December

Revolutionary mug number 9.

Since I’m still on the Man’s dime, let’s blog! A wake-like dinner with the Adventuress and the Editor last night, the three of us long a writing & dining conspiracy. Cathy is leaving us for the wilderness of the Old North West, a little fish-drying settlement named “Chi-Ka-Go,” or something similar. Nothing but hirsute, gone-native French trappers and well-armed locals notorious for ritual anthrophagy.

And I do mean wake, as in Irish, none of this mourning crap, but celebratory, with the corpse waking to prove it all premature in the midst of the singing! “Finnegan, you bleedin’ bastard, you’re supposed to be dead! Now the pints are on you!” I made a baked pasta casserole with corn, ham, tat soi, onion, garlic, three cheeses, etc. and a hot fudge pudding (fatten ’em before the slaughter, I always say) and the ladies provided copious amounts of work-week vin rouge. Thinking of thirds, I circled back to the stove, and somehow caused the lid of the Cast Iron to fall behind the stove. I had visions of the gas line severing, the building going up in an explosion (now, that would be a way of getting rid of Stompy…) or else the lid plunging through the floor. Damn, that beast is heavy. We wrestled the still warm stove out of its cabinet pocket, and, finding no dead animals back there, rejoiced.