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I did almost everything I planned to, today. No Medieval gravegoods, but a whole other article in temporary lieu. I've read Thursbitch (Alan Garner) and started a novel by Lilith Saintcrow to boot. Never let it be said I overwork! I can read for fun! Mostly, though, I rested today. One day, I'll feel better for all this rest. Until then, I shall do more reading for fun, in between finishing off bits and pieces and writing and sitting at my computer, pretending I know what I'm doing.

I've solved the problem of what my background viewing is going to be over the next few weeks. I went on the library's website and put myself down for vast quantities of DVDs. None of them were on my priority list, but they're all things that I ought to see. This means that, from Monday, Tuesday to Thursday are about teaching and meetings and the rest of the week is writing and dissertation and etc.

That's my next eight weeks all sorted, in theory. Not that they'll stay sorted, but I can try. What this means is that tomorrow I have to do housework. More housework? Housework again? I hate housework.

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Photos! I need your photos!

Ms Cellophane, of course. You have until Wednesday!

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Today started off as a day of the utter miseries. I get these from time to time because of the challenging combination of perimenopause and depression. If I don't take the right vitamins, or get a virus, or things go wrong around me (or all three, as happened this week) then it all becomes a bit of a strain.

I'm much better now, for I asked my mother for a care package.

"What's a care package?" she wondered.

"Whatever you choose it to be," I said. She's still bewildered, but willing to give it a go. So I'm getting one, once Mum has worked out what one is. This helps.

What also helps is food. I have to be careful with food because I need to lose weight (this is not an optional extra - this is for the heart), and comfort foods are not good for weightloss, but I came back from Sydney with truffle and today I did something I have wanted to do for twenty years.

There is a story behind it.

When I was doing my first doctorate, I was in London in a bitter winter (like Canberra, now, in fact) and a nice family offered me a weekend away. During that weekend I got to walk on the North Sea (for it was frozen at that precise point) and was taken to a rather exclusive restaurant where I tasted truffles for the first time.

The chef made me oeuf-en-cocotte and I wondered what the fuss was about. More recently I've been wondering if the problem was not with the truffle, but with the quantity of truffle used in my oeuf. God forbid that the dearest egg I have ever eaten should be rendered ordinary by too little truffle, but there it was, once I started wondering, I had to know.

Sydney had the right sort of truffle (Canberra does, too, for they come from this region, but my ability to get around by myself right now is a bit restricted, and none of my friends currently seem to have time for foodie explorations) and so I bought fully two grams. One gram is busily creating truffle oil and the other I just used, en cocotte.

One gram scraped over three large eggs (for I couldn't find the right equipment* and so had to improvise and the improvisation fitted three or four eggs, but not one or two) and lashings of butter and I had the dish I should have eaten in 1986. .333(repeating) of a gram for each egg gave me at least five times the truffle that the exclusive chef in the UK had used. And it was total magic.

Not only am I much cheered, I immediately emailed a friend asking if she wanted to visit the markets this week, so that I could obtain more truffle. (For those worried about my bank balance, I used exactly $0.50 worth of truffle for each egg. And truffle season is nearly over, so I'm not going to get to do this again often at all. In fact, I was lucky to get to do it once.)

I'm still not happy, but today really isn't a bad day at all, considering.





*If anyone wants to help me sort my cooking equipment, they can score all my unwanted gourmet equipment as a thank you. This is one thing I cannot do terribly easily, so many things I want to use are in hiding.

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I took a long break this evening for long phonecalls and am now contemplating work. This means I haven't yet started, but I will, just as soon as I have a cuppa. I meant to watch TV and work on bibliography, but bibliography has been upstaged by drafting an abstract or two. My life is inordinately exciting. Or it will be, if I can't get those abstracts written.