domesticity and my mother

i have a new kettle!

isn't it shiny? mom sent it in the mail last week to replace the piece of crap one i took with me to seminary that even then didn't have the whistler anymore. so now she sends me one that costs apparently over $50 which is comparable to the price of the electric, full-on british one i bought for her almost a decade ago. (now that i think about it, that thing has held up extremely well)

so i get all excited because mom sent me a wicked-nice kettle as a present, and then she shares with me that it was a free gift to go along with the really expensive dutch oven they just bought (this is also similar to the time she sent me a curtain and pillow she proudly picked up at a garage sale). not knowing which size they got i'll just have to give you an estimate that it was probably around $200. anyhow, i ask my 67 year-old mother why she decided now was the time to finally get one of these things and she replies, "well, i want to make beef boulonnaise." mother saw Julie and Julia a few weeks ago and has been mildly obsessed ever since. after first asking if i had a copy she bumbled about trying to find one. last night came the request for me to pick it up for her off of amazon.com because "it's $20 cheeper there than in the stores, but when i keep putting in the password i swear we have, it says that it's wrong." i love my mother. usually she functions better than this. and i'm not going to let her pay me back for this book. i actually said that i'll just get two and keep one for myself, but she said, "oh, no. i'll just do this recipe and send you the book soon so you can have it." i love my mother. i never know what she is going to say.

so apart from my imminent (cooling) english breakfast tea, this day off proves to be full but, i suspect, good. i get to clean my house (always a bonus), put curtains back up (no clawed kitties to climb them anymore, and i bought replacement rods finally), put up first time curtains to block my living room from the street (need to be hemmed) and somehow go pick up a frig. did i mention that my frig has been increasingly broken for the last 3 weeks or more? no? well it has. i dislike this. and my landlord, while a really nice guy, is so not on top of things at all. i'm thinking that within 2-3 weeks i might have a new frig. so i'm glad for the mini-frig loan. let's see if we can put it in my little civic now. this should be fun.