It's got to give, it's got to change

Discovery of the night: a personal calzone from Eat at Jumbo's is exactly the right size for a person who walked fifteen minutes each way for it. I ordered the Frank Cyrano, which is what derspatchel calls BBQ chicken, ham, and ricotta cheese (see note), and the time it took me to walk to the restaurant was almost exactly the time it took the calzone to bake; I picked up a vegan chocolate fudge cookie for adrian_turtle and what I thought was a chocolate peanut butter cookie for myself, placed the calzone flat in a brown paper grocery bag for insulation and by the time I got home it was still warm. It had a very short lifespan after that. The cookie was unfortunately chocolate chunk, which I don't actually like, so I ate the parts that were chocolate and ignored the rest.

Other discovery of the night: it is just ten minutes on foot from my door to rushthatspeaks'. So after I'd eaten my calzone and finished picking the chocolate out of the cookie, I checked my e-mail and saw that due to the vagaries of life and root vegetables Rush had not actually baked the parsnip cake for faerieboots' birthday that I was invited to help with last night, so I walked over and we baked a parsnip cake. We had to go to Shaw's for star anise (which they didn't have, so we wound up substituting a mix of aniseed, cinnamon, and amchur to go with the ground cardamom seeds and nutmeg and toasting half the results before whisking it all in with the flour) and four kinds of sugar (which they did, so we bought them all) and the recipe is once again slightly different from the last time we made this cake (the blackstrap molasses turns out to be necessary for the flavor profile, but its function as liquid in a dense sticky batter can and should be taken over by the sweet liquid obtained from squeezing out the parsnips), but I am looking forward to seeing what happens tomorrow with the lemon icing, which we made last time with crème fraîche and lemon juice and are planning to try this time with lemon extract and ditto. Brown butter is one of the greatest things that can be made on a stovetop; at the point where we had stirred in the white and brown sugar and it had that delicious milk-fat, nuttily toasted smell, I just wanted to put the parsnips on hold and make some biscuits. Also, a spatula is a remarkably handy instrument. At one in the morning, I walked home in the same ten minutes. I have a doctor's appointment at noon tomorrow and we'll figure everything else out after that.

I like where I'm living.

Her words still ringing in my ears

Everybody should read this interview with rose_lemberg, linguist, poet, founder and co-editor of Stone Telling, and general all-round awesome person. And look forward to Bridgers when it sees well-deserved print at last.

Note from the offline world, made on my way to the doctor's this morning. The buses go by reading "WE ARE ONE BOSTON" and "BOSTON STRONG" in between their route numbers and destinations. That was weird enough when it was just on Facebook.