I spent an hour at the farmers' market in Hamilton last weekend searching for cocktail ingredients and found only passion fruit juice, not that I wasn't thrilled with that, and bought a tote bag at Roots that was filled with bubble wrap so that I'd have something to cushion the bottle of juice in my suitcase, and did not buy the sheepskin rug that I wanted at Ikea because I wouldn't have room in my suitcase due to the bubble-wrapped juice, and I got it home and discovered that there are no recipes in "Cocktail Genius" containing passion fruit juice that do not also call for a whole passion fruit, muddled up, or passion fruit syrup, or some other impossible-to-find passion-fruit-containing thing. Also, the juice was best before mid-April, so I had Pat open it for me, sniffed it (musty), and poured it down the drain.
I made a Cielo instead this afternoon, containing vodka and creme de cassis (which I own), and lime juice and ginger ale (easy to obtain), and it was very good.
Oh, yes, it also has Peychaud's bitters, which I found in California. Bitters contain 35% alcohol, something I did not know, and Peychaud's bitters, which are anise-flavored, originated in New Orleans. People would add them to their brandy or cognac, to enhance the flavor. Did you know that?
Do you care?
I keep dreaming about living, or vacationing, beside the ocean. It is crucial that I do this for some reason. I must not stay in a cabin a few blocks from La Jolla Shores and surf for a few hours and photograph flamingoes at SeaWorld; I must not take the kids to Universal Orlando Resort to the new Harry Potter Theme Park, stay at a hotel, and go to the beach for the day. I must reside beside water, for weeks, for a month; I must not leave.
We discovered today that there is a very nice year-round home for sale on a perfect lake near Atikokan, where we could launch our boat, swim, eat nachos and salsa on the dock, jump in the sauna. Only it's worth the same as our house, and we're in the middle of installing hardwood floors, and houses take years to sell around here, so it's useless even to think about relocating. I get so restless. Nothing is ever good enough. We have a great place here, only it's not on the water, so I must dream, nightly, about living on the water, to foster my dissatisfaction.
Housing market aside, just do it. Or just consider doing it.
ReplyDeleteI'm reading "The Happiness Project", not because I think I need to be more happy, but because I think I want another perspective on what happiness really is. It really struck me when she wrote:
"Other people's radical happiness projects, such as Henry David Thoreau's move to Walden Pond or Elizabeth Gilbert's move to Italy, India, and Indonesia, exhilarated me. The fresh start, the total commitment, the leap into the unknown - I found their quests illuminating, plus I got a vicarious thrill from their abandonment of everyday worries.
But my project wasn't like that. I was an unadventurous soul, and I didn't want to undertake that kind of extraordinary change. Which was lucky, because I wouldn't have been able to do it even if I'd wanted to. I had a family and responsibilities that made it practically impossible for me to leave for one weekend, let alone for a year.
And more important, I didn't want to reject my life. I wanted to change my life without changing my life, by finding more happiness in my own kitchen. I knew I wouldn't discover happiness in a faraway place or in unusual circumstance; it was right here, right now - as in the haunting play The Blue Bird, where two children spend a year searching the world for the Blue Bird of Happiness, only to find the bird waiting for them when they finally returned home".
Happiness. Mine is right HERE, right NOW. Where is yours?