The Ink-Pot and the Palette

I made a gianduja cake--involving six eggs, six ounces of unsweetened chocolate, a cube of butter, a bit of sugar, lots of ground hazelnuts, and only a couple tablespoons of flour--for my mom's birthday today. I've just come home from that celebration, where I indulged in a slim slice of this bitter, decadent goodness.

It's wonderful and powerful to know that I can have just one. Something about de-cluttering my house makes me less interested in cluttering my tummy.

Now I'm sitting in a warm bath liberally laced with soothing magnesium sulfate and scented with frankincense and grapeftuit (a seriously gorgeous fragrance combination). I'm about to watch an episode of Torchwood.

*waves at everyone*

This is the life. If you have to say goodbye to the weekend, this is a very good way to do it.

I had a wonderful dream the other night in which I was attending a wine tasting in a banquet hall of the sort you'd expect in a castle. There was a dais, along which a Last-Supper-esque table was arrayed, with a frankly Christ-like figure at the center dispensing the wine samples.

( Seriously, I dreamed this. )

For the synchronicity: a consultant I'm working with is German and speaks no Mandarin. His wife is Taiwanese and speaks no German. They communicate in English, their common language, and their children are trilingual.

Which is cool in itself. But this consultant overheard me discussing the Pimsleur language-learning method with another coworker today and offered me the use of his Pimsleur Mandarin CD set. These babies cost $250 per level, and he's got three levels that he's willing to share.

I'll drink to that.