Virtually Home

This is a photo of the chicken I cooked tonight, posing with Charlie, the inflatable turkey my parents mailed me a week or so ago. For scale, that inflatable turkey is 16" long. So, in the absence of a (real) turkey (and really the absence of ambition to make a turkey), I decided to roast a chicken, which I'd never done before. By the time I got my plans for roasting a chicken together, it was already 6 p.m. and I was beginning to get hungry, so I decided to just put some olive oil and rosemary and garlic under its skin and go with that. For some reason, it always looked really easy to do this kind of thing when I was watching my mother do it. What I didn't take into account is that chickens have skin that doesn't float freely over their muscles. I'm not really sure how I even thought that was possible -- maybe I just always missed the part where my mother must have spent several awkward minutes pulling the skin loose and listening to the fascia tear. I'm ...

So this photo doesn't actually have anything to do with today, but since I didn't take any good photos today and they have been such a hit...Well, it's a shot I took at St. André yesterday as the organ concert was sort of ramping up. I spent the day mostly at home. I did have an adventure to the post office while trying to mail some stuff internationally, which turned out to be a sort of spectacular demonstration of either my incompetence or theirs...but probably both. When I walked in, I looked around and decided I should probably get in line. Then I was promptly yelled at to use the automated machine. Having had several frustrating experiences in France that were based around the apparent unwillingness of French people to use automated services when they could otherwise be helped by a person, I got out of line and made a brave attempt. The machine, predictably, spoke French. Probably better than I do. I navigated my way through the buttons -- yes, I want to se...