Oh, wat a beautiful morning!

Actually it was a beautiful morning, so cool I couldn't put the top down on my car. But what I really meant, with all due respect to Oklahoma, is "Oh, what a beautiful weekend." Last night I went to a reading and book signing--it pleases me that TCU Press is still publishing books I acquired (it may not please the current director as much, but he hasn't squawked). This was C.W.Smith's novel, Steplings, which I really think is good. We published four of Charlie's novels. Although I knew the passages he read, it was fun to hear it in his voice. Afterward went to dinner with Charlie, his wife and daughter and the guy who filmed his video trailer, plus his publicist who is a friend. We go way back and have lots of ties in common, so it was especially good to visit with Lisa Taylor.

Today I worked--ran some errands but was home by 9:30 and applied myself to the computer--sent out invitations to the next Bookish Frog event, roughed out a speech to book clubs, finished rereading what I've written on mystery #3 and even wrote about a thousand new words. Hooray for me.
Tonight I had dinner with Kathie and Rick, two dear friends, and an added bonus was that we went to Lucille's where they're having Lobsterama--all kinds of lobster dishes at reasonable prices. I had a whole Maine lobster with drawn butter and a salad with blue cheese dressing--but not the house blue cheese vinaigrette that I thought I was ordering. Kathie refused to fight with taking a lobster out of the shell and had a lobster roll, but Rick and I both had the whole thing. Somewhere along the way I learned to deal with lobster fairly easily, and I do love it. I would always order the whole thing just to get the claw meat--so succulent and sweet.
Tomorrow I'll meet Jordan at church and then we'll come home for chicken salad for lunch. Then I get to nap and work on the novel again. And I plan to experiment and fix myself a spinach souffle for supper. The real reason that I went out this morning was that I forgot to bu spinach.
My kind of weekend.

Waking up joyful

I have vivid dreams, sometimes getting into bizarre, impossible situations with aa wild variety of peole past and present and sometimes writing a novel in my dreams but of course the next morning I don't remember those details and twists of plot. It interests me that in the midst of a dream, bits of reality intrude and I can say to myself, "No, that's not true." I often find myself cleaning--a messy kitchen, a dirty house, whatever, rarely my own home. I'll have to look into the significance of that, but it generally takes me a bit to transition from my world of sleep and whatever dream world I was in to the real world. A friend calls it "getting my happy on" and says she gets it by the time she has her first cup of coffee. Today, though, I felt like I ought to burst into that song from Oklahoma! "Oh, what a beautiful day!" I felt self-confident, strong, skinny (well that may have been delusional), and like all was right with my world. Wish I could bottle that feeling! Not sure where it came from but probably a variety of things.
I corresponded last night with a MacBain descendant in Alberta that I'd never heard of--I wrote him because a family tree he put on Ancestry.com has been most helpful, and he answered immediately. At one point, he said he thought the MacBains, at least his branch, were in Glengarry by the Uprising. I thought he meant Scotland and wondered if I should abandon Inverness, change the itinerary and go to Glengarry, which is near Glasgow and doesn't sound nearly as interesting. Then he wrote back and said he meant Glengarry, Ontario, not to give up on Inverness. We are both apparently stymied by the same man, father of both our great-great-grandfathers (they were brothers!). What fun to find this hidden trail to follow.
This morning I went to Central Market and splurged, really splurged, to fill that lobster longing I wrote about a few days ago. They had lobster tails for $13.95 and I thought I could afford that, but when I asked I was told yes, they had been previously frozen. I have a tentative relationship with shellfish, can't eat shrimp at all, and have found that I can eat fresh lobster and crab but not frozen or canned. The fish lady offered to steam a lobster and take it out of the shell, which she did quite quickly while I waited. (I can do it but I rarely get the claw pieces out in one big piece as she did.) Please do not ask about the cost, but my lobster salad tonight was delicious--a bit of celery and green onon, lemon juice, dry mustard and mayo, all lightly used so it wouldn't hide the lobster taste. And there's enough left for tomorrow night---shhh, dont tell Jordan who will probably show up right at lunchtime, after church, tomorrow. She gets tuna salad.
Jacob and I ate al fresco--a picnic on the porch. I had given him his choice of going out for either spaghetti or tacos and he said he wanted Mexican, but after I got changed he said, "I want to eat here. You can take those clothes off." So he had chicken nuggets and I had my lobster with hearts of palm and hummus. The breeze was just beginning to show signs of the cold front we expect tomorrow and now the air feels much chillier.
Jacob had a big day--a program by Kids Who Care in the morning, errands, a little boy's birthday party in the afternoon--he arrived with green hair and a fish on his cheek, which he announced he was wearing to church in the morning. Unfortunately he smeared his hand down his face and the fish transfered itself, not intact, to his hand. As I helped him clean it, he said, "I am just so angry!"
At 7:30 I was in the family room, reading while he watched TV. Left to come write an e-mail, came back at 7:50 and he was sound asleep, fully clothed. I have two concerns here: I'll have to get him up to pee, and he may wake up at six. Heaven help me!
I guess I'll make full use of my free evening and go to bed early just in case.

Lobster longings

Is there a season for lobster, say like there is for raw oysters--we can eat them  in April but then not again until September. The months inbetween have no "r" in them, and that's the rule. Of course, some people won't eat any raw oysters these days, but I admit to giving into temptation occasionally, always with a bit of trepidation. But I digress. Back to lobster.
I'm reading a novel called Town in a Lobster Stew, a mystery set in a small coastal town in Maine. The author is B. B. Haywood, and I think she knows whereof she talks about lobster stew. The small town has a lobster stew cookoff every spring to start the tourist season, and Candy, the protagonist, is asked to step in at the last minute as a judge. As she described the variatioins on a theme, I got hungrier and hungrier--one made with tomatoes and thyme, another with Dijon and white wine, and one with just a hint of cinnamon. I want to try all of them. I think that's a sign of how much I've walked into the world of the novel. More about B.B.Haywood and her small Maine town another time.
Then a new Bon Appetit arrived and I leafed through it, finding a stunning recipe for lobster rolls. So now I have a craving. Next time I'm in Central Market I'm going to look longingly at fresh lobster meat--I'm past wanting to bring home a live lobster and cook it. Maybe I could afford enough for a meal for just one--me!
Years ago there was a restaurant and fish market in Fort Worth called Zuider Zee. Every year they had a lobster two-for-one special. My then-husband and I used to have "bring your own lobster" parties. We'd borrow a huge kettle from the hospital kitchen, fix a salad, and I suppose serve wine. Gosh, do you suppose way back then we served Mateus? Anyway, I remember those parties, in the tiny concrete block house we lived in, were always great.
Another memory of two-for-one lobster: I worked as a secretary to the hospital pathologist at the time, a nice if somewhat unusual guy. He and his wife were both on the plump side, and one night they ordered the two-for-one lobster. The waitperson brought them each a lobster, and he said, "No,  you don't understand. Two for her, and two for me!"
These days a local restaurant, Lucille's, has "Lobsterama," with whole Maine lobsters for something like $13. Betty and I love to order a lobster and the house salad, a bleu cheese vinaigrette, but each time she looks at me and says, "How do we do this again?" I once had dinner with Megan at Uncle Julio's and we split the Cadillac special--a whole lobster and fajitas (to me, sort of an incongruous combination). I mostly took it apart, but she said, "If I'd known it was this much trouble, I'd have never ordered it." But then, that's the child who, when I splurged on fresh raspberries (they're dear in Texas) said, "If I'd know they have all those seeds, I wouldn't have eaten them."
I'm ready for lobster and raspberries. Hmmm, gourmet delight.

Three big accomplishments

Nothing makes me feel more deliciously self-indulgent than eating a whole lobster, but that's what Jeannie, Betty and I did tonight at Lucille's, a local restaurant that once a year sponsors Lobstrama for several weeks. A whole lobster is only $13.95, and we have it with the house salad which has a roquefort-vinaigrette dressing. Needless to say, I'm stuffed but happy. I've gotten pretty good at dealing with a whole lobster and extracting the meat, especially the claw meat that is so sweet and tender. Betty laughs that she always needs instuction, though she did well tonight, and Jeannie found meat in the body cavity where I never think to look--I was full by the time I got to that. Lovely evening, although the restaurant got so crowded it was hard for me to hear, in spite of the fact that the volume on my hearing aids has been re-set and turned up a lot.
But that was only my final accomplishment of the day. The first was  cleaning closets, a chore I hate and am fully capable of putting off for two years or more. But I got a notice that the ARC would be in my neighborhood tomorrow (Association for Retarded Citizens? Surely not. There must be a more pc name for it now, but they do help people with intellectual and developmental disabilities). It sparked my conscience. I kept the notice on my desk for a week or so, thinking surely I could come up with one bag. Today, with a/c repairmen putting the finishing touches on the duct work for my new furnace, seemed like a good time to clean closets, so I did. Got four bags, including one of shoes. I was ruthless--or pretty much so. There are some things I gave leniency to for another year, and in a couple of instances, I discarded the pants, skirt or jumper but kept the top. I even straightened the shoes that were strewn haphazardly on my closet floor, put them on the shoe rack, and swept the closet. Oh, the feeling of righteousness! Tomorrow I'll put the bags out with the appropriate sign.
Then this afternoon I spent about two hours posting my short story collection, Sue Ellen Learns to Dance and Other Stories, to Kindle. They really do make it simple, though I'm afraid my text came through with no paragraph indents. Stiill, I was enormously proud of myself for having accomplished this. I priced it at $2.99, the lowest price Kindle allows. I've heard that at that price you get a lot of sales. It wilil be two or three days before it shows up in the Kindle shop.
Why, then, with these accomplishments for the day, do I feel edgy? It's the lack of a next project, but I made a resolve today: I'll finish the draft of my work-in-progress, a cozy mystery, and then move on to a nonfiction project that's floating in my head since my agent mentioned a possible assignment. I hope I'll stick to that resolution. I also have to obtain e-book permission from previous publishers and send copies of the books to the agent. And I'm still waiting for an editorial opinion on the Texas food book. Yep, I'm not giving up on the career yet.