Monday again. It's raining to beat hell. I have a stabbing pain in my right side which usually means something gross and disgusting is trying to settle in my lung. "Eeew yuck!" said The Hub, when I asked him to rub my back, "When you cough I can feel it ratteling in there!"

"Dear? If you decide to give up carpentry/handyman work and switch careers again, do yourself a favor. Don't consider nursing."

I mean, jeepers!

So it's noon time and I've already had just about all the asthma medecine I should take for the whole day, and it's making me very jittery, and bouncing off the walls....which would normally make it a great time for me to clean the house, except it's still in great shape from the dinner party yesterday. If coffee is a drug that makes people do stupid things faster and with more energy, albutoral is a drug that does that exponentially with the side effect of generating ceaseless anxiety about all the other things you are thinking of but NOT doing.

The dinner party went amazingly well.....

for the number of people we had here in our little cottage type house. I had been so hopeful that the weather would be good and the buffet could be one of those indoor / outdoor events. Instead, like almost every other Easter in Maryland that I can remember, it was raw, grey and rainy. I even tried to do a little research on the percentage of rainy Easters we have had in this little corner of the planet. Maybe I should start to note the weather in my journal, so I'll have that kind of information close at hand.

As a study in strange thoughts and someone doing the same stupid stuff over and over again, my journal is a masterpiece, but as an historical document it's worse than useless. And it's depressing to read that I've been trying to figure out what to do with my life for my entire life! Well, whatever I do wind up doing with it - nobody will be able to say I didn't give it any thought.

Anyway, to give you a report on the Easter dinner: the ham was much more popular than the turkey. The peas had a mixed reception, just on account of a lot of people don't like peas...but among people who started out liking peas these were well received. No pea converts though. Oh well.

Also, I am beginning to think I ought to start a cooking show. No matter what, anytime I cook, everybody comes in the kitchen to ask if they can help and then watch....it's fine really, because I love to have the company, and it's fun to talk to people while I'm cooking, but I feel that I should be doing something such as yelling "BAM" while throwing stuff into the skillet. I'm also afraid that my guests will just leave when they see how infrequently I am consulting the recipe, the extent to which I am just throwing stuff into the pot without exactly measuring it, how close everything comes to boiling over, and that I literally toss knives, kitchen towels, vegetable discards, wrappers, and spice bottles into a pile on the counter beside the stove while I have three burners going on top and both the upper and lower oven going full tilt. It's a pretty chaotic scene in there.

My mom was nice enough to bring over her coffee pot. That was a Malox moment, when I realized that 12 people were coming over to my house and I have a coffee maker that makes two cups of coffee at a time! The Hub is the only one here who drinks coffee. If I ever get some normal cash flow going I think I'll buy a normal coffee maker so I have it on hand for guests.

The best part of cooking all day is when you see everybody filling up their plate, and steam is rising off the food, and they're talking and eating, and looking happy. For me, the worst part is when I sit down with my own plate and try to eat. I can't taste anything. I don't know if it's because of the mix of aromas when I'm cooking or what. I sample very little, so I don't think it's that. Maybe it's like a combination of adreneline and concentration. I'm thinking, " Is that brown enough? I wonder if these carrots are cooked through? This smells like it needs more salt. That sauce is taking too long to thicken up, I wonder what's wrong with it?" and then, all of the sudden, it's not a project anymore, it's your dinner! So I have to ask The Hub "are these potatoes all right" since to me they just taste like a glutenous mass. The next day, when I have leftovers for lunch - if there are any - I realize the stuff didn't taste bad after all.

Hmm. Lunch. Now there's a thought.