the grass is riz

I finished With No One As Witness this morning. A bit melodramatic at the end perhaps, but wow, what a read! Elizabeth George does not fail her fans! I realized halfway through that I really want to go back to the beginning (13 books ago?) and reread. The characters have changed and grown so much. It would be fun to travel the journey with them again, now that I know where they wind up. A Great Deliverance is the first in the series.

I need something calm and domestic to ease back into the reading world, so I brought Tender at the Bone with me to work today. But it makes me hungry for real and amazing food. After reading the chapter when Ruth goes home with one of her friends from her French boarding school, I now want to go back to Paris and eat foie gras that feels like silk in your mouth; crepes with lemon and sugar so light they melt; the ice cream at Berthillon; the chocolate tart at Café Mimi; the Croque Monsieur at the little brasserie on the corner near our hotel; the fresh baguette and jam and big cups of hot coffee and milk every morning for breakfast. The French have a way of making even a simple ham sandwich sublime. Of course then there was the butcher shop with the horse head hanging outside…those silly Europeans, they’ll eat anything! And I thought I didn’t remember much about Paris. Admittedly it’s a bit more of a blur than Italy or London was, probably because I had NO CLUE what anyone was saying at any given time, but I guess the food did make an impression after all : ) Anyone who knows me knows that, for me, a vacation is largely about the food!

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I just had two hang-ups in a row from the same number at the reference desk. How odd do you have to be to crank call a reference desk? At least ask some obscure question, don’t just hang up!

Also, I just encountered the least intuitive log-in procedure for a piece software that I have EVER seen, involving holding down the Shift key while do any number of other keystrokes to get to the proper log-in screen. I hope we didn’t design that ourselves…