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At last, some logic.

Joy and Glory

My new MacBook arrived today. Please pause for ecstatic dance. Normal service to resume shortly. With Widgets.

Aaarrghh! or: How I Learned to Stop Bleeding and Love the Coagulant Properties of Albino Seasonings

[Disclaimer: This post contains information which could just save your life someday.]

Whilst slicing enthusiastically into a watermelon for dessert this evening, I managed to open a gaping wound across the pad of my left thumb. This led to a violent stream of colourful piratical expletives and, indeed, blood. I stopped leaping around when I realized I was giving the kitchen a new spatter paint job and decided to do something more constructive, like plunging the offending gash into a pile of white pepper which my mother had thoughtfully dumped onto the kitchen counter.

White pepper is an oft-ignored cure for most of the problems related to lacerations of the flesh. It creates an artificial scab almost instantaneously and disinfects the wound to boot. This is something people always seem surprised to learn -- perhaps because the standard associations one has with pepper aren't exactly in the "soothing cure-all" vein -- but it has proved invaluable on numerous occasions.

On further reflection, a part of me wonders if this wasn't (at least partially) intentional, simply because I've been searching high and low for an excuse to utilize some recently acquired bandagery-based delights. Not that I'll be making a habit of it, because it does hurt (a lot) and it's seriously putting a damper on my latest knitting project, but honestly, who wouldn't be excited to bust out piratical band-aids at a time like this?

That's what I thought.

Heritage (Of The Inescapable Sort)

I should hardly be surprised that, coming as I do from a brood of mess-making clutter-based life forms, my first attempts at serious culinary experiment should end in this. The resulting dish, however, was quite tasty. Low-carb Moussaka, catering to the requirements of having a diabetic in the house, constructed with the aid of lunacy and knives. Plus bushels of cheese, cream, eggs, onions, garlic, mincemeat, aubergine, and seasoned tomato sauce. Opa!

There is a great deal that could be said about coming home after so many months, but it's difficult to know where to begin. Ojai is, in many ways, exactly the same as it was before I left. Then again, it's also somewhat like a David Lynch film. Certain small things, otherwise unimportant, have shifted ever so slightly. This is somehow far more disturbing than coming home to find that the place has been overrun by triffids and set on fire. New shop front here, demolished block of houses there, a few fixtures of the social landscape permanently altered -- it feels less and more like home than it did before, which is a change I don't really want to investigate too closely in case it turns me inside out and backwards at the same time like some sort of Escherwoman.

Bottom line, it feels good to be here. I'm just a little more finely stretched than I was before.

Lets more light in anyway.

The Essentials

I suppose a more accurate addendum to my previous post would've been "And then I drop off the face of the Earth for half a month," but it's a bit late for that now. The only purpose that this post serves is to reveal a rather crucial and surreal piece of information:

I am home.

Jet lag prevents me from going into much more detail than that, but those, Ladies and Gentlemen of the Jury, are the facts.

(So help me God.)