After a sluggish workday due to my only having had time to scarf down a pear for breakfast and a handful of stale trail mix for lunch*, I jumped into the car at 2:30 with a pep in my step despite the grumbles emanating from behind my naval. I had the rest of the day to myself. The sun and the cold were inviting.
On my way home I picked up the CSA share which was particularly good this week: beets, arugula, spinach, delicata squash, lettuce, kale, bell peppers, potatoes, sweet potatoes. (We've been getting so many potatoes that I had to designate an entire drawer in which to store them; with today's batch, the potato drawer has officially reached max capacity, so some of the sweet potatoes have shacked up in the oil and vinegar cabinet.)
Once home, I buried my face in a pile of leftover Chinese takeout, greeted the piano tuner, and did some work (re: Facebooked) on the computer while he did his best to bring my baby [grand] back from the brink of honky-tonk so-flat-it's-starting-to-sound-like-Baroque-tuning awfulness.
Few joys in life rival that of practicing on a just-tuned piano. So I did that for a couple hours until I got frustrated and hungry. Uncanny how those two sensations always seem to go hand in hand. Then I made dinner, which turned out to be a more extravagant affair than originally planned.
It all started with some poblano peppers. I chopped up some tomatoes and onions and stuffed them inside the peppers along with a bunch of cheese. But there were a lot of tomatoes and onions left over, not to mention a large amount of cheese, so I decided to make a pizza too. And then decided to make a salad to go along with the pizza and peppers, so at least there'd be a modicum of healthy pretense happening. So I roasted some beets.
The pizza dough was already rolled out by the time I realized I had no pizza sauce. So I grabbed a handful of beet greens and made pesto.
All this to say that I made dinner and ate it and cleaned up the kitchen and loaded the dishwasher and did two loads of laundry and folded one pile of laundry and cleaned out the litter box and took out the trash and was feeling pretty pleased with myself as I settled down to plan the menu for a dinner party this weekend.
Then I heard it. Retching coming from the living room. The cat was throwing up on the floor. Large chunks. All over the hardwood. I watched him do it. He looked up at me as if to say, "Your day was going too well. I have to keep you grounded somehow."
*I realize that this sentence structure is atrocious. Duh, it's me. But I've just had to deal with the eliminations from both ends of a cat, so the least you can do is deal with some less-than-pristine grammar.