Okay, I’m a few days late on my Saturday post.  But I have some really good reasons:

Bob (New Cat’s new name) spent Friday, Saturday, and Sunday at two different emergency clinics. He’s okay, but for about forty-eight hours it looked scary.

There were potentially frightening X-rays, the possibility of his heart being enlarged, terrible anemia, and an odd lab result on one of his liver readings. After more tests, his heart is fine and the one odd liver value is coming down. His red blood cell count is back to normal. He’s home and tormenting Dave (the other tabby) so all there is good.

Then on Sunday, I had vertigo. I’m not talking about, “Ooo, I’m a little light-headed.” I’m talking feeling as if I’d drunk four bottles of tequila, got into one of those human-sized gyroscopes, and then taken a roller coaster ride. To make things worse, I hurled during the urgent care exam. It was mortifying.

I’ve never experienced anything like it. At one point, I couldn’t move my eyes without sending the room into an impressive axis-tilting whirligig. It was one of the worst twenty-four hours of my life.

I couldn’t walk straight. The Dude had to help me walk into the clinic. During the exam, the doctor said he had to ask if I was intoxicated because my physical behavior was so screwed up. (He didn’t really think I was drunk, btw.) I would have been dead of alcohol poisoning long before I drank enough to reach this stage of incapacitation.

There wasn’t much for them to do. They sent me home, and The Dude went out for Meclizine. I took some and, amazingly enough, felt well enough to get out of bed and go lie down on the couch.

Monday I was better, but my balance was still off. I’m good today, just tired. I’m going to the “Dizzy Clinic” next week to start some physical therapy.

I’ve been through this before. I had Benign Paroxysmal Positional Vertigo. My doctor explained this as the rocks in your head going where they’re not supposed to. They basically treat your head like those kids’ puzzles where you try to get the ball bearings into the little holes. It’s less fun than it sounds.

And that’s why I didn’t get my post done this weekend.

You got a problem with that? Come on over to my house. I’ll spin around a couple of times, and we’ll see what happens . . .

Sometimes the world is so postmodern it hurts my brain. This is a group called The Wrong Trousers (Wallace and Gromit!) which performs a version of Video Killed the Radio Star on harp, mandolin and stand up bass. Thanks to Karen Meisner for the link.

One of the things my father and I have in common is a love of kitchen equipment. Pots. Pans. Pie crimpers and ramekins and really handsome mixing bowls. When I was a kid we had a catalogue of kitchen supplies and gear that my father and I would pore over it together, admiring things we were unlikely ever to possess. A couple of times when we were both in New York we’d go downtown to restaurant supply stores and wander through the aisles, examining the stainless steel and the cast iron and the industrial-strength mixers and pasta machines. “Look at the design on this!” “That’s one hell of a handsome bowl.” “Who thought this up?”

Now that we’ve sold the Barn, we can afford to redo our kitchen, which was last fixed up sometime in the early 70s. Can I tell you how I rejoice at the notion of four reliable burners and an oven that reaches and holds the desired heat? But redoing the kitchen will take time and thought and aggravation as well as money. Oh, and patience, never my hallmark. So, in the meantime, I’ve bought myself a toy, a sort of Promissory Token of my someday kitchen: a stockpot. A twenty-quart stockpot.

When I make chili or soup I like to make a lot at once so that I can freeze it for those evenings when I have to feed people and am uninspired. Until I got the new stockpot, I used the largest pot I had–my canning pot, a 24-quart black-speckled-enamel steel pot meant for immersing multiple jars in a hot water bath. It’s a fine pot for its purpose, but not so good for chili, since the thinness of the metal pretty much insures scorching, which adds an unintended and unappealing flavor. So yesterday I made enough chili for dinner for the family, plus five more dinners (all tucked away in the freezer in the basement). No scorched flavor! I was moved to make bread to go with the chili, and the house smelled several varieties of gorgeous all afternoon long.

I do drive my husband a little crazy, since (except when baking, which has certain chemical requirements which, unmet, will guarantee failure) I am an extremely improvisational cook. Chili, chez moi, includes meat, chilis, beans, onion and garlic. It can also include, in no particular order or amount, green pepper, carrot, dried apricots, basil, cumin, thyme, beer, wine, cinnamon, rosemary, lemon peel, olives, and whatever else happens to be around the house. So the taste of my chili (sans scorch) varies from batch to batch. I am married to a gustatorial conservative: if he likes something, he wants it the same way it was last time and the six times before. No matter how much he likes each batch of chili, he has to grapple with the fact that the next batch may well be different. Not wildly different–I’m not making calves-liver-and-grape-jelly chili, the fundamental things still apply–but it’s different. So the upside of the new stockpot is that I can make more unscorched chili at once, and the man can have five or six meals of the same chili before he has to get used to a new batch.

With my shiny, new stockpot everybody wins! How often in life can you say that?