Popcorn

I popped corn for the first time in a pot on the stove. I never thought about how people popped their corn before microwaves! Strange and disturbing how you can be ignorant of a simple manual procedure because of the commercially manufactured product.

I used this recipe by Rachel Ray for delicious kettle corn. We ate a whole bucket of this stuff while watching The Da Vinci Code last night. And then we ate some for breakfast and a late afternoon snack. Addicting.

The Grant Study on Living Well

Here.

“What we do,” Vaillant concluded, “affects how we feel just as much as how we feel affects what we do.”

Domestic Urges

Bake
cookies
banana bread

whip
meringues
bake more cookies
with butter

braise
thighs in red wine
buy sweet onions
in bulk

eat the neighbor's currant scones
drink iced black mint tea
and watch the hubby get bigger

My new favorite sentence(s)

From this article on Paris in the April 2009 Conde Nast Traveler:

"The firmament looked good enough to eat. I wished for a knife and fork to plunge into the cool candy planets, the vast blueberry orbs."

dance dance dance

I watch this in the morning for a pick me up.

Wedding Song

I'm singing this song on the beach in Hawaii for my friend's wedding in June.
(This was the only decent recording I could find on the internet that was up for embedding. The unofficial video is eh.)

Music, a poem my friend B. sent me

Music

by Anne Porter

When I was a child
I once sat sobbing on the floor
Beside my mother's piano
As she played and sang
For there was in her singing
A shy yet solemn glory
My smallness could not hold

And when I was asked
Why I was crying
I had no words for it
I only shook my head
And went on crying

Why is it that music
At its most beautiful
Opens a wound in us
An ache a desolation
Deep as a homesickness
For some far-off
And half-forgotten country

I've never understood
Why this is so

Bur there's an ancient legend
From the other side of the world
That gives away the secret
Of this mysterious sorrow

For centuries on centuries
We have been wandering
But we were made for Paradise
As deer for the forest

And when music comes to us
With its heavenly beauty
It brings us desolation
For when we hear it
We half remember
That lost native country

We dimly remember the fields
Their fragrant windswept clover
The birdsongs in the orchards
The wild white violets in the moss
By the transparent streams

And shining at the heart of it
Is the longed-for beauty
Of the One who waits for us
Who will always wait for us
In those radiant meadows

Yet also came to live with us
And wanders where we wander.