Two things regarding last night's biscuits

1. Our new cheese-grater is a transcendent experience. Oh, it's such a lovely little thing. It's got a wooden handle that feels nice in my hand, and you move the grater instead of the cheese, and I don't know if I will ever be using our old cheese-grater again. So much quicker. So much easier. Requires hand-washing because of the nice wooden handle, but it's so easy to hand-wash that I can't think this will be a significant drawback.

2. This particular biscuit recipe had been sitting in my recipe file unused. It was for Parmesan-basil biscuits. I thought that white cheddar and garlic would go better with the rest of dinner. They were fine. Fine-ish. They were quite edible, and in fact 11 of the dozen were et by the housemonkeys, the godchildren, and their parents last night. But they were thoroughly uninspired and not the least bit what a fresh, warm garlic-cheese biscuit should be.

"You know what I think is wrong with these?" I said, chewing on the last of my biscuit. "I suspect, in retrospect, that the recipe may have been written attempting to be low-fat."

"Hey!" said Robin. "No name-calling!"

In Which We Declare a Holiday

It is, however, a holiday with homework.

Here's the thing: this stupid vertigo crap has been going on for quite some time now. And February 13 will be the one-year anniversary of my visit to the current clinic to get test results and make a plan for PT and like that. I am having some difficulty with the length of time this has gone on, but frankly I don't feel able to talk about that very much here right now.

So what I'm doing instead is declaring February 13 the holiday of One Year Closer to Balance. We don't know yet how long this will take or what exactly the end state will be, but we know we're one year closer than we used to be. Think of it like it's my birthday! Only without cake or presents or funny hats. And instead of observing something fun like an arrival on the planet, observing something unpleasant continuing to go on for at least the near-term future! Um. Perhaps I will rethink this lack of cake and funny hats.

Anyway. Homework. What I would like you all to do--and any of your friends and family who want to, the more the merrier--is think about balance in your lives. It applies in all sorts of places. So I would really, really appreciate it if you could do something to bring about a little more balance in your own life, and then come over to my lj to comment or write me an e-mail to tell me about it. It could be very literal, doing a few yoga poses or balancing your checkbook. Or it could be a lot more abstract than that. Leave work on time that Friday to give non-work activities more of their place in your life. Read hard SF if you've mostly been reading high fantasy. Spend more time by yourself if you've been feeling pushed into more extroversion than you have available. Call your grandmother if you feel like you haven't had enough time with family and are lucky enough to still have one. Balance, balance, balance.

Please? This is frankly pretty hard for me, and I would kind of like to put it in a larger context rather than feeling alone with it.

(I will bring this up again, so you don't have to remember all this time by yourselves.)