Surrogate

Vince and Stephanie took the holiday opportunity to go Back East for a couple of weeks. So I have been staying at their place and taking care of their cats. That's actually most of the reason I started this blog; I'm in someone else's house without all my usual distractions and my friends are out of town.

Cooking in someone else's house is kind of interesting. I had to run home to get my pie tin, since apparently they don't place as high a priority on baking as I do. You get used to doing things certain ways with the tools that you have, and if the toolset changes a little, you have to, say, roll out a pie crust with a wine bottle. There's no shame in that.

Also, did you know that not everyone stocks sesame oil, nutritional yeast and tofu at all times, just in case? Weird, huh? Thanksgiving dinner turned out great, anyway. I wish I had a camera to take pictures of the tofurky, stuffing, sweet potato casserole, mashed potatoes, sautéed kale, cranberry sauce, and apple pie. After I finished off the apple pie a few days later, I made a pumpkin pie as well.

Later this week I think I am going to do 'butter'y-French style seitan with a red wine and beet reduction. I have a few especially toity recipes that I am going to try out. And if I find a camera in a drawer somewhere, I'll take pictures.

The cats are pretty great. Devo is enormous and friendly and behaves more like a dog than a cat. I think he is smart enough to figure out that being aloof only gets you cred temporarily. Duncan is a beautiful deep grey and he's legitimately shy. He spends most of his time under blankets, though as he gets used to you he'll come out more and warm up. In the presence of any guests, myself formerly included, he would always disappear somewhere. They are really very insistent about feeding time, though. In particular, they wake me up in the morning by knocking my glasses off the nightstand or putting their cold noses on me.



This housesitting venture also coincides with a dry spell at work; I haven't been to the studio/office in a week and a half, and this after working a full week and putting in at least 20-30 hours at the Roller Derby track to get sound and other production elements ready. So after being in high gear, these two weeks are a little disorienting. I've been reading, watching movies, and trying to write some music for the library, though it's a little slow-going since most of my gear is back at my apartment downtown, and I didn't feel like lugging all of it up to Hollywood.



In truth, the setup that I have cobbled together reminds me a lot of the portable composing rig that I put together when I was living in France: it's functional, every thing has its place, but it's just a little awkward everywhere and not at all ergonomic. Of course, in Brittany it was all arranged on a hundred-some-year-old desk, not an Ikea jerker. And the view from my window was a two-hundred-some-year-old cemetery, not the Hollywood Bowl. But still. it reminds me just the same. And I managed to get some writing done on that setup. We'll see.



In Vince's absence I have also been recruited to work on the finishing touches on the audio for the movie we have been working on for, uh, ever. We just had some sync issues so I pulled down all audio files for the whole movie and I am told by the video guy and the director that sync is solid now. It feels good to wrap up a project that big, and now I'm kind of anxious to start whatever is next. The screening is on Friday, though I just got an email saying that now I may have some work that evening. Perfect. Of course. It couldn't possibly work out any other way.