Three Things: The Home Edition

Chukairiyaan, originally uploaded by yaznotjaz.

1. Waking up at 8am, realizing it's a Saturday, and burrowing back under the warm covers to sleep in until 10:30. Washing my face, and then promptly sitting down at the computer. I check emails and weblogs while my mother pulls up a chair beside me and flips through catalogues and coupon books. We discuss an impending visit to IKEA (she's never been!), and she tells me The Sister is on a newfound campaign to add a cat to our household. A cat would be nice, says my mother wistfully. She fondly recalls our previous next-door neighbor's cat, Daisy, who used to keep my mother company in the garden.

2. I wash and condition my hair, then actually take the time to comb it out, too - albeit abruptly, top to bottom rather than the other way around, so that my impatient tugs result in lots of gnarled hair in the wastebasket. Still, it got combed. Since I'm a firm adherent of the "I don't believe in combing my hair" philosophy, today's effort is highly newsworthy and must be mentioned, especially considering I have conversations about hair quite rarely anyway (my favorite conversation is still that latter one, with a four-year-old, no less). I then sit in a pool of sunshine on the living room floor, willing my hair to dry while reading the last few chapters of John Knowles' A Separate Peace, a book I love but have never reread since finishing it in one evening for my tenth-grade English class, eight years ago. In one passage that makes me smile, Gene says:

After the lights went out the special quality of my silence let [Phineas] know I was saying [prayers], and he kept quiet for approximately three minutes. Then he began to talk; he never went to sleep without talking first and he seemed to feel that prayers lasting more than three minutes were showing off. God was always unoccupied in Finny's universe, ready to lend an ear any time at all. Anyone who failed to get his message through in three minutes, as I sometimes failed to do when trying to impress him, Phineas, with my sanctity, wasn't trying.

3. Lazily sitting around the dining room table after we've just finished dinner, The Sister looks around at each of us individually and asks, wide-eyed, "Anyone want chocolate cake?" I laugh at her excitement, and she adds, "I've been looking forward to this all day!" Our mother, ever the practical one, advises that we save the dessert-consumption for after taraweeh [the nightly congregational prayers held during Ramadan], but the daddy-o - never one to refuse dessert - overrules that suggestion with an authoritative, "Well, in that case, we can have two! - one dessert now, and another one when we get back from taraweeh." A quick peek into the refrigerator makes me laugh at all the choices available to us: apple-caramel-pecan cake, chocolate ganache torte, apple pie, chocolate-orange sticks, and, in the freezer, two pints of ice cream, one of which (my new favorite: Ben&Jerry's American Pie) merited an excited email from me to fellow ice cream fan 2Scoops months ago, raving about how it was "basically exactly what it sounds like - apple pie with ice cream!" Just for 2Scoops, I would like to add that the American Pie ice cream is still SPECTACULARICIOUS.