Harp Food: The View from Here

So, this is usually what I’m looking at this time of night:

The food:  Another quick stir fry, this time with tofu.  The yarn:  Attached to a mega-size commissioned blanket scrunched in my lap that I’m crocheting for a client.  The laptop:  What enables me to pause and take a bite of dinner or add more stitches as I wait for files to upload, Google Reader to populate with one billion Vegan MoFo entries, or for an email with an answer to arrive in my Inbox.  No, this is not a healthy way to have a meal.  It’s multi-tasking at its finest.  But my other computer is upstairs in the darkest and coldest room of the house, attached to the wall with fifty thousand wires, and I just realized today that I absolutely hate working in there.  So not good for business.

And where is the harp? It’s in the other room (no, not THAT room — that one is UP -STAIRS, remember? That’s a situation the harp doesn’t like), sitting in the dark, because I just spent five hours with eight different students in that room and I need a bit of a break before I go back in that space and attempt to work through my own music.

I was reading one of my many e-newsletters today (I really have cut down) and the gist of it = people (clients) love to hear stories about what you’re doing.  It encourages connection as inevitably through your story-telling you strike upon universal experiences and ideas.

And so, the point of this blog was not only to contribute to Vegan Mofo, but to also illustrate the kind of lifestyle a creative type *might* have, gauge relate-ability and test the theory of whether or not I am an anomaly.

So, here’s my food-related life story for the day.  I had the aforementioned disaster cake for breakfast along with a few pieces of Halloween candy, and my late lunch was a big bowl of aforementioned soup.  Because soup is mostly water, a fact that seemed to escape me at the time, I was so ravenous by the time I was done teaching that my almost desperate food prep resulted in singeing my wool sweater over a stove top burner flame.   The scent of that incident brought to mind another from a previous night when I was concocting the cake-that-won’t-go-away (last mention, I promise).  After preparing its failed frosting, I was going about my nightly routine congratulating myself how beautifully I had made the house smell of peanut butter.  Part of this thought made no sense at all, but that idea was punctuated by how disastrous this could be should any of my students scheduled for the following day have peanut allergies.  When I went to wash my face that night, there in the mirror I saw the source of this house-pervading scent — peanut butter mayhem all down the front of my sweatshirt.

I really am a good / more careful cook / baker than perhaps I paint myself here — that’s my story and I”m sticking to it.