Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

I believe that the single most wonderful sensation — or at least one close to the top of the list — is that of drinking cold water when you’re thirsty… that feeling of relief when the dry and withered tissues inside you become engorged with life once again. Next to our fish pond we have a big leafy plant which, after periods of not-being-watered neglect weakens and starts to droop and soften and shrivel. Upon noticing that the soil it lives in is as dry as dust we thoroughly soak it, and in only a few minutes it comes back to life, its stems becoming strong and firm again, lifting its big leaves off the ground and doing its best Lazarus impression. It’s really quite amazing. I’m sure it’s experiencing just what I’m talking about.

On the whole I prefer clean, simple, pure flavors much more than complex flavor textures, water being the purest of all. Yesterday I picked up some golden raspberries on the way home from dropping Caitlin off at work (as well as some blueberries, which I’m eating right now, and some marvelous looking baby carrots — the real kind, not just big carrots whittled down — for later). You might notice in the background that there’s a swank new 24″ LCD panel sitting next to my old one. I just sold my computer and upgraded to a new i7-based (eight CPUs!) with plenty of memory (eight gig) that I’m sure will be a ton of fun to program on — that machine is currently being injected with all my files, flying through the air as, to my surprise, the machine comes with wireless even though it’s a desktop. I also treated myself to a fancy Logitech keyboard that not only lights up for midnight coding, but has a display that does things like tell you your CPU load, the time, or what media is playing.

It totally blows my mind how powerful a computer you can buy for a remarkably small amount of money, and the speed at which that power has grown. I’m both eager to see what computers will be over the next few decades, and a little frightened.

Now back to food. I tend to cook a very plain fish… A few days ago I made a salmon meal that turned out extremely well. I made a marinade with fresh squeezed lemon, a little salt, a tablespoon of brown sugar, some grapefruit juice, and a hefty amount of fresh grated ginger and freshly chopped garlic, in which the salmon rested for the day (which caused it to cure, just a little bit, a la ceviche). I cooked it in a pan with plenty of butter and served it alongside sugarsnap peas, broccoli, and asparagus with some really nice pre-cooked noodles that Caitlin got. I was worried that it wasn’t going to turn out because Caitlin was on an important phone call and it was in the pan longer than I thought was right, but it turned out to be exactly perfect — were it not for the call, it would have been undercooked.

So good.

SO GOOD!

I think one of the reasons that I so love food and drink these days has to do with pain. As the condition progresses, my senses are increasingly inundated with agony. Bright lights and luminosity changes hurt. Sound is even worse, and touch is worst of all. But taste and smell are, for now, unaffected, which makes it the one thing that I can enjoy unadulterated. I am very afraid of the day when that slips away and I’m left with nothing that has not been corrupted. Don’t get me wrong — I still find joy in everything that I do and in every moment, and I try not to dwell on the negative.

Speaking of sensation, I noticed something funny today. As you may have noticed, I got a new pair of headphones, my first set of really effective active noise canceling ones. There’s plenty of racket in this studio — banging pipes, the hum of ceiling fans and computer fans, water rushing through the exposed pipes, clacking keyboards, the bubbling white noise from the fish tank — but with the headphones on it becomes a rather eerie silence. Anyway, you know how if you’re playing Guitar Hero for a while, with its constant downward scrolling of notes, that if you stop and look at the stationary real world it seems to be floating in the opposite direction (since your brain has gotten into the habit of compensating for expected motion)? Well, after wearing the headphones for an hour I got up to walk to the kitchen to grab the aforementioned blueberries, and I thought to myself, “what is that thundering swishy sound?”

I realized a moment later that it was my feet. How quickly silence can transform the world into a deafening cacophony!

With Nefarious off enjoying Disneyland (and, I am told, trying to pull the “but daddy lets me” scam, haha, to coerce her mother into doing her bidding), Caitlin and I are going to take a rare date night, beginning shortly with going to see The Wolfman (my desire for that being stoked by this video of a bear that walks like a person). One of my favorite conveniences in seeing movies in this modern world is the small blessing of being able to buy tickets online and print them at home. It means that I don’t have to worry about getting to a new movie that might sell out early, and that I don’t have to stand in line at all — standing in lines being something that I really despise doing.

Other than that, I anticipate sleeping very well tonight. I haven’t been getting a whole lot of sleep the last few days due to discomfort, but I think I’ve crossed the threshhold into being so deliriously tired that even if goblins crawled into bed and gnawed on my legs — something that many nights I could swear is actually happening — that I would blissfully snore through it. I think drifting off to sleep in a comfortable bed with Caitlin at my side is up near the top of my “best things list” as well.