about, enjoying the opportunity to do nothing, even for a few minutes.
My laptop, alas, had other ideas.
For those of you who have heard this interminable complaint from me before, I must beg your indulgence. For new visitors to PTMYB, well, I must beg your indulgence, too. Three years ago, I decided that the time had come for me to go mobile and get myself a laptop. For reasons I can no longer remember, I was entranced by the idea of subnotebooks, the tinier, the better. I was not, however, so entranced that I was about to shell out $2,200 for a Vaio. On a trip to J&R Computer World, I found the answer to a maiden's prayer, a Sharp Actius MM-10, 10" screen, 15 gigs of memory, can be used as a hard drive once you're done using it as a laptop! Sure, it only has two hours' worth of battery power, and it does run on a Crusoe chip, but hey, it's nice and small and it's under 1,600 bucks! Sold!
I will not bore you with tales of the motor cycling on and off, of the sudden freezes, of the kernel stacking errors, of the repeated Blue Screens of Death. I will say that it took me well over an hour to boot up, log on and remain logged on for more than three minutes. An attempt to run the disk defragmenter led to an error message about a corrupted file in my cookies folder. Normally any bad files are caught and fixed during a disk check, but today Mister Softee's disk checker has been getting stuck before it even starts, necessitating a hard shutdown and restart, something I hate to do.
The good news is that a) Lloyd has finished the taxes and we are getting a nice little refund back, and b) he has been finding decent prices for laptops. "You'll have to go up a little in size, but you can get, say, a 14-inch screen, which isn't too big, and you'll still have more power, and more storage..." He says this to me in a soothing tone, and I try to look properly engaged, like an educated consumer, but all I can think is "I don't mind a 14-inch screen. I will take a 20-pound laptop with a 36-inch screen and radio tubes protruding from the back of it, just as long as I don't have to listen to the motor whirr to a halt and the screen freeze in that sickening telltale way for 45 seconds ever again."
As a result, my muse has been feeling a little delicate, and she has gone off to have an aspirin and a lie-down. Maybe after I put up the jam and eat a little Thai food, I will feel like the hostess with the mostest again, and verbosity will reign supreme on PTMYB again. In the meantime, maybe I'll live dangerously and not only try to post this, but also try to download the picture of the Shaker Meyer lemon pie that has just emerged from the oven, making our kitchen smell of toasted butter and sugar and sweet lemons. I have to admit, as a mood elevator, it works like a charm.
Edit: Sure enough, as I was trying to upload the picture, the little bastard died again. But now it's back up, and hopefully will let me play for more than 1/2 hour. In the meantime (fingers crossed), we have pie.
