A good day, mostly

Dear family and friends,

On Thursday, Merwin and I drove to a very quiet NCC, where the library was open but otherwise hardly anything was stirring. I wanted to pick up a book that Alicia had gotten for me from ILL, and I also wanted to xerox some pages from the OED. For the latter task, Veta Ingleton, librarian, and Shunelle Nevers, student aide, sprang to our aid and the 5 pages or so were competently xeroxed on large sheets. I have those very pages in my small-print OED at home, but now, even with the magnifying glass, I cannot read them easily. The entries I was interested in are for my essay: what are the meanings of play, playd [so spelled]. playing and the like in the seventeenth century. All that effort yielded about five words in a footnote, but it is worth it to me.

The ILL book, on the other hand, turned out to be the wrong edition-—right title, wrong publishing date—so Alicia will try again.

After the library, we stopped at Pathmark for a few things, which of course expanded exponentially as we walked around. Then we hurried home so I could make Merwin's mid-day, main meal.

I tried a recipe from the cookbook that Anna J. S. sent me from Alabama: Southern Fried Matzah. I like turning over the pages and reading these very homey recipes, many familiar from my own family. This one worked out well.

Sweet and Hot Chicken: preheat oven to 350.

The recipe calls for 6 skinless chicken breasts with the bones; I used turkey breast cutlets cut into portion lengths.
Mix together 1 can of whole berry cranberry sauce and 1 jar of mild salsa in a long Pyrex baking pan. Add the turkey strips and mix well.
I also added a bag of frozen string beans, so it would be a one-dish meal, with salad on the side.
Bake uncovered for 45 minutes to an hour, until turkey is cooked through. Could anything be easier?

Merwin liked this very much. He ate about 1/5 of it and packed the rest for the freezer. Unlike me, he doesn't like to eat the same thing, meal after meal, but it's great to have little treasures at hand.

I had a vegetarian pizza for both lunch and supper.

I worked on my essay only till the Olympics called. But the Carol Burnett show, which we were flipping to during commercials, actually caught our attention even more. We are amazed at all the manifest abilities and daring on so many fronts.

A nice quiet day, marred only by an increasingly painful right hip. It's better this morning. Of course there were the usual emails, phone calls, and all the rest, including review tickets for a second viewing of Measure for Measure, and the promise of an interview with the director and a copy of her script, as cut for performance. Nice things like that are always flowing around me, keeping this smile on my face.

See you later,
Love,
Bernice