But not in Washington, D.C.
On Thursday, July 3rd, the older brother I never had, Karl Crandall, is getting married to Danielle Dunn, his girlfriend of seven years (eight years? nine?)
I was supposed to fly home today.
I didn't.
I wish I had.
I should be in bed.
I should have been in bed hours ago.
I have to go to work tomorrow morning at midnight - sucks to be me.
But I came home and grilled myself some wild boar, leek and apricot sausages. I've slathered them in homemade dijon & tarragon mayonnaise. Norah Jones is singing Turn Me On. It's raining gently.
"Like a flower waiting to bloom
like a lightbulb in a dark room
I'm just sittin' here, waiting for you
to come on home and turn me on."
Norah's voice is chocolate to my pain au; the mellow strains are like melted Normandy butter running down my chin.
I'm a butter snob. I'm a food snob in general, but I'm a butter snob in specific.
I have Fleur de Sel de Mer Buerre de Bretagne butter for my scones. I have cheesy Normandy butter, made by ripening the cream while warm with cheese cultures, for my pain au chocolate. I have Fife Creamery Butter - a sweet cream butter - from across the Firth of Forth, for melting on seafood. I fry in Derrygold (Irish), make noisette and meunière butter from Presidente (French), which I also slide under the skin of a whole chicken before baking. I spread only Stichell butter-with-no-name on my bread.
How can it be both Stichell and butter-with-no-name? I call it Stichell because Mrs. Stichell makes it from the milk of her Jerseys up in Aberdeenshire; I buy it twice monthly at the Edinburgh Farmer's Market. It comes wrapped in cellophane with a paper label with the ingredients: cream, salt.
Butter. Healthier than any other spread - I knew it all along. I always said that butter was better for you; modern science only just recently managed to prove what my body knew all along. Real cream is better for you than Cool Whip®. Butter is better than margarine.
And that's how Norah sounds: like butter.
Nifty, eh?
Okay, you may not see any change. If that's the case, go empty your browser cache and then reload my site.
Why? Well, Rahmat has been teaching me about Cascading Style Sheets - and you'll notice that his Blog looked much, much prettier than the rest of us.
If anyone is interested in figuring out how to make their site look different, drop me a line here and I'll put up instructions.
Last Saturday was the third Saturday in June.
Why is this particular Saturday better than the second or fourth Saturday?
Last Saturday, and also the first Saturday, were the days on which the Edinburgh Farmer's Market is held. I went there with Dave Duffy, his lovely girl Jenny and Helen Harrington.
The summer solstice is a strange time in Edinburgh.
The sun doesn't set until about a quarter past eleven and it rises around four thirty. The dogs bark more than usual, the birds are hyperactive, the weather changes rapidly during the day and everyone is out enjoying the nightlife. Going out is the pastime of choice in Edinburgh year round; the summer solstice exaggerates this trend enormously.
Last night was actually the day after the solstice. It was a strange night indeed.
The sun is up.
Not just a little up, all the way fully up and shining in my bedroom window.
I cannot sleep.
It always gets like this in Edinburgh in the summer - there is maybe an hour or half an hour of real darkness, and the rest of the time is nautical twilight.
I'm getting six or so hours of sleep and it's driving me crazy.
My sister has written on her brilliant and prolific blog about weight, health, cholesterol and appearance.
This set me a-thinkin' and a postin' and this is what I thought.
I hate ants.
It's not a subtle hatred, not a sly, slanderous loathing.
No, this is a violent and disturbing hatred, at leasit if you're from the Family Formicidae, in which case the simple formula:
My hatred = your death
holds.
