We were rich once before your head exploded

And today started off with a nearly literal bang, as my brother and I taste-tested a hot pepper grown by one of his friends, an easily bored Mendel-type who couldn't remember which particular cross he had donated to my mother. It's in a pot on the sun porch; the peppers are small, slim, and range in ripening color from a startling vinyl purple to primary red. Given the forty minutes it's taken the capsaicin to wear off, we're guessing it was either the habanero/red bell or the habanero/jalapeño, and although I am very fond of food you need to blow your nose after, this predilection is not shared by the person who just had to eat a banana, a baguette, and several glasses of milk. The composition of tonight's chili is currently under debate.

(I am no longer in New Haven. I got back late on Thursday, but most of yesterday was taken up by a doctor's appointment, Porter Square Books and talking with a woman canvassing for Oxfam on a corner of Mass. Ave., and then hibernating. It was a lovely, lovely visit. We watched Lady in the Water (2006) and two and a half episodes of Lost in Space and had dinner at India Palace and talked about all sorts of things until four in the morning, after which I actually slept more than six hours. I had expected it would be excruciating to be in New Haven, and instead it was only mildly surreal; I credit a lot of that to hans_the_bold. There was not yet a new volume of the CAD in the Babylonian Collection, but I hadn't realized the extant volumes were online. Spoils of used book stores include Howard Schwartz and Barbara Rush's The Diamond Tree: Jewish Tales from Around the World (1991), Patrick Leigh Fermor's Roumeli: Travels in Northern Greece (1966), and the music for Julie Taymor's Juan Darién: A Carnival Mass (1996). We drove back to Boston, and hans_the_bold left yesterday morning. We plan to repeat the experiment in April.)

Meanwhile, what I have waiting for me when I get back from running errands is Megan Whalen Turner's A Conspiracy of Kings. I have been looking forward greatly to this book. Now if only I didn't have to wait for The Sword Dance and Flora's Fury . . .