Monday, June 11, 2007

Oh, dear, I feel faint

I’m back at work, slugging it out with the tissue box and my own squeaky sinuses. My mystery illness has been a real time-sucker, not to mention being generally uncomfortable and inconvenient. I just about fell asleep on the train to work this morning—and that’s after more than eight hours sleep last night, a nap yesterday afternoon, and two sick days last week. What more does my body want? Revenge for too many years eating crackers and cheese for dinner, methinks.
Anyway, it was a nice weekend, mostly, except for when I was in bed with a headache. We went to the SF Farmer’s Market on Saturday morning and rubbed shoulders with the organic, wealthy set and their color-coordinated adora-tots. The market is quite the trendy spot to grab a coffee and wander around getting a tan—yes, the sun was out and it was gooood.
The food is beautiful, eminently displayable, the sort of thing that you’d see in a still life by one of the Dutch masters, capturing every drop of dew on a pear leaf, the glassy texture of the fresh cheese. Most of it we couldn’t really afford. I mean, we could buy cheese for $27 a slab and cured salmon for $75 a shrink-wrapped packet, but then how would we pay the rent? (And wouldn’t you know it, in the middle of my mystery illness the rent check was due and I forgot all about it; the landlords’ suspicions about us have now been confirmed.) So we were a bit choosy, plumping for a sourdough loaf that cost just a bit more than it would at Trader Joe’s, our kinda pirate-themed supermarket, and cherries for a mere $5 a pound, and peaches for $3.75 a pound. And doughnut muffins, which were a deal, actually, at $1.15 a piece, and an innovation I can get behind. Basically, they are doughnut dough rolled in sugar and baked in a muffin pan to avoid the deep fry fat of a traditional doughnut. And yet, they still taste exactly as doughnut-y as you’d want. It’s a neat trick.
And with that, I’m all tired and schlumpy. Damn mystery illness.