At left is last night’s dinner: a small salad with homemade vinaigrette, lightly buttered broccoli, and two chicken sausages in a light tomato sauce. It was quite delicious. 
The woman behind me in line looked over my grocery pile at the checkout line in the supermarket. She said, “now I feel bad. My choices are not as healthy.” She put two loaves of wheat-white bread on the belt, six or seven boxes of Kleenex (“there’s a sale on”), and a number of containers of chocolate and vanilla pudding. There was some other stuff, but then the cashier and the bagger started asking me questions, and I couldn’t keep track of what she put on the belt, after that.
I came home, heated a saucepan for the chicken, chopped broccoli up into ‘trees’, sliced sausages, diced cherry tomatoes into the saucepan with some butter, salt, pepper, paprika, olive oil, and balsamic vinegar. As these became a sauce, I added the chicken sausage slices, steamed the broccoli, and composed the salad. I had leftover dressing that I’d made at Solstice, which had kept pretty well — garlic, olive oil, salt, pepper, balsamic vinegar, herbes de Provence. There was some leftover blue cheese from Solstice, so that went into the salad just after this photo was taken.
There are enough leftovers for lunch today.
The dinner did a lot to improve my mood. Since the end of the holidays, I’ve been rather down, and today was a weird, wired, muddied day to get through. Making the Image of the Third Mansion did a lot to improve my mood, even if it wasn’t a very high-quality image.
I heard from a friend this afternoon that I was supposed to be meeting tonight; their grandmother was going through some illness and they were canceling our meeting. Another friend’s grandmother passed away. My own grandfather passed away just after the holidays ended a number of years ago; I think a lot of old people find that they can let go after a happy holiday, and go on to the next challenge.
We who stay behind, of course, have our own challenges to look for: what the poet T.S. Eliot once called “ordinary time, of darning and the 8:15 train.” My seventh graders are working on learning the US Constitution. My sixth graders are working on Latin declarative verbs. I’m planning three different stand-alone events for the school’s Design Lab, and planning my own class in there. It’s going to be a busy 2012.
