In no particular order, 5 things that make me happy right now,
1. Made mussels for the first time the other night. This was notable for a variety of reasons including that those little guys are ALIVE when you buy them. If a mussel is slightly open when you rinse them off, the fishmonger told me, just give it a hard tap on the shell. If it's still alive, it will close up... so you can safely KILL IT by cooking it. So there were the hubs and I, standing at the kitchen sink, tapping 2 pounds of mussels. They tasted delicious, actually, although anything cooked with garlic and onion and tomatoes and wine tends to taste pretty yummy. Gonna expand the whole venture with a fish stew/cioppino (how the heck do you spell that? I'm not sure and I'm too lazy this morning to check, but it's delicious) kind of thing. Add crusty bread to dip up the sauce. Invite a bunch of people I love. Yup.
2. Have you watched Great British Baking Show? I am obsessed with it. It's calm Brits. Baking things they seem highly familiar with. Things I have NEVER HEARD OF. And the ovens are near the floor, so there is a lot of oven crouching and gentle nervousness and seriously, this show is the best, mostly calming thing to watch.
3. Getting excited to head back to Corpus Christi next month for Teen Book Fest by the Bay. Honored to be asked, thrilled to be on a panel and spend the weekend talking books and hanging with authors and readers. Last year was a great time, too, but I was still recovering from surgery from a thyroid cancer relapse and while the surgery was thankfully successful in removing some rogue lymph nodes that were trying to grow again, it had bothered my vocal chords (there's a more technical term for it, but let's stay with 'bothered' for right now) and my voice hoarse on and off still and two days of school visits pretty much left me sounding like I had laryngitis. (which basically I did.) This ended up being an on/off thing for months and months, making it hard for me to talk in noisy rooms, but is thankfully gone now and my projection and pitch are my own again for which I am very glad. Anyway. Corpus here I come! And very excited to hopefully see all wonderful librarians and students I visited with last year in Rockport, which suffered huge destruction during Hurricane Harvey ( the same storm that gave Houston our 51 plus inches of rain) including a total loss of the beautiful high school that was so welcoming to me last year. So I am looking forward to hugging a lot of folks.
4. Did you ever notice that you don't mind when the dog snores but when people do it's another story? And let me say that there is no situation where the basset/boxer's snoring doesn't make me laugh and smile. She's doing it right now. Because early morning walk and eating and doing her dog thing takes it out of a girl.
5. Number five today is fuzzy socks. Tacky fuzzy socks like the ones I got at Old Navy for everyone this holiday season-- with unicorns on them or llamas (there were other choices but how can you turn down unicorn socks? You can't.
Happy Friday.
Til next time.
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