Making lemonade

Thanks to major accidents on just about every freeway in the Bay Area, it took over two hours to get home Friday night. By the time I got home, it was too late to get the flour and milk I needed for the Swedish coffee cake, so I watched King Arthur (the dvd my coworker lent me, which was Not Too Bad) and worked on this quilt. Saturday I got up early to hit up the bike shop since my rear bike light is m.i.a., the farmer's market and Berkeley Bowl to collect ingredients for the Swedish coffee cake and apple bread (since the coffee cake, which is kind of like a Swedish version of cardomom flavored challah, wouldn't be done in time for Erin's birthday picnic that afternoon).

So I bike home, whip up the apple bread batter, stick it in the oven, hop in the shower and get my stuff ready to head to the picnic only to discover that after 60 minutes, my oven was only luke warm and the apple bread was still just batter. Sigh.

I wrapped up the fancy chocolate I'd gotten to go with the bread in tissue paper and yarn and headed out.

Settling in later for a night of quilting, one of course wants to eat nothing but baked goods because one's oven is out of commission. I tried just skipping dinner since I was still full of chocolate cake, but half way through Wicker Man I got peckish, so I raided the fridge for veggie scramble ingredients and put a little of this and a little of that in a mixing bowl determined to make some kind of savory griddle scones to go with the eggs + vegetables.

Molly called to offer her oven as it turned out she wasn't going to the city after all, so I biked over with two loaf tins of apple bread dough and four dvds. Broken English was a little less cutesy romantic than we were hoping, so we finished Wicker Man instead. Very strange movie, that. It wasn't as girly a night as I might have hoped, but we had fresh apple bread and lemon verbena tea. And let me tell you, Molly's fancy convection oven is an absolute dream.

This morning I found a message on my phone from my manager suggesting I call PG&E about the oven, but as soon as the PG&E man said the technician would be over asap, I came down with the most awful cabin fever. The injustice of being trapped inside indefinitely on what may very well be the last beautiful day of the season! It is the end of November, but I'm in my lightest skirt and a sleeveless shirt and not cold in the slightest.

So I inspected the fire escape, found it to be very safe-looking and brought a chair, my quilting supplies, and some new episodes of RadioLab out on my ipod and sewed in the sun watching for the PG&E truck.

PG&E showed up after 45 minutes / an hour maybe. Bless them. And now I'm free as a bird just in time for Steven to show up to play music. Still oven-less, but I can live with that.

Take that, winter and loneliness.