Some Thoughts While My Beets Cook

I put some beets in to roast about two hours ago and there they are ... still a-roastin. While I wait for them to be easily piercable, I figured I might as well share some of the random thoughts that have been rattlin' around the old bean.

First of all, and while we're on the topic of beets, which I have an unbounded love for, I'm reminded that I also have an unbounded love for buying any vegetables at all from a farmers market. Cooking and eating them I'm not so fond of. But buying! Buying from the farmers market is so satisfying. With any luck I'll actually eat what I bought this week: Wax beans, zucchini, beets, arugula, mesclun greens, and some honeycrispalicious Honeycrisp apples. If not, meh, I can always buy some more next week. I can hardly wait!

Second of all, my Halloween weekend was Phenom. I went back to my old stompin ground in Capitol Hill to do my farmer's market shopping before the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear. The rally was great! It was a good old-fashioned DC Crowd Feeling Event. We could hear and see (mostly), the weather was perfect, our neighbors were friendly, and the crowd in general was good humored and unfailingly polite. A finer rally has rarely been had. Plus I got to see Ozzy and Kid Rock in concert ... two things I could have sworn on my dead aunt Ethel's grave would never happen. To tell the truth, I wouldn't have been sad if they'd had more Ozzy and less Kid.

The rest of my Halloween weekend was full of parties where I wore my Supergirl costume. It was a pretty awesome costume and a pretty awesome weekend, if I say it myself.



I think my beets are almost done, so I have just one more thought before I wrap up. The other day it was just a normal day. I went shopping to get some hiking shoes for my trip. After I got my shoes I was wandering around the outdoor shopping center. I had been craving the shrimp roll at Coastal Flatts for quite some time, so since I was right there, was a bit peckish, and didn't have a reason to not eat an early dinner, I decided to give into my craving. It was great! Diet coke. Cornbread. Fries with salt. All my favorite things! Afterward, not having much on my agenda I decided I'd see a movie across the way. While I waited for it to start, I sat on a sunny bench and read a really great book. As I was sitting there I thought to myself how much I was enjoying my day. And I reflected that I get to have these types of days pretty regularly. In fact, a day in which I get to do all of the things I want to do, and none of the things I don't want to is pretty typical for me. (The stacks of mail and less than pristine apartment alone attest to this fact). I'm pretty lucky that way, and it occurred to me that instead of being jealous or at the very least slightly wistful looking at the couples out enjoying their day, that I was the one that they (or at least someone, somewhere) should probably be jealous of. I don't want to be like, oh I'm so fab and you should think I'm the bee's knees, but I, we, all of us spend a lot of time thinking about the bad parts of our lives or how our jeans don't fit quite the way we want them to, or how we're not part of a couple on a beautiful afternoon and it just gets to be a habit. So it was a nice sojourn for a little while on my side of the fence where the grass is pretty damn green.