Today, it rained. Relentlessly. The only time it stopped was during the half hour in which my son and his classmate had to walk up to my office after school. I had told him that if it was still raining “like this” that morning, that he could call me and I would come pick them up. So, he was grumpy when he arrived.
There was no inspiration on tap for making dinner when we arrived home. Frankly, I’m out of ideas and back to recycling meals and sick of everything I can come up with. My kids answer SUSHI to every inquiry about what they want to eat and when smacked upside the head, because enough already! they then answer TACOS. Which, ew. Never having been a big fan of tacos to begin with when I lived on the continent where they had at least originated (okay, sort of), I honestly don’t understand why they are so enamored of the decidedly homogenized Swedish style of Mexican food. We have tacos way too often for my part, as it is. Why can’t they answer something else for once, when asked what they want to eat? Why can’t they answer smoked salmon? Or chicken cordon bleu? Or crab cakes?
So, I threw macaroni in a pot to boil, thawed a package of ground beef, added a packet of taco seasoning, popped open a can of corn niblets, chopped up half a cucumber and a couple of tomatoes and took the lid off the crème fraîche. Anders helped with the meat while I set the table and after everything was served I called the kids into the kitchen for dinner. YUM, they said and dug in. Martin declared, with a delighted smile, “It’s Taco-roni!” Haaa!
I am reading a really good book, The Girl With Glass Feet, a first novel by Ali Shaw. I’m halfway through it and don’t want to know how it ends because that will mean that it has ended. Yesterday I read another, completely different, really good book, What the Dog Saw, a best-of collection of Malcolm Gladwell’s essays for The New Yorker. Both of them feel as if they are cracking my brain open, in a good way. These days, I relish anything that does that. I worry that it happens less and less. I worry that my skull has finally fused shut.
In some ways, I guess that’s a good thing: at least the rain won’t get in.