Is a swell tune which you can audit here.
I am a great fan of ceramics, and in fact recently purchased three ceramic pieces (one of them in a silent auction which I thought I wouldn't get, nor was I upset on that score, because someone else had bid above me: but he or she was not present at the time to claim the object, so it went home with me, and now sits, dutiful as any bone, containing pens of various description but not, shockingly, a pewter letter opener): the object described parenthetically, a tea cup and dish, and a vase. Now, one of the reasons I like ceramics is that, for the most part, most ceramic objects are made to be used, funerary urns notwithstanding (oo oo! a chance to quote Lichtenberg!: It is so very modern to place a funeral urn on top of a grave while the body rots in a box underneath. And this funeral urn is in turn a mere symbol of a funeral urn: it is merely the tombstone of a funeral urn.
, which quote was deployed, in a manner not entirely justified by the context, in a short paper written about a white urn in the Benaki museum in Athens, of which paper the TA said that my prose was, if not constipated, something similar—and I agreed, but what of it? What can you do to me now, R-b G-rm-ny?), so it was somewhat ironic that I got the tea thing, since I don't, as a rule, drink tea. I couldn't even put the vase to the use I had planned, wanting to nestle in it some of those irregularly branching, uh, branches with tufty nubbins at each change of direction, which I thought I could get from my mother, remembering that she had some, though they have now been replaced with some less interesting things, or perhaps at Paxton Gate: bootless. There were some such branches at Applewood, and I could have asked what they were called, at least, but I didn't. So now it contains only some wood strips that are the last remnants of the side table I got from two of these people (see if you can guess which!) when one got a job and left, a cane, and a slightly rusty two-foot piece of rebar.
But I was talking about tea, and how this very day I used the cup twice: once for drinking tea, and now for drinking a mixture of whisky, cinnamon, lemon peel, and once-boiling water. If drunk in sufficient quantity, guaranteed to be good for what ails you.
I also, at Applewood, got to watch the butcher-type dude, Guillermo, break down a pig. (Obviously this happened before they opened for service.) After muffing the rear knees a bit, he made my sister, looking on, leave, after which he neatly severed the tendons and twisted them off. The front legs came off much more easily, and from that point on he was extremely quick, moving in time to the head of the line symphony and striking in the big gaps. The head took a bit of doing, but severing some tendons, then twisting the head off, tossing it a bucket so as to use it later for headcheese worked. By this time my sister had returned and they made me break the spine, which was only slightly risible.
I mention this because today I got a bone-in pork loin, which I wanted to debone: it's not the simplest task in the world. I succeeded in the end, but not very elegantly, and in fact one bone remained attached. On the other hand, I got both the loin proper and the tenderloin, and a whole lot of fat, stashed for future rendering in the freezer (I will make deep-fried pork belly confit if it kills me). I wonder what my cohabitants will make of that.
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