this post is not about diapers

I made this pumpkin soup today. It's good, although very time-consuming, especially if one roasts, peels, seeds, and purees one's own pumpkin. It's also a ridiculously large amount for one wee me here in the apartment, so I'll have to find some friends to feed sometime soon. If I try to eat it all myself over the next week (I know from experience), I'll eat it daily for about 2.5 days, then get so sick of it I'll never be able to eat it again.

Yesterday was a three-state, two-borough day that knocked me whiskers off. The travel (4 hours of driving & 6.5 hours of airport/airplane/taxi) plus the job interview (me in a suit!) in the morning and a partially-blind episode* at 1 a.m. made skipping income tax this morning really what could only be described as necessary.

I think the job interview went well, but I am competing with 7 hyper-qualified applicants and it all comes down to (as they said) whether the boss liked me best. If that's true, then just getting the interview was the hardest part/part over which I had the most control and whether I get the job will be based on an entirely subjective judgment. So there's no point in worrying about it, really, although I want it more than any other job I could get right now. That is, I want it approximately as much as that other job for which I interviewed a month ago now. That one won't be making job offers for another few weeks, so the waiting continues. I should hear whether I'll be offered this one this week or next. All fingers crossed, please. Substantive job descriptions will be provided once it's all over.

Other parts of the weekend were less deadly serious, and didn't require a suit. I kicked it with my niece and nephew (+ the obligatory sister, brother-in-law, and parents) at the Shrine Circus in Minneapolis, and we made puppets from felt and buttons. My mother had brought all of her puppet-making materials (you'd be surprised) from Nebraska, and we spent a good chunk of Sunday on our puppets. My puppet had a long teal tongue, a twirly teal-and-orange nose, and shiny sequin pupils. Kieran, my four-year-old nephew, named it Clapton (apparently he made this name up, never having plausibly heard of Eric C.). Clapton stayed in MN with Kieran and Emily and his puppet cousins. My niece Emily (8), with some help from my sister (and her mother) Mary-Ei, made a terrific undersea lizard monster with spiky purple, um, spikes on its back, beady black eyes, white felty teeth, and what we all thought was a mouth with character. The people part of the circus was very impressive--five dudes on motorbikes zipping around a steel ball (see picture), a human cannonball, the usual tight-rope walkers (sans net, to my displeasure), jugglers, and butterfly women dancing on ropes were all pretty terrific. It was sad to see the animals, though. I don't like the animal part of circuses. The kids were agog, though, especially Kieran, and that was fun to see.

oh la la, it's time for homework and bed.

. . .

*In which I read in bed while lying on my right side with my right eye closed, thus reading only with the left, rinse and repeat till tired, get up, turn off the light, and can no longer see out of my left eye. Not to fear, I underwent a literal (in one sense or another) battery of medical tests last year, which discovered....nothing! So since it's gone by the time I wake up in the morning, I just try not to read that way and when I forget (as I did last night), I just treat it like a bad drunk and sleep it off.