Mongolian Fry Bread

I am looking at  you from the law school kitchen.
Happy New Year

I have just barely been able to write the year, 2019 without feeling a bit uncomfortable.

 It seems hard to believe I am in the last year of this first decade of the 21st century.

 I look up at the calendar and January is almost finished. Time is flying by while I am here in Victoria enjoying the antics around living with Rebecca, and the joy that is every day watching her boys.

I was remembering lauhing today, just as I was about to finish up the evening, thinking I was too tired to type one more sentence on the computer.

Then I got my second wind.

Yes to living here.

Rebecca worked until 8 pm at the university – trying to get on top of her work. I have been shadowing her for 2 weeks, helping – mostly taking papers to the recycling bin and doing the odd bit of adding an index to a book. And typing some old business lecture for her. Tonight we fold at 8 pm, but then there were still groceries to get.

We promised Duncan something special. Another package of pork buns.

The sushi and the Chinese food was on sale: 30% off after 7 pm. Well, our timing was good for that. So she bought some ginger fried beef, some deep fried pork, all of the usual Chinese food at Fairways. And she knows which kinds of sushi to buy – shrimp for me, but that will finish Alex off if it doesn’t kill him, so she chooses something else for him.

I think everything is going well. When the grocieries are unpacked, that is the time when she will let them start eating the fast food she has brought home – each man to his computer, she and I curling up by the gas fireplace, since this is the first time in the day when either of us hasn’t been on the run.

I say to her, “I know when I am working hard, when I brush and floss my teeth, use the water pick on them and then say to myself, ah, so fortunate to have this quiet moment in the day with my teeth.”

I come to the living room table to do another hours work but Rebecca suddenly jumped up. Alex has let some profanity pass his lips and was running for the kitchen saying, “I got so excited that a banged my hand on the table, right into my sushi.” It was everywhere. He was going for a cloth to clean up the mess. She made back to his computer chair first, to wipe up the flying sushi. I looked to the screen to see what it was that had caused the excitement on the computer. He had been watching someone drop the first piece of bread into some boiling oil – Mongolia fry bread.

Well, that must have been exciting.

I looked at what was left of the bashed in sushi and so did he. “It doesn’t look too good, Grandma, but it will taste the same.”

Yup. Fun being around these kids.

On another matter, between Rebecca’s dining room and the large room (where all three men have their computer station, and she has her grand piano), there are some glass doors – fifteen-paned with wood molding separating the pieces of glass. The sun shines through the window, blinding us at the table each day. Rebecca has the practise of putting 18” x 24” prints from art books on the door. She traps the sun so that it can’t get through the glass and we feel as though we are in a gallery, its walls ever changing. She just took down Degas and Raphael is going up now. The coffee table books she uses for the print are pretty well destroyed, but five of us get long looks at paintings of the masters.

She tasked Duncan with writing the names of each painting on the white border of the picture. I was getting the tack off of the old pictures which she keeps and she began putting them up on the wall and we were well into our task. What got her attention was the painting on which Duncan had written “Chair and Three Guardsmen from the Papal Palace” that got her attention. It looked to her more like the Madonna with two angels close to her side.

Here is the mistake. He had transcribed from the back of each page to the front. But the description had been on the left hand side of the page, and the photo on the right – not what he normally encounters in a book.

Duncan didn’t laugh when we found the mistake. He had spent ½ hour on a task that was now useless. And now we were going to have to go for the white oujt. Rebecca wasn’t laughing that hard either. But I couldn’t help myself. Oh, so many tasks go wrong.

One thing that couldn’t go wrong this morning? Rebecca had lost her annotated class lecture notes – but found them and carefully put them in her bag for work. We were at the university, about ½ hour before class as to start and I heard her murmered. “The notes that I so carefully put in the backpack? I don’t have them. That was not my backpack this morning. I put my notes into Alex’s backpack, since I handed mine down to him last week. Now he has my notes at school and I have nothing as I teach my class in 20 minutes. I hope coffee will help.”

And she went off to get some.

And with that, I should go to bed.

Arta