Full moon on Friday the 13th. The nuts will be out en masse today.

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October's Martha Stewart Living (yes, I'm a subscriber -- does that surprise you?) has a nice article on lunch clubs. The article is not available online, so I'll summarize. Four wage slaves at MSL found themselves always scrambling not only to make time for lunch, but also to come up with new and healthy ideas for lunches -- as opposed, I presume, to running across the street for a deli sandwich.

After discovering their mutual problem, they had a brainstorm: each one would take a day of the week and be responsible for bringing lunch for all of them. (On Fridays they're left to their own devices.) The article was accompanied by some good-sounding recipes for healthy homemade lunch items that break out of the sandwich-and-chips mold.

Assuming that one could find a small group that shares your tastes and that can cook well, this is a great idea. A major part of its charm is that each participant has to make a good meal only once a week, while getting to eat a different good meal four times a week. I'm jealous of these women for having found such a group. This plan would never work for me in my current situation, since each of my coworkers has a very different sense of what food is all about.

My lunches, while semi-healthy, are pretty boring. It's hard to get worked up about preparing an interesting lunch when it takes an hour to put it all together the night before and you're cooking only for yourself. My situation is complicated by the fact that it's usually too warm to consider a hot lunch.

If you have recipes or links to share for good, healthy, non-hot lunch food, bring 'em on!

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We went to the opening of the Hawaii Craftsmen annual exhibition at the Honolulu Academy of Arts Linekona Art Center last night. What a fantastic show, with all kinds of weird stuff in addition to the traditional vessels and wall art. It was nice to see some of the not-so-well-known artists represented, and some really playful and tongue-in-cheek art shown. I still have a fascination with mixed media pieces -- Joseph Cornell's boxes remain among my favorite pieces of art -- and was pleased to see mixed media in full force. Honoluluites, hie thee there.

I always come away from such things with more inspiration than is probably good for me. Now I want to play with fiber and glass and wood and cloth and, well, just everything.

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Book group is coming up next week, so it looks like I'll spend the weekend cranking onthe second half of All the King's Men. I never take this long to read a book -- I started it at the end of August. It's not that it's bad, because it's not. I'm thinking that it's because I got so confused in the beginning with all the switching around of the timeline and trying to keep all the characters straight.

I was pleased to see the following by Andrew Kirkpatrick on a review site: "Warren halts the linear progression of the main narrative on page 50 and does not pick it up again until page 191. . . . Once Warren returns to his present . . . the plot's pace quickens substantially, and there are many surprising twists and turns before a cataclysmic climax and softer denouement."

I'm on page 209, and I could use some pace quickening, twisting, and cataclysm.
- posted by Lori @ 4:28:00 PM | permanent link | |