hannah

Having now made soufflés, I can't see what the big deal and the fuss is all about with them. They're difficult the way risotto and yeast-based breads are difficult: it's all in the technical details. Once you've mastered those, you're fine. I was fine even whipping the egg whites with only one whisk on the electric mixer because I couldn't find the other one, even when I had to leave them for a few minutes while I got the simmering water ready, even when the oven somehow turned off and I had to leave them sitting in the water bath an extra half-hour while it heated back up. They didn't puff up as much the picture promised, and they were astonishingly fragrant. Cakes on top and custards in the middle as they're supposed to be.

It's not something I'll make all that often - I made them today as recipe testing for one of my clients - and it's something I'm not going to be scared of, if I'm ever called on to do so.

I'm only a little disappointed I'm not working the polls tomorrow. Only a little, because as much as I'd wanted to get out and participate, I know calling off was the right thing to do. I'm coming off a nasty cold - four negative rapid tests since last Wednesday night, including one this afternoon, seem reasonably trustworthy - and while I'm mostly recovered, working the polls for the full duration tomorrow wouldn't do me any good. It's hard enough when I'm completely healthy.

What I'm finding amusing about this is one of my clients reached out and because I'm not working the polls and the physical demands will be significantly less with far fewer hours, I'll be working with her tomorrow afternoon, which means I've basically gone from the public to the private sector.

Tonight was my and my dad's last Friday night rooftop cider of the season. There's still going to be Friday night ciders - splitting a bottle, catching up, having a good time chatting - and with the nights coming earlier, it's going to happen in the apartment instead of the roof. I don't mind too much, not with how dark it was when we got there or how much darker it was when we went back down. It was honestly quite nice to look around and realize this was the last one. Nothing too special about it, no world-class cider or magnificent thoughts, just a good bottle and a nice time.

Let me amend that: nothing too special about what we did, something quite special about the night in a low-key mundane way, paying attention to the ordinary moments. It was a lovely sunset, fast-moving gray-on-slate tufts and spots of clouds, and by the time we went in, it was dark enough the moon was the brightest thing in the sky. So we stopped to look at it for a while. Just past half-full, the clouds were moving eastward. Almost there, almost there, the wind and the angle taking them just below the moon, enough to light up but not what we were hoping for, waiting more, waiting, a large piece comes by and not quite and maybe this next one - and in front of the moon it went, bright as a star, and we kept oohing and ahhing until it'd passed and the moon was shining by itself again.

As ways to end a season, it's a pretty good one.

When I held my niece A. this afternoon, I told her parents J. and E. that she weighed a bit more than a golden eagle. They didn't know how much that was. I told them it was about as much as a housecat. They didn't know how much that was, either.

I can get not knowing the golden eagle. It's the housecat that's baffling me. J. and I didn't grow up with a cat and, apparently, neither did E., but I'd think they'd both have a heuristic model for that already. It's possible that given my social circles, I might be over-estimating how common housecats are across the United States.

But that's not the best part of the afternoon.

Months ago, I had a dream - a literal dream - about a russet potato dessert. When I told the internet about it, someone pointed me towards white potato pie. I knew I had to make it someday, and when my younger brother R.'s birthday came around, it seemed like a good fit. Last year it was a carrot pie, and this year it's potato.

The recipe I used made enough batter for two nine-inch pie shells, so he got two pies. I had some blueberries in my freezer, so I made an easy spiced blueberry compote to go with the pie. We all had some this afternoon, and rarely do I get the chance to mean it when I say it was the stuff dreams are made of.

In looking at the amount of peanut butter I have, and in looking at the internet's suggestions of what to do with it, the best idea comes with a minor concern - namely, that peanut butter bread doesn't work with natural and organic peanut butters on account of the emulsifiers being necessary for the bread's crumb to effectively hold together. It doesn't seem possible to add in anything at home, whether it's another kind of vegetable oil or some extra egg whites, that'd address and fix the specific problem.

There's a few recipes I've found which are designed around natural peanut butters, and none of those look quite as much fun as the others - some of them even seem a bit finicky. They don't come across as something simple to make and stick in the freezer for quick snacks in the future. I've got more than enough of the peanut butter and not quite enough of the everything else to experiment, at least not more than two or three times, and I'm loathe to waste flour like that. I guess there's always noodles.

Before tonight's screening of Collateral - still astonishingly good and an excellent crowd, plenty of laughs and gasps - I spoke to someone else who'd also gotten there early, but instead of being early for the 7PM Collateral showing, they were early for the 9:15 screening of something completely different. They're both on the same night, both in the same screening room, and it's an easy, understandable thing to get confused. This person also had time to head out and grab some food, and their friend who was meeting them was understanding about the situation.

Weirdly, though, this person didn't say things like "how foolish of me" or "I've got time to grab something" or "this is an easy mistake and I'll remember this to attempt to avoid such things again." What they said were things like "I can't read" and "I'm such an idiot" and generally insulting themselves. It's got me baffled as to why someone would take that route and go for those reactions, and I can only hope they grow out of it.

When the clouds clear enough, and the moon comes out, it's almost a surprise - only almost, because you've seen it for ages, you know exactly where it is, but it's only when the clouds clear enough and the circle of the moon shows itself that you see it for what it is and not the light it gives. Because until the clouds clear, all you see is the moon's light. You don't see the moon for itself, for what it is, not quite yet. Standing up on the roof, looking skyward, all you see are the clouds and the light, not the moon. You see the reflection, not the thing itself.

Standing up there, the second night of Sukkot, the second night of the yearly harvest festival, the celebration that comes with the night of the full moon, I could see where the moon was by the light that pushed through the dense, dark clouds. Not the celestial body itself, but its light, its reminders and indicators of where and what it was. I could see where the moon was, and I could see, farther south, the breaks in the clouds that I knew would let me see it. I'd come from a Sukkah party of sorts, a dinner at a local synagogue that wasn't so much choreographed as it was loosely hosted: a sukkah built on the rooftop, with people bringing food of their own to have dinner in a sukkah and fulfill the requirements of the holiday. I talked about Greek museums, and riding the metaphor to work in Athens, and Hadrian's wall, and Los Angeles' architecture, and probably a dozen other topics, all while eating food and drinking wine in the temporary structure on the rooftop. There was some wine left over. I took the bottle with me to another rooftop. My parents' building doesn't close its roof the way my own building's does. My father wanted to see if he could see the moon.

It wasn't so much that he could see it as it was that he could see where it was. The clouds were moving south to north, along the eastern part of the sky. To the north, it was largely clear; to the south, the nighttime clouds loomed dark and uncaring, taking up as much of the sky as they could. I could see where they were thin and weak, and stayed to watch. My father had to go, satisfying himself by seeing where the moon was. I waited to see it, if I could. I knew I could, if I waited. I waited to open up the bottle and drink its remains when I saw the moon. I didn't wait long. The spinning of the earth and the motion of the clouds had them thin out and open up so it was more than seeing the light behind the clouds telling me where the moon was: it was seeing the moon itself. Waiting and watching, the darkness stopped for the light to come. It wasn't cold on the roof, not with the thick dress I was wearing and not with the wine I was drinking. The clouds weren't enough to hide the moon from me anymore. The faint spectrum around it, the blues and reds reflected by the thinnest clouds making a rainbow halo, told me exactly what I was seeing. The faintest reflection of sunlight turned into the strongest moonlight.

I watched the moon, and drank the wine. I looked at the clouds, and drank the last of the wine. I left when I was ready, and I don't know when next I'll see it - just that I'll remember having seen it tonight.

Because it's the world we live in, I got a virtual consultation on my wallet today. There's an assortment of leather repair shops in New York City, and they now offer the option of having someone check out a piece through video conferencing rather than legging it out to Midtown. My wallet's been getting fairly ragged for a while, so I figured it was time to look into seeing if it could be fixed. It turns out, not so much. The guy took one look at it and said that it probably wasn't possible, given the overall wear and weathering and and rips at the seams, and even fixing up the seams would be difficult. He gave a timetable of several days, if not weeks, and a price point of a few hundred dollars.

The thing about this wallet that's got me considering that price and timetable is that this is my wallet. To be clear, this is my only wallet. To be even more precise, this is still my first wallet. It's the wallet my parents bought for me when I'd have been five or six, old enough to be trusted with one. To illustrate how long I've had it, it's got the address and phone number of the house I grew up in. My hometown changed its area codes in 1997, and the number in my wallet has the old area code. When I told the leather guy I'd had it for at least 30 years, I wasn't exaggerating.

Besides the sheer emotional attachment to this thing, it's also a good wallet. It's got a clear slot for emergency contact information, it's got an ID pocket, it's got six thin credit card sleeves and a larger pocket for a few more, it's got a lot of room for bills, and it's got a coin purse. A coin purse! With a clasp! A coin purse with two pockets, one I use for pennies and one I use for all the other coins to make exact change that much easier to manage. That's not a feature on most modern wallets. It's barely a feature on vintage wallets, at least going by what's being offered on eBay.

A few hundred dollars to fix this would still be getting my money's worth out of this wallet. I'm also thinking that given I've had this over thirty years, it might be time to buy a second wallet for a good deal less than a few hundred dollars. Provided, that is, I can find one that's also capable of doing what this one does. Hopefully with all the same features, ideally for at least another thirty years.

The first day of fall. Rosh Hashanah beginning a new year. And giving blood, too. It took me just over six minutes, which isn't bad except for how I know I can do better than that. I'll keep hydrating and hitting the treadmill.

I'm also going to leave the bandage on until bedtime, as usual. It's yellow, so I feel like I should pick a dress for tonight's dinner that'll really make it pop.

I'm looking my vanity right in the eye when I say, "I want to fit into smaller dresses." That's it. That's the desire and motivation. Smaller dresses. I don't much care about the scale - while somewhat ego-stroking, it doesn't matter nearly as much. Volume, density, and mass. If I dropped a dress size by weightlifting, decreasing volume and increasing density, the mass is the same.

One of my clients has, some time ago, begun taking an injected antidiabetic medication, presumably for diabetes. I haven't asked and don't plan to. Mostly I noticed that when she needed to move a potted plant that felt like it weighted twenty to thirty pounds at most, she had a hard time lifting it, while I didn't have any trouble. While it's true she doesn't lift weights as much as I do, I can't help but think about how much I like that form of exercise for its direct benefits of being able to pick something up, move it, and put it down without issue, and how that's something I'm unwilling to mess with. There's healthy and there's skinny. There's also vanity, which I'm admitting to - without wanting to sacrifice health to get there. My relationship to gravity is secondary to my relationship to my closet and being able to readily find good pants at thrift stores.