Did some kitchen cleanup before it got too hot to work in there. Made a jug of peppermint green tea with a squeezing of lime and ginger, put it in the fridge to chill. Served myself a first glass of it with which to take the morning's meds. I'll have the rest throughout what promises to be a scorcher of a day, as hydration and caffeine boost. I have a bowl of raw oats beside me, in oat milk w vanilla (begone, high blood pressure!). I have the manuscript of T'aint open and have done a bit of writing. Aiming to get through chapter 4 by end of day today, though experience tells me that goal is about 20 times too high. In a few minutes I'm going to strip the remains of the meat from yesterday's twice-cooked chicken in spicy peanut sauce, and stir-fry it with greens. In addition to writing, I also have to prep this week's classes for the creative non-fiction course I'm teaching at OCAD U. this summer, critique a manuscript for one of my private mentorships, and run a couple of errands that I've put off for too long already. Profuse thanks to the people who helped get my bicycle to me and helped me mend it. I have wheels again for the first time since 2008!

Now, to help my heroines escape a bad guy.

One of the toughest parts of being a freelancer is the interminable wait between when you submit the invoice and when the cheque arrives.  I am currently in one such slough.

But my mother is a woman of extraordinary talent and inventiveness, and she seems to have passed some of her skills on to me.  Because I, my friends, am the queen of stone soup; hell, in a pinch, I can even make it without the stone.  People read my meal status updates and don't realise that I often make those meals from the fourth iteration of last week's leftover rice, a handful of beans, and some spices.

Today's lunch; curried channa spiked with capers and goji berries (I only used a little of both of them as flavour enhancers), seasoned with garlic, cardamom, creamed coconut, homemade pepper sauce, and lavender and bigleaf thyme from my little container kitchen garden.  Served over mung bean coconut rice. I'm eating it as I type this.  It's pretty, delicious, and filling.  Eat my dust, late paycheque.

My old high school friend Janice sent me this. I don't remember writing it, much less that it was published in the yearbook. I was probably 14 or 15 at the time, and the school was St. Hugh's, in Jamaica (I went to four high schools in four different countries).

Thank you so much to everyone who braved cop assault and torrential downpours to come out to Verdant last night.  It was lovely to read to a friendly crowd and catch up with old friends.  And OMG, the readings and performances!  Master taiko drumming, heavy metal haiku, real and fictional life stories in poetry and prose, pouring the tea on the summit leaders' wives.  Lots of laughter, some tears, lots of hootin' and hollerin'.  The night was a healing balm.  And I believe all the performers were able to come away with a little change from the take at the door.  Thank you so much to writer Anna Camilleri for creating a night of verdancy.

Heading out now to give a reading at Verdant: Queer Writers on the Verge. Toronto folks; see you there?

My act of protest against the G20 today was to choose to wander my own city as freely as possible while watching gangs of cops on every street corner stopping and searching people.  It doesn't amount to a hill of beans as an act of protest, but today, it's what I got.  It showed me that I need to step up the level of police presence in T'aint, my novel-in-progress.  And I need to give them bulletproof vests, and I need to have the sound and sight of helicopters ceaselessly circling above, and the distressing Blue Meanie howl of cop car sirens as they pull over yet another car.  And I absolutely need to include the sight upon which I stumbled; an empty Canine Unit vehicle parked outside a doughnut shop full of cops.  I laughed as reality synched with stereotype, but I turned my face away from their view as I did so.  These guys have been given the right to seize and detain pretty much without having to justify themselves, and they've been doing so with a will.

Now, on to the pretties; I wandered the shore of Lake Ontario for an hour or so, taking pictures of flowers (an activity that netted me suspicious looks from a couple of security folks; anyone with a camera is suspect in G20 Toronto).

Okay, so I had one more snark in me.

Anyway: When I go down to the lake in summer, I often see poor little guys like this one:

He was quite dead.  Had been so for some time.  I find ladybugs like that, too.  I don't know how they end up there.

Been having bad fibromyalgia pain, fatigue and brain fog, but I managed 536 words today towards my first final draft of novel-in-progress T'aint.  It's now 77,093 words long, and it'll become a tiny bit longer in a minute; as I was typing this, not yet quite out of the fiction-writing trance, I realised I'd created a perfect place today to introduce one of the elements I want in the story.  Here's a snippet from a few days ago.

"Okay, people," Mrs. Kuwabara called out cheerfully. I'd barely been back in school two weeks since summer break, but I'd already learned that my homeroom teacher Mrs. Kuwabara was cheerful about everything. "The bell's going to go in about ten minutes. Finish up the questionnaire you have in front of you now, because I have one more for you." She handed Jimmy Tidwell a stack of sheets of lavender-coloured paper. He stood up and started handing them out to the class.

Beside me, Ben sighed and rolled his eyes. "Oh, God," he muttered, "I don't want to know myself this well."

"Yeah," I said. "Don't people go blind that way?"

Ben chuckled. Mrs. Kuwabara had decided that it would be a good idea to spend the first week of term doing this boring old self-knowledge questionnaire, a little bit every day during home room period. She'd told us that no-one was ever going to read them unless we wanted them to, not even her, so we should write whatever we wanted.

I re-read the part of the questionnaire I'd just filled in. Mrs. Kuwabara had copied it onto sunshine yellow paper. Mrs. Kuwabara was big on colours. At the top of the sheet, printed in swirly black letters surrounded by scrollwork, were the words:

Five Things That Make You Happy

Holy humidity, Batgirl.  I'm not cooking dinner till the sun goes down.  Back to working on the novel with a fan not two feet from my face.

I love rösti, a traditional Swiss dish of fried grated potatoes, like a plate-sized, buttery hash brown.  But potatoes make David's tummy unhappy.  Cassava (manioc), however, loves him, and that love is mutual.  I like cassava, too.  So I decided to try making rösti out of it for breakfast this morning.  Result? Total, untrammeled success. The trick to the flavour of rösti is cooking it in butter.  If you can't do butter, maybe some other flavourful oil.  My first instinct would be to melt 2 tablespoonsful of creamed coconut in olive oil and cook the dish in that. I haven't tried it, but I suspect it'd work.

The slight mustiness of cassava was brilliant with the butter.  I also added cayenne pepper, fresh garlic and fresh basil.  It was a pretty tasty marriage of flavours.