january 5, 2001. My boy is making dinner tonight. One of the good things about buying vegetables is that I get to hear his "I love cooking stir fry/why don't I do this more often" speech again. Every single time we do this, he's honestly bowled over at the amount of joy he derives from the process. He's like an infant, surprised at the sight of his hands. It's kind of silly, but I do enjoy the food & mood that result. Right now a sharp combination of vinegar, sugar and soy sauce are assaulting my nose, filling the house with smell from their central location. I'm pretty hungry - lunch was a bowl of pasta almost 7 hours ago and I slept through breakfast. To make matters more extreme, I was sick after last night's dinner, managing to bypass the benefits of fresh poached salmon and rice. On the upside, I feel the dizzy, starved glamour that attends our nation's models & ballet dancers. Wheee! later… Well, that was interesting. The Boy cooks emotionally, adding ingredients that seem exciting and new while hoping that the result will be tasty. Since I'm the original bland-o girl, it's been my challenge to remain positive in the face of the unexpected. I'm terribly fussy about meals and sleeping, two things that have irrevocably changed with marriage. It gets easier to be cheerful every day, with every hour of deep slumber and every delicate stir fry. Unfortunately, tonight's meal was a bit...um...inedible. He was adding a small amount of dill seeds when suddenly there were a whole lot of dill seeds in the mix. We both agree that it made for a memorable meal - imagine, if you will, the flavour of pickle married to the texture of shitake mushroom. Together at last! To add an extra layer of gastronomic adventure, the Boy was also attempting to finish off a big bottle of pink grapefruit juice. He later confessed that it was the most incompatible drink possible, adding bitter top notes to a sour serenade. I tried really hard, cross my heart. For inspiration, I recalled the food scenes from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and grimly determined to eat what was in front of me. But it was a futile attempt. I gave up after pushing a dozen mouthfuls in my mouth, preferring to toy with the rice until dinner was over. Yeah, it was horrible - but it was funny horrible. We ended up sitting in the hallway, laughing at the comic badness of the meal while the Boy complained of stomach pains. I think it was a bad idea to eat an entire plate full, myself, but he said that he couldn't stand to throw away two plates of food. Call it chef's pride. Today I paid my university fees, returned the key to the curriculum centre and photocopied some essays on Robertson Davies. I think I was far too productive for my last day of Christmas vacation, but I suspect that this is simply another part of being an adult. Speaking of Robertson Davies, I was doing some desultory research on the man when I came across something he said in interview that seems to speak right to the heart of my online diary experience: As a newspaper editor you have to sit there in your office and listen to the knock on the door and know that some angry, offended person is going to come in and tell you about something which you never thought would have offended an angel in heaven. Change "come in" to "email" and you just about have my life, back when I was somewhat more popular (especially among my meatspace friends).