author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

OK, so. Jet has her "there is no spoon" moment. It involves a certain amount of hyperlucid dreaming, in that she has to arrive on Earth with her awake/reality mind and memories. But it also involves a certain amount of treating Earth as part of what is real, such that she can manipulate physicality for the illusion it is.

If this all means that she can now shapeshift, pass through walls, travel in time, and bring people back to life whom she regrets having killed, why then is she powerless to stop one particular death?

...Maybe she doesn't get to bring people back to life after all. Because people aren't illusions; they're people. People are real.

That's enough Plot Putty to keep me sane until January, I guess. Unless I end up buying a different brand of Plot Putty, the following will not survive to the next draft. This excerpt is official an endangered species! Which is just as well, because it's sort of blue and red at the same time. Which is to say, purple. With Sueish overtones. Gah.

Time, of course, is an illusion. But so is death. I remember the pictures in the monitor room, that smiling boy with the missing front tooth. In an earlier dream, I killed his father. And was it really necessary after all?

In this dream, I will bring him back.

I kneel beside the body, unzip the gym bag, pull the poor man's head onto my lap. I place my right hand over his unmoving chest. Right now, in this moment, my disguise is not precisely human. A human cannot do this: lay a kiss on a corpse's brow, then pound my fist once over his heart, then hold the man tight by his shoulders as he gasps for his first breath in hours and struggles to resume his fight with the small, fierce woman who overpowered him in the doorway.

His struggles cease in a moment. "Who's there," he rasps; "who are you?"

I lean down to whisper in his ear. "It's me," I say. "I killed you, just a moment ago--no, wait, wait--but I've brought you back now. Because I was wrong. I am sorry."

OK, so much for skipping ahead. Somewhere between then and today, I sort of got an idea of the shape of the in-between bits. How X and Y and Z happen, and how they're all related and internecessitated, I mean interdependent, and how I might get there from here. So I rearranged the order of some scenes, dropping some of them into different chapters, and babbled to myself in yWriter's scene description blocks, and moved other chapters firmly toward the end in a group of unused and unusable chapters... and finally placed the editor's cursor right where I'd left off Sunday morning.

I'm still not sure I like it. The whole thing feels very contrived: while Jet's supposed Monitor, Chender, is slipping secretively onto Earth to mess with an emotionally vulnerable Lia, Jet just happens to run into Lia's asshole brother Jack and get involved with him because she, too, is emotionally vulnerable in her own doggedly determined way. Again, there is only so far I can push Jet's dream's synchronicity. It begins to feel like a get-out-of-disbelief-free card for me, and that card's getting decidedly shabby around the edges.

But the plot had begun to feel claustrophobic in this section, containing as it did nothing but Jet and Lia and Jet's angst and Lia's scared boredom. They're getting out of the house for a bit--er, motel of the week, whatever, they're getting out of the motel for a bit, and they're meeting people and doing things. Which gives me an opportunity to tie things together, if I'm observant enough to take advantage of the opportunity.

And even if I'm not--sing it with me, now--this is only a first draft. It's amazing the connections that arise after the draft has been set aside for a few months and the author comes back with fresh eyes to evaluate it.

So. Trusting the process, trusting that I am unconsciously providing myself with opportunities to make really stunning things happen to this book in January, I continue writing a whole buncha crap. At least it's crap with a direction again.

She couldn't blame Jet for not knowing. She hadn't told her. She had never told her about her so-called family, about her mother's near-psychotic insistence on control and "civility" (because no matter what terrible things are going on in the dark, we must never be uncivil about it), about her father's stern, warped oblivion (because Lia was only a girl, not worth his time or concern), about her brother's--shit. Of course she'd never told Jet. She'd have to think about it then. Not just because she'd said, but because Jet would ask for more details. Whatever Lia chose to say, Jet would her interrogate her for more. Jet would probably think it had something to do with her infernal "assignment."

Lia sighed and turned toward the TV. She wasn't really watching it. She'd left it on so that its play of light and shadow would make the room seem active, less empty, its puppet show holding back the night. The volume was off. Lia's own thoughts, where they might go, that was bad enough, but the TV's chatter was worse. The TV was her mother's constant companion and a foil against which civility might be enforced. Civility meant keeping voices down so that the TV could be heard. And if Lia shouted, or screamed, or cried, Lia's mother would slap her. And Lia's father would say nothing. And Lia's brother would do whatever he liked, which was usually why Lia had been screaming, which was something Lia did not want to think about right now. TV. The TV was mute. It was better that way. And it was better for Lia to think instead about Jet and her putative assignment.

It wasn't that Lia didn't believe Jet now. She had no skepticism left, at least not about the supernatural stuff. She had accepted Jet's claims into her own understanding of existence. She accepted that Jet was not of this world, that Jet could die and return to her on the third day--or even on the next day, one-upping everyone's usual go-to example for resurrrection. She didn't accept that Jet's world was the real one and hers was not, but she accepted that there were more worlds than one. And she accepted that Jet arrived with assignments to piece together and perform, and that she received her instructions while she slept

But what Lia wasn't sure about was Jet's insistence that every random thing was a message from beyond. Jet could be a being from another world and still be a bog-standard paranoid conspiracy theorist. Lia though it highly likely, and it was pissing her off.

I was going to. Yesterday's nibble of what was left after Friday's huge big bites taken out of the work remaining had left me with a Day 7 word count. I was already done for today without having opened the project at all.

But days off have a way of multiplying themselves. Lacking calculators and reproductive systems, still they manage to multiply. So best not to take even one. It was going on 10 PM, and I decided to write for about 15 minutes.

And so I did.

Here is pretty much all of it. (After a light round of editing, of course.)

She crawled out from under the hall table--just in time to startle Mrs. Finch, her next door neighbor. "Why, Lia. What were you doing under there, sweetie?"

"Long story, Mrs. Finch," Lia mumbled. She darted inside, painfully aware that her neighbor was continuing to stare at her. Lia gave her a sheepish smile through the door just before slamming it closed.

The living room was just as she'd left it, except for the dust on the floor. Which is to say, there was none anymore, not even in the corners. And the kitchen was frighteningly clean. The stovetop was white with a gleam like polished lacquer. Lia supposed it had been that color when it was new, long before she'd moved in. For years it had been more of an off-gray greenish-beige, the color of the thin, cement-hard veneer formed from years of spattered oil, spilled coffee, and stray cheesy-mac flavoring powder. "Jet," she called, "why are things so clean?"

"You have a good housekeeper." Jet's voice came from Lia's bedroom, and Lia flashed back on how terrified and violated she'd felt to find Jet there this morning. She stood still a moment, swallowed the feelings and the memory--more important things to worry about now, Lia--and went to meet her uninvited guest.

When she got into the room, the sense of violation returned sevenfold. Not because Jet was sitting on her bed as though she belonged there, no, not now that Lia had decided to just deal with that, but because the contents of every drawer, every keepsake box, and every hanger from the closet were strewn across the floor. "Oh," was all that came out of her mouth. "Oh." She couldn't seem to find a worthwhile obscenity to follow it up with. She took the two careful steps necessary to get her to the foot of the bed without crushing anything, then she sank onto the mattress, her hands covering her mouth. Through her fingers she mumbled, "Tell me you did this."

From behind her, Jet said, "No. I'm sorry. He must have done it while I was out finding you."

"It was the stone. It had to be. And he didn't find it because it's right here--what's going to happen now?"

"I don't know. It would be nice if they never bothered you again, wouldn't it?"

It would be nice... Lia knew better than to hope this would be the case. "I should put things away," she said, and got up. She waded into the middle of the mess. The first item of clothing that came to hand was a pink sleeveless shirt with segments of white lace sewn on any which way. Some of them criss-crossed the three long parallel rips that ran up and down the back of the shirt. It was part of her limited collection of punk costumery, for those nights when she needed to get out of the apartment and go somewhere loud to stomp the night away.

She stood there, holding it, unsure what to do next.

"Lia?" She turned, met Jet's eyes. It didn't seem fair that a killer could speak her name so kindly. "Would it help if we left for the day? Get something to eat, come back and deal with it later?"

Who's 'we'? The thought flickered through Lia's head without finding any place to land. In that it was a lot like the shirt she held. It drifted away again, leaving another thought in its place: Later. Worry about it later. The word later spurred Lia into motion. She knelt again and pawed through the pile of clothing until she found a pair of jeans to match the shirt she held: black denim studded with safety pins, chains of paper clips, other random bits of metal. The cuffs were a mess of tangled strips. Several patches on the back pockets declared dubious allegiances. "Yes," she said. "We are going out. I am going to change clothes now. And when I come back out the bathroom, you're going to tell me everything."

Jet held up her hands in a gesture of surrender. "It's a deal." But she said it after a moment of hesitation, and that moment told Lia a lot about how little to expect Jet to tell her, and how much less than that Lia would be able to trust.

This wasn't news. Lia was already well aware of that. And she made a conscious decision to ignore the hell out of it.

Oh! Also. Friday's baked eggplant got mushed up and mixed with a scrambled egg and about 2/3 a cup of falafel. This turned into small patties, which got baked at 350 d F for about 20 minutes. The results were kind of bland and dry, but also kind of nutty and sweet. Made a great side-dish for cooling off my mouth between spoonfuls/bites of kimchi chigae, which I also made Friday as part of continuing that OMG Let's Cook EVERYTHING binge after the Atlas party.

I spent a large part of Halloween weekend doing two things: making kimchi, and stressing about the NaNoWriMo Day 1 activities. Often simultaneously. It is trivial to stress while stirring a rice-flour porridge, running the blender, waiting for salted cabbage to wilt, or chopping up raw oysters. These activities don't occupy the brain. It doesn't take much effort to fill the brain with stress while doing them. Indeed, more effort is required to not stress.

But as it turns out, today rather rocked. So the stress was either A) unnecessary, or B) for a good cause.

I'm going to choose B) here. The stress was like, for instance, the stress over a possible Y2K disaster. In both cases, the stress wasn't just biting-the-nails insecurity; it was the emotional prompt for thoroughness of preparation. And preparedness averts unfortunateness. The result is everyone thinking you stressed for no good reason because obviously nothing went wrong, thus nothing could have gone wrong.

Well, that last bit is true about Y2K (which made a lot of programmers sad). Not so much true about my organizing NaNoWriMo kick-off activities. More "Wrimos" than I can easily count have thanked me for doing so; I do not feel unappreciated. In fact, I think they think I did more work than I actually did. As it turns out, a lot of the work involved asking people "Can we use your space?" and them saying, "Sure!" and me saying, "What, really? Really?" Then I packed a bag full of Stuff and showed up. The rest of the work was Boulder-area Wrimos being awesome.

So. Activity the first: We had an Inaugural Midnight Write-in in the lobby of the St. Julien Hotel. And the staff there were fantastic. Nobody cared whether anyone in our group was actually staying at the hotel; in fact, one couple had taken a room (ooh, luxury! *jealous*), but at no time did I feel compelled to point at them and say, "We're with them!" No. The bar manager and the night manager were both hugely solicitous, helpful beyond our wildest dreams, and exceedingly permissive considering that we taped up posters, took over half the lobby, moved furniture around, unplugged their lamps in order to plug in our extension cords, laptops, and my electric kettle. (In fact, the night manager seemed surprised that we would bother to reverse all the changes we perpetrated.) Aside from patronizing the bar a bit, we weren't paying the hotel any money for use of the space. And they didn't mind. They treated us like honored guests. They were amazing, y'all.

Wrimos began arriving as early as 10:30 PM. They ordered coffee, wine, and beer from the bar. They began moving furniture around, like I said, that we could all sit in rough circles around extension cords. Someone brought cake. Someone else brought cookies. I brought a bag of apples and a bucket of candy and some tea-and-coffee fixin's (the bar provided us coffee mugs galore). We ordered pizza from a nearby Papa John's (yet another thing I was amazed the hotel staff didn't mind us doing). Every once in a while someone would check the clock and announce how long we had until midnight.

Then, at midnight, we all started writing. Silence settled over what had been a merrily chatty party. Silence, that is, except for the clacking of keyboards.

I thought I did pretty damn well getting to 1674 by 12:45 AM. I still do think that's pretty damn good, but I am humbled at having been told that another Wrimo reached 5,000 by 2:00 AM.

Far as I can tell, everyone had fun. More than 20 people attended--that, on a Sunday night! And words got written. Thus: Success!

After the clean-up and the various carpools home, after John and I got home, after I sleepwalked my way through changing Null's diaper (I shall tell the story of How My Cat Got Into Diapers another time), I crashed and crashed hard. Aside from sleepwalking my way through feeding the cats at 10:00 AM, I pretty much slept until noon.

And at 7:00 PM we did it all over again, only with more partying and conversation and less actual writing, and the venue was Atlas Purveyors. And it was crowded--I mean, ker-OW!-ded. I lost count of the attendees attempting to find seats among the Monday night regulars (and there were a heck-a-lotta those as well). One couple did sort of give up and go home shortly after arriving, but most everyone else was able to endure the bustle and the lack of chairs long enough to enjoy meeting their fellow Wrimos and enjoying great conversation about how Day 1 had treated them so far, what word processors or novel-organizing software they preferred, and what genres they were writing in. Some of the non-involved Atlas customers got interested and started asking us about NaNoWriMo. We may have effected one or two conversions.

And now I am home. And I have edited a little of what I wrote this morning, in order to have a paragraph or two worth exhibiting on my NaNoWrimo profile. I hope to keep updating the excerpt on display under my Novel Info there on a daily basis. That's been a goal of mine in years previous, but I've never managed to do it.

So here's my Day 1 excerpt:

Lia's iPod had been repeating her Ramones playlist since pulling out of her mother's driveway four hours ago. At that time, she'd adjusted the car stereo's volume to a level known as I'm So Fucking Pissed I Could Scream (But If I Did I'd Never Stop Screaming, So I Won't). It was a very specific setting. You turned up the volume until the precise point at which the bass line started rattling the dashboard, then you turned the knob another 90 degrees. Some two hundred and fifty miles later, Lia was no longer So Fucking Pissed Etc., but she'd left the volume untouched because, hey, Ramones. And because it warded off the specter of falling asleep at the wheel, which was more likely than falling asleep in her childhood bed. The night was dying; the road was long. Thank God the road was long. Sometimes she suspected that only the distance between her family's home and her own was what kept her from killing herself.

Writing metaphors! They're not just for breakfast anymore! In fact, they're what's for dinner. Also lunch for the next three days, because we cook in quantity.

So on Wednesday John and I had our first Cooking Date of the year. We made French onion soup and insalata caprese. It was all a spectacular success, and, as implied above, I've had leftovers to eat every day since then.

Today at lunch I sat down with a freshly broiled toast-and-cheese top on a rewarmed crock of our awesome soup, and, apropos of nothing extraordinary, I finally figured out how to eat the dang stuff.

Pause. Rewind. Replay a Wednesday night in Metairie, Louisiana circa 1988. Maybe it was a Sunday, I don't know. Once a week, or maybe just once a month--memory is hazy here--a group of neighborhood ladies got together to sing barbershop harmony. They had hopes of founding a brand-new Sweet Adelines chapter. Mom met with them and brought me along, and this was when I first got pegged as a baritone. (Yes: I was a Type A at the age of 12.) But where I'm going with this trip down memory lane is down the road from the neighborhood home in which we rehearsed to the local Ruby Tuesdays for late night appetizers. Where I always, always, always ordered the French onion soup.

And I always made a mess trying to get through that toast-and-cheese lid. And Mom and all the other grown-ups enjoyed great and gentle amusement at my exasperated expense.

It's not simple! A spoon isn't sharp enough to get through that thick swiss cheese. And even if it was, the toast is floating; you can't very well slice it with a knife and fork. There's no leverage. Best I managed to do was poke at the edges of the cheese until I had a hole through which to sip the broth down to a less perilous surface level, such that mangling the toast and cheese no longer caused catastrophic overflow.

Even John asked the question when we sat down to dinner: "Now how do I eat this?" "I have no idea," I told him. "You just muddle through and make a mess. It's why I put the soup crocks on plates."

But today at lunch, I got it. If you just let the soup crock sit, all patient-like, until all components are cool enough to eat without burning your mouth, the soup will have soaked into the toast and softened it up. Then you can push... not too hard... very very gently... at the cheese-topped toast with the edge of your spoon, until it gives way. The cheese will try to glue it together, but once the bread breaks, the cheese will stretch thin and you can bite through it when you eat the broken-off bite of bread.

After that, everything's much easier.

So this was my discovery. And I thought, "That's another metaphor for writing, isn't it?" (Yes. I know. Everything's a metaphor for writing. Shut up, I'm making a point, it's an effin' marvelous point, it's bloody brilliant. Because I say so. Hush.) Of course I thought that. I was in the middle of my writing day, and I was trying to figure out how to get my mental spoon through the thick cheese topping that was keeping me from going deeper than babble draft into anything.

The plan was to spend a good hour moving an unfinished short story closer to submission-ready. Only I didn't know which one. "First Breath" was done and out the door (though it may yet see further revisions pending an ongoing conversation a colleague and I are having about its worldbuilding details). "Lambing Season" also hit the slush again yesterday. A number of stories are in the post-critique "almost perfect, but not quite" stage, but none felt... permeable, if you know what I mean. None felt accessible. I spent half an hour going through my files, looking for some half-baked idea from a freewriting exercise that might spark itself into a full-blown story. Nothing went ping.

Finally I latched onto a "scene" from the Daily Story Idea yWriter file. It had to do with sentient, human-sized Ants coexisting with humans. One of them goes into a coffee shop and orders a cappuccino. As story ideas go, this one was light and fluffy and funny and nothing at all like "First Breath," and it amused me to read it. I had no idea what to do with it, though. I didn't even know what to call it. ("The Ants Go Marching Latte-ward, Hurrah" is very much not a working title. It's an "I have to call this something and I mustn't take it too seriously this early in the game" sort of for-now title.) I set the timer for another half hour and attempted to figure it out where this thing was going.

I pasted that ridiculous excuse for a working title at the top and printed out the not-yet-a-story. Then I read it again, letting its broth soak in and soften things up. Then I got out a pen and began making notes as tentative as the spoon's assault on the toast-and-cheese. "Barista shouldn't be too enlightened; anti-Ant prejudice shouldn't all be big bad boss's." "Would Ant use mandibles for speech? How would Ants speak?" "What barista thinks but doesn't say parallels what Ant doesn't say but telegraphs with her antennae." Several of those notes put together became a solid story development idea, like a nice big bite of toast that lets you finally get your spoon into the soup. And after that, everything becomes much simpler.

Really, everything about writing that looks scary and impossible tends to seem less so once you take that first nibble. But then, isn't that the case for most scary and impossible tasks?

A friend of mine wanted to know what it is precisely that I do at Abbondanza. The quick answer is, "Not nearly enough," and probably would be even if I volunteered there every day instead of one morning a week and didn't feel guilty giving the farmers an extra job to do, namely, assigning me tasks and making sure I don't screw them up along with the farm's chances at a successful harvest. But it's not a useful answer. Therefore, I blog.

Writing five days a week gives me a two-day weekend, which I take on Sunday and Monday. Sunday because social stuff tends to get planned then. Mondays because of the farm. I'm a wimp, and after the bus/bike commute and the actual work done, I tend to have no brain. Sometimes I in fact have no consciousness--but that's more of a middle-of-summer thing. During March, the workload is a little less physical and leaves me a little less wiped.

The pace is just as hectic, maybe even more so. March means scrambling to get ready to plant.

My first Monday in 2010 was two weeks ago. There were some miscellaneous clean-up chores needed doing around the greenhouse, where planting would happen, and in the barn, where squash and onions stored from the fall needed sorting and rotating. There were beans to be sorted--there are always beans to be sorted, which means picking out ones that are moldy, cracked, or simply not the right variety. Then we worked on soil.

Soil is important. You can't just dig up dirt from the ground, shove it in planting trays, and call it good. And you can't buy all the potting mix for a season on a shoestring budget. Farming means shoestring budget, unless you're Monsanto I guess, in which case, eff off. (Hey, when you google "Monsanto," one of the first suggestions is "Monsanto evil." That tells you a little something about their public image, I think.) So before you can plant seeds in little trays, you have to make your soil mix. At Abbondanza, this appears to involve homemade compost, a cow manure mix, vermiculite to keep it breathing, and another bag of fertilizer that had fish on the label. The remaining hours of my March 1 were spent sifting the compost through a big screen that had been propped up at about a 45-degree angle. Compost was shoveled through it, and what didn't go through was stomped on to break up the clumps and then shoveled through it again. What didn't go through then got put aside for use as tree mulch or similar.

That was just while I was there. A lot more mixing and sifting would happen before the finished soil mix would be ready for use.

The following week (last week) was spent cleaning trays. Again, if you're on a shoestring budget, you reuse as much as you can. I would reckon that, during my few hours on site, we cleaned about 400 trays, some being 200-cell planting trays and others flat trays to give the cell trays something to sit on without breaking. These trays were set out on screen tables, hosed down, brushed off, hosed some more, turned over, brushed some more, and hosed some more. Then stacked in stacks of 10, sorted by cell size (deep or shallow), and put away. It was a cold morning, so our fingers all ached after the first batch. But then the sun really started coming up, and it felt nice to be working in the wet. I am grateful they had extra rain gear and rubber overalls I could borrow.

This week, actual planting happened. Which will explain the bizarre contraption in the photo included here.

Back up a step. First, we had to fill those cleaned planting-cell trays with soil mix, which isn't as straightforward as it sounds. You don't want the soil compacted too badly, and after all that sifting and mixing the soil is fine enough to get compacted if you just give it a heavy look. Best practice goes something like this:

1. Lay out trays on the ground. Well, on a board. On some tarp.
2. Gently shovel soil over the trays. Use a forward-back motion to distribute it more evenly.
3. Use shovel tip to spread excess over cells that haven't been filled.
4. Use a 2-by-4 to scrape excess off.
5. Lift tray up an inch or two and drop it sharply. This causes the soil to settle.
6. Top off gently with more soil. Scrape excess away.

Finally the trays were ready for seeding. The machine pictured here, the one that looks like a sewing machine with multiple personalities and a can-do attitude, does that. It was made in 1982, did you know that? And they still make the parts. It's like a 1970s-era Cessna or something. Abbondanza recently bought more needles for it. The needles are hollow, like blunt hypodermics. They come in different sizes depending on what size seeds you're using. The row of needles dip into a tray of seeds, grabbing one each (or two if things aren't adjusted perfectly) by the power of suction. Then the needle arm rotates to drop the seeds down a row of funnels. The funnels channel the seeds onto the cells of the planting tray below. Then you move the tray forward so that the funnels are lined up over the next row of cells in time for the whole process to repeat. Supposedly you can get a part that causes the machine to advance the tray automatically, but this not being present the tray was advanced by dint of a careful and patient farmer.

After a tray is seeded, more soil is sifted on top and tamped down. Then it's tagged and laid out for watering. What you see here are three varieties of leeks being put to bed.

And that, friends, is the sort of stuff I do on one of my days off from writing.

So. First, you gotta make stir fry. Stir fry requires sauce. Sauce requires soy, hoisin, mushroom sauces. Also hot sauce and a spoonful of dill relish (because it's easier than chopping chilis and acquiring sezchuan pickles). Also veggie broth. And you gotta totally overestimate how much veggie broth the stir fry sauce needs. Those dried mushrooms don't really soak up all that much juice, reconstitutin', after all. So you end up making a really soupy stir fry.

Oh well. You serve it with a slotted spoon and use some of the extra to moisten the rice. It's damn good. Mmm, mushroom stir fry with selection of Asian greens from Abbondanza's last veggie share.

Meanwhile, you have all this stir fry sauce left over and, incidentally, the leaves of all that young celery you chopped up. The celery was really more leaf than stem, to be honest. You hate wasting it. So. You toss those leaves and that sauce into your crock pot. You put an extra cup of water in. You crush up one of your home-grown tomatoes that's starting to reach the use-it-or-lose-it stage. You set the crock pot to "low" and you go to bed.

Good morning! Now. You've been defrosting that lovely 1/2-lb Celebration Roast since a couple days ago, because you wanted to roast it up with some vegetables. Now is the time. Pull out your pyrex casserole dish with the clear lid. Set the roast in the middle. Surround it with the results of chopping up one onion, two potatoes, and two big carrots.

Ladle over it a little of that broth that's been simmering all night. Did you strain out the solid bits first? I recommend this.

Put the covered casserole dish into the oven on 425 degrees F for half an hour. When the buzzer goes off, baste with more broth. Give it another half hour and another basting. Then give it another 10 minutes but this time uncovered.

During that last 10 minutes, make a roux of about a tablespoon each olive oil and whole wheat flour. It's not going to be a gumbo roux. It's just going to be a basic thickener. When the roux is well mixed and bubbling creamily, pour in the last of the broth. The roux will go all shreddy; don't worry. Stir it casually and let it simmer until the mixture gets homogenous again. This is your gravy. It will need salt.

Serve the field roast with veggies and cover all with gravy. Do not be afraid to invite your vegan friends to the table, or indeed to create this dish if you are yourself vegan, 'cause it is.

Eat leftovers cold for maximum delight.

Go forth and try this come thanksgiving.

(This post coming to you live from BeauJo's Pizza in south Boulder. We started tonight's write-in at the Baseline Brewing Market, but they unexpectedly closed early "for cleaning." So we hopped across the parking lot and had pizza and garlic-cheese bread and fountain drinks in mini mason jars. Today, Melissa finished up her first visit with the Ghost Prince, and I discovered that the first lesson she learns from him is, "You think you've got it bad? You think you're lonely? You, missy, are eight years old. Come back and whine when you've endured loneliness for ten centuries." Except the Prince was a lot nicer than that, breaking this to her.)

As I may have mentioned before, this is Chez LeBoeuf-Little's second year in CSA membership with Abbondanza Organic Seeds & Produce. Last year we had far, far too many veggies even for our renewed resolution to eat out less and cook together more, so this year I yielded to John's wisdom in signing up for only a partial share. Even so, possibly because I've been going out of town at frequent intervals and John's been working late, we have a situation.

Thus, on a snowy day in Boulder, I present OMG Nothing Will Fit In The Fridge Soup.

1. From that still unopened package of bacon you bought because it looked like a good idea at the time, remove four fat slices. Cut them into 1" squares. Start them frying.
2. If you like, add a quarter-cup chopped up roasted chilis. The ones that looked so gorgeous at the farmer's market last week. You only meant to buy three ears of peaches 'n cream sweet corn, but you can't resist a bag of freshly roasted chilis.
3. When the bacon is about half-done, delve into this week's CSA share. Slice up and add to the bacon pan the stems of that beautiful bunch of rainbow chard, one fat green pepper, and one yellow onion. Let these cook until the aroma makes you salivate. Let cook a few minutes longer.
4. Roughly chop the chard leaves and stick them in a soup pot with just enough water to cover. Dump in a can of navy beans. (This is why you stocked up on canned beans.) Dump in a quarter-cup or so of frozen turkey drippings. (This is why you save and freeze the turkey drippings.) Dump in a nice big anonymous spoonful (teaspoon? tablespoon? Who knows? Who cares?) of your favorite bouillon.
5. Take the pan of bacon-onion-pepper-chili off the stove and put the soup pan on. Turn fire up to "please come to a gentle boil, if you please." Dump contents of pan into soup pot. Stir.
6. When the pot's boiling, reduce to "simmer but don't take forever about it" and wait as long as you can stand it.

Typically some greens haven't been used up. Make stir fry tomorrow with the choi, using those Hazel Dell oyster mushrooms you bought for just this purpose. Also one of those great long yellowish-green peppers that you're never sure what to do with.

Take the rest of the chard, collard, arugula, mizuna, and whatever choi didn't fit in the stir fry, and boil them down for Green Gumbo. (This has the advantage of using up more peppers and onions, though you may have to go out and buy the celery and parsley.)

"Next time on the CSA Overflow Creativity Show: OMG Nothing Will Fit In The Freezer! Stay tuned."

Hello, and a belated Happy Winter Solstice to everyone! Days are growing longer now, and sunrises will come earlier every day. I can't begin to tell you how cheerful that makes me.

We had our usual Solstice Vigil/Open House, Saturday night. The basic plan goes like this: Light the Yule Log at dusk, make sure it stays lit all night long, and, at sunup, go to sleep. Or, if there's interest, carpool down to Red Rocks Amphitheater for the Drumming Up of the Sun. Then come home and go to sleep. This year, I just went to sleep. But it looks like someone posted some lovely footage of the event!

Our Yule Log this year was a hunk of cottonwood reclaimed from a tree chopped down outside the climbing gym. I biked it home and left it out on the porch to age and dry. I had a really dramatic hollowed-out wedge of last year's log to start the fire with, along with some grocery store firewood bundles and a couple of wax-coated pine cones Avedan gave us. We lit it, drank a toast to it, and cheered in on into the night.

I cook a lot more than is reasonable on Solstice Eve, especially considering there's no guarantee we'll have guests at all. We had one this year; a neighbor from downstairs came up and chatted with me straight until dawn. She wasn't very hungry, however. I am drowning pleasantly in leftovers. Mostly I did the "traditional" dishes, the ones I do every year (although in some cases the "tradition" only started last year). Tomato and Orange Juice Soup, from The Wicca Cookbook. Teresa Nielsen Hayden's A Savory Pie for the First Day of Winter. Tree's ultra-thick-n-fluffy eggnog. But then I also had a bit of extra Napa cabbage in the fridge brought home from my most recent volunteer shift at Abbondanza, so I brought home a game hen and did a crock-pot sized version of Whole Chicken and Chinese Cabbage Soup, a la Kenneth Lo's Top One Hundred Chinese Dishes. And satsumas had just come into season, so I put out a bowl of them on the table.

And Avedan made empenadas - lovely little pastry tarts filled with apples, raisins, cinnamon, and further yummies I cannot recall to enumerate here. And our neighbor brought us a little tin of sweets. And another neighbor had earlier brought us a basket of cookies as a thank you for our occasional cat-sitting services, which I swear we thought well repaid by his own sitting upon our cats. And there was my fruitcake, too, as you'll remember. Which turned out divine. We were overflowing in goodies.

Since then, I've been snacking on cold slices of pie followed by satsuma chasers, and the other leftovers are looking at me like commmmme eeeeeat meeeee naaaaaaooooooo. 'Tis not the season for watching one's waistline, I fear. But it's a good season for breaking bread together, for keeping each other company, for making music, for reading books and poetry aloud together, for knitting in front of TV and radio with friends.

Whether you celebrated the season Sunday morning, during the darkest night of the year; or celebrated it Sunday evening and will continue to for a total of eight commemorative days; or will celebrate it Thursday morning with presents around a tree; whether you prefer to wait until the Kings come marching in on January 6th, with or without the eponymous Cake; or whatever way you do celebrate, as I do not have encyclopediac knowledge of all winter festivals... or perhaps you celebrate simply by getting up in the morning, like you do every morning, and saying "yes" to life in your own way... my wish for you is the same: Love, light, warmth, and hope to comfort and delight you during the cold darkness of winter, and to see you through to Spring. And may all good things come to you during our planet's next good lap around the Sun.

Today's thing happened in the kitchen. John and I made spanakopita. Pictures! We have pictures! I really wish I'd taken some during the actual manufacture of the triangular pockets. That was... involved. I got too distracted with "Gods damned filo layers won't separate ARGH!" to remember to take pictures then. (Yes, this was our first time cooking with filo. Oh my Gods that sucks. But I would do it again, and probably will sometime soon; there's all sorts of leftover filo in the freezer.)

But meanwhile you get to see John sauteeing the fresh spinach (and wondering how it could possibly all fit in the pan) and, later, the cute little finished spanakopita triangles bubbling and crisping away in the oven.

They just came out of the oven. We need to let them cool down. They smell sooooo good... Good thing I've already stuffed myself on homemade turkey/andouille gumbo and I'm not starving or anything.

Hee hee.

I am a kitchen Goddess.