I promised I would have happier things to talk about this week and indeed I do. Lots of little happy things, in fact. I finished a couple of books last week, finished knitting the Jinkies arm warmers, tried a fun new recipe, and bought a few fun things as well. We’re all still kind of sad about Chichi, but keeping busy helps.

Speaking of keeping busy, my daughter has largely been coping by rearranging her room and clearing out Chichi’s stuff. Her guinea pigs lived like little kings, their home taking up nearly half her room, so moving it all out created a lot of space. All three of my kids are weirdly obsessed with rearranging and trading their furniture, so this cleaning process involved trading beds with her brother, giving me two sets of storage shelves she didn’t want anymore, and a search for a new “woodsy” bedside table.

We couldn’t find anything suitably “woodsy” at our local thrift stores. Instead, amazingly, we found a matching pair of black end tables for a really good price. I realized my current vintage side table would work really well in her room, so I bought the new tables and gave her that. It looks cute with her nature-themed decor.

After our thrifting trip, I had her take some pictures of me wearing the arm warmers I finished. They’re quite warm and cozy. I really like them, but I’ve already decided to make them again in red. Once I got going the pattern was really easy, and I really want a pair that shows off the geometric pattern properly. I just got my hank of Vengeance in the mail this morning, so I’ll probably be winding and casting on tonight.

I also finished a couple of books this past week. The first was that biography of Catherine the Great I was working on. The full title is Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman by Robert K. Massie. I think I mentioned before that it’s very focused on her as a person, on her youth and private life and her personal ideals and opinions. It certainly covers her major accomplishments and challenges as empress of Russia, but it spends a lot more time on her personal thoughts and relationships. It was quite interesting, and it portrays Catherine as a very complex and intelligent person faced with a lot of hard choices and personal disappointments. I went into it knowing only the basics of Russian history, so I learned a lot about Catherine as a person and about Russian society and politics during her lifetime.

The second book I finished was Zanoni, a historical novel by Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Funny enough, part of this novel is set during the French Revolution and Reign of Terror, which Catherine the Great watched from afar, so I was reading two very different perspectives on this event at the same time.

Zanoni is both an epic romance and a sort of mythic presentation of Rosicrucianism. The title character, Zanoni, is an immortal member of an ancient order of mystics. He communes with the higher spirits, has the power to persuade and guide ordinary mortals through the force of his personality, can see the future and heal injuries and illness through his deep knowledge of herbal medicine. When he loves with a beautiful and virtuous opera singer, he realizes just how much he has left to learn about life and love and God’s mysterious ways. In the end, he and his wife are caught up in the brutal realism of the Reign of Terror, the very opposite of the solitary mystical life he’s led for centuries.

The plot is pretty straightforward, mostly told without the elaborate twists and turns most gothic novels have. Bulwer-Lytton was trying to show us the mystical delights of Victorian occultism even more than he was trying to tell us a good story. Much of the middle is full of long decriptions of his occult beliefs and reassurances that astral projection and ceremonial magic are pure and Christian and somehow not heretical at all. Then we move on to the brutal details of revolutionary France and the contrast is stark. This book was slow at times, but the farther I read the more I was fascinated by it, and the ending was quite epic and exciting. I’m starting to feel like Bulwer-Lytton is an under-appreciated gem of Victorian gothic writers.

But enough of Bulwer-Lytton and his immortal Rosicrucians. I promised a recipe. I dedided to try this gnocchi and leek soup from Bon Appetit magazine and I’m in love with the lemony broth.

The recipe starts with making crispy leeks and I’m not gonna lie, that did not go well. Leeks are so thin they go from brown to burnt in mere seconds. I burnt the first batch and the second batch wasn’t much better. Everything else about this soup was easy, though.

Last night I made it a second time without the crispy leeks (and with some cannellini beans thrown in for extra protein) and it was wonderful. I like to cook but doing it every day can get boring, so I love finding new flavors and techniques to keep things interesting. Browning a lemon and then simmering it in the broth created a lovely bright flavor; I’m definitely going to try this in other soups as well.

And that completes my list of happier news for this week. On Thursday we’ll be heading down to El Paso for a volleyball weekend, so I’ll hopefully come back with some photos of Texas scenery and beautiful art deco architecture along with some action shots of the tournament. Until next week. –Corvus