sprite writes
broodings from the burrow

November 10, 2005


seasonal smells, cinnamon, and understanding
posted by soe 11:29 pm

I know. I know. You’re dying to know — what were three of the beautiful things that I noticed this week? Wait no longer. Here they are:

1. Late Friday night as I was walking back to the Burrow, I caught a good whiff of fall. I wasn’t expecting it. But there it was, waiting for me, just like an old friend on the street corner. And it was there again the other day amidst the crunchy leaves littering the sidewalk on the way home from work.

2. Tonight I decided to make some applesauce with some of the apples deteriorating in the fridge. I didn’t bother to measure the cinnamon when I added it to the pot, and it was clear from the way the mixture smelled as it was simmering that I’d put in way too much. But then once it was done cooking, it tasted fine. So cinnamon can be added to applesauce far more liberally than recipes call for and it just makes it that much tastier.

3. I took yesterday as a work-at-home day in order to finish editing a book that got passed on to me. The topic was astronomy — and, in particular, the terrestrial planets (Mars, Mercury, Venus, Earth, and the Moon). Unfortunately, because I barely passed the subject in college, I was having a difficult time understanding some of the nuance the astrophysicists were trying to get at in their comments. So it felt really good when, in the last chapter, I finally understood that a planet’s magnetic field is related to its core and that its major surface disruptions (like volcanic activity and earthquakes) are related to its mantle. The two have nothing to do with one another, according to NASA. [Don’t say we aren’t instructional around here…]

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cat antics
posted by soe 12:10 am

The cats are enjoying having a clear desk. Posey and Della are content merely to lie on the top shelf and await admiration; Jeremiah, on the other hand, understands it less as a shelf for pretty trinkets and more as a stage. He puts on a good show, too. He pirouettes, he flips, he dances, he flirts with disaster. He pursues his tail with a zealous glee we haven’t seen since he was a kitten.

And someone really didn’t appreciate the fact that the couch is no longer a cat paradise of piles. Last night they left a hairball on the freshly cleared cushion. Luckily, cleanup was minimal and painless.

Who needs expensive toys when you can just offer cats furniture?

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