Cabin Fever

How is it possible to have Cabin Fever when not confined to the cabin?  State of mind.  We have a state of siege.  Snow siege.  It annoys me that I cannot get to the back yard.  I thought about going out via the cellar door, but it has two feet of snow on it.  The snow in the yard won't bear my weight. I tried walking around the garage this morning.  Impossible.   We found another suet feeder and hung it up on the front porch.  In the meantime, the flicker and friends are on the last pecks of the backyard suet.

Even in Chicago in the winter of 1979, we could get to the backyard.  I have no desire to wade through waist deep snow.  What if I get stuck?  How embarrassing would that be?

The post-Christmas snow caterpillar has morphed into the sinister shape.  The cats have a hard time bird watching, because the birds are way up on the snow and the cats are down on the living room floor.  The orange cat has been inconsolable the past few days.  Does he, too, have cabin fever?  He likes to sleep by the hot air vents in the kitchen and the bathroom.  He sleeps on top of me whenever he gets a chance. 

I-tunes is playing a Latin version of Volare.   The first time I heard this song I was playing water frisbee in a swimming pool in Aurora, Colorado with a guy named Tim.  A million years ago.   

I am making a recipe from Gourmet for dinner, a diet chicken pot pie.  Ye gods, the ingredients list!   And I think I didn't get the sauce thick enough.  Instead of crust it has mashed potatoes (with low-fat sour cream) on top.  Sounds pretty good.  Definitely from scratch.  We're going to have some white chili next week.  In this weather it is temping to make comfort food with loads of calories.  Discipline.  Discipline. Yup.

A long ago Thanksgiving in Puerto Vallarta at Daquiri Dicks

It's hard to write.  It's even hard to rewrite when one has this "siege" mentality. Ah, for I have forty pages of edits left.   Then that book gets put away for a while.  I need to get World of Mirrors on the Kindle because The Shadow Warriors is doing all right.  How about them apples?  I haven't publicized it because I accidentally tossed my hand-written "plan" away.   Just a few modest mentions so far and of course blogging on Suspenseful Sunday with Seven Sentences.

This business in Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, and even Yemen is so interesting.  Who would have thunk it?  I watch a lot of TV and read three daily papers, dinosauress that I am.  Astonished to find two women who have never heard of the "Tiger Mother."  Astonished that people can go thru $160,000 for a college education and not learn anything.  Astonished by how high the freaking snow is.

I will never cease being astonished.  Astonished that my book is selling.  It has a good description of the Boston Public Garden and Fanieul Hall in winter.  Normally, I write summer books.  Now I know why.
I long for Southern Climes?  Puerto Vallarta anyone?

Grapeshot                      

Proustian Moment - Nel blu, dipinto di blu

Psyched up about working out after realizing that I don’t a) have to set all the weight machines to 20 pounds and b) didn’t fall over dead during the aerobics class. Now granted, the aerobics are “low impact,” but she works us pretty good with lots of movement and arms above one’s head.

Yesterday the music began with Nel Blu, Dipinto di Blu (Volare) by Domenico Modugno.

A whole Proustian cloud of memories came percolating out of the speakers. The song was already old, but my first real memory of hearing it was in Aurora, Colorado playing water Frisbee in the swimming pool of somebody’s apartment house. I was a college student , and the party was one of those crazy affairs where everyone collapsed of tiredness and drunkenness about 3:00 a.m. and slept where they fell. It was a good song for water Frisbee, and the next morning I volunteered to make scrambled eggs for the remaining celebrants.

Grapeshot did not always cook. In those days she didn’t cook much at all, and she didn’t know you had to put a little butter or oil in the skillet to cook eggs. Yuck! Said eggs had to be scraped off the bottom of the skillet.

Flash forward a few years to San Remo Italy and my first trip to Europe as a very young bride. By then Volare was even longer in the tooth. We had changed hotels from the Londres to a modern kind of Scandinavian place a few blocks from the beach. All night long we heard Volare, again and again and again.

The next morning at breakfast, ye gods, there was Domenico Modugno himself in the dining room, and he was having a beer for breakfast. In all the wild parties I’d ever attended, no one had drunk beer for breakfast. Later at the Frankfurt Bahnhof (train station), I came to realize that beer is not an uncommon European male breakfast beverage. Make beer your breakfast beverage. Haven’t seen that advertising campaign yet.

So the song just rolled all those years (and by now they are quite a few) back and I was a college student splashing in the pool and an American girl in her first bikini strolling the beach in San Remo.

We either ate at a restaurant on the beach or at a nice bustling trattoria in town or sometimes at night in a pizza place by the Orthodox Cathedral. When we first arrived, we ate at the Londres, but that was too boring. Lots of old folks, no doubt. At the beach restaurant I first realized pasta was not a main course but a first course. In town for the first time I ate melon with prosciutto and melon with port wine. By the cathedral, we tasted Italian pizza for the first time. It wasn’t actually as good as American pizza. WTF?

Volare! Hey Proust, how about them melons?