I hear the Groundhog saw his shadow yesterday. No surprise there; winter's never going to end at the beginning of February. I'd count us lucky if it's over in six weeks, really. Maybe the climate's different in Punxsutawney, PA, but Feb 2 seems overly optimistic for Boston.
We drove out to the 'burbs yesterday: Concord and Burlington, MA. I bought this quilt at Upstairs Antiques, the same place that Stephen got me a suitcase and Stephen's mom got me a cake stand for Christmas. They had lots and lots of old blankets and quilts there, but this one jumped out at me for the incredible variety of fabrics and the sheer amount of (wo)manpower that went into it. It's a Postage Stamp quilt, which means that it's made of thousands of stamp-sized squares of fabric, all pieced together in a perfect grid. It has a little damage: the binding is frayed, a few squares are unraveling, and there's a small hole in the center square. Some past owner had covered the latter with a huge, bizarrely incongruent apple-shaped patch (??), which I painstakingly removed. I'm not sure how I'll fix the hole, but even the batting looks better than that patch.
One of my resolutions this year was to read more. I hardly ever read books for pleasure anymore. I read the New Yorker and Newsweek religiously, and lots of blogs and articles online, but rarely a book. I'm going to try to read one per month. In January, I read Eats, Shoots & Leaves, which explained away a lot of confusion I had about the Oxford comma and other niceties of punctuation. Yesterday, I bought The Omnivore's Dilemma, which comes highly recommended. I've just started it but am already glad that we're planning to get a CSA share this summer.
We also visited the (Famous) Concord Shop, where I bought a non-stick ("anti-adherent") madeleine pan. Stephen got me a regular madeleine pan a couple of years ago, but I've never gotten the hang of pre-greasing the thing, so my cookies always end up looking like torn sponges when I try to remove them after baking. I got interested in making these again when I saw Ratatouille a few weeks ago. You know the scene where the food critic bites into the ratatouille and flashes back to his childhood? That's an allusion to Proust and the madeleine in Swann's Way, right? Anyway, now I'm all excited to make some cookies. Cookies that don't disintegrate in the pan and break my heart.
