Scrambled eggs are so simple that most people don’t know there’s a way to make them. I have often seen people break eggs directly into a hot frying pan and stir frantically until they had a pile of tough, dry crumbs. This does not produce a yummy meal, but scrambled eggs can be very yummy.

Eggs
1 tbs milk or water per egg
Butter to taste
Salt and chili (not cayenne) powder
Cheese (optional)
Heavy frying pan (use a cast iron pan for more nutrition unless you can taste the iron)

Melt butter in the frying pan on medium-low heat.

Beat the eggs and milk or water gently with a fork. You aren’t going for perfect uniformity and you certainly don’t want froth.

Pour the eggs out into the frying pan… and don’t touch them. Not right away. If you want you can lay thin slices of cheese in the liquid egg at this point. Let them cook gently until the bottom 2-3 mm are set. Use a spatula to gently push the set egg into a heap in the middle of the frying pan, letting the liquid egg flow back out to set. Continue until all the egg is set.

Sprinkle with salt for taste, chili powder for looks.

Eggs cooked this way will be soft and delicious. If soft eggs aren’t your thing, put a lid on the frying pan and leave it off the heat for a few minutes to let the eggs continue to heat.

Eat with hot buttered toast and maybe ketchup. Ketchup sounds scandalous, but scrambled eggs are comfort food. If you loved them with ketchup when you were a little kid, then let yourself enjoy the ketchup now.

One of the ducky things about a beloved who works at home is that you can receive cheery mid-day pictures like this one of Plume in her bed next to Mark’s desk.

The other night a former veterinary technician described to me all the silliness people subject their animals to. Apparently they had clients bring in dogs with hairpieces.

Immediately my feverish little mind set itself to inventing a context for this to make sense, and succeeded. I pointed out that the usual way of making dogs look human is through breeding for brachycephaly (round foreheads and bulgy eyes), squashed faces and floppy ears that look like long human hair. Putting a hairpiece on your dog has a similar effect, but at least the hairpiece doesn’t obstruct breathing or cause ear infections.

“Yes,” said my companion. “Or make their eyes fall out when you whack them on the head!” Apparently boston terriers have very shallow orbits, and being very active are always getting whacked on the head. And then their eyes fall out. She says it’s very gross.

See also: kitty wigs.

The always-delightful Penelope Trunk is writing a series this week. I think it’s going to be about how to deal with work when one has Asperger syndrome oneself.

I showed the first article to my beloved.
http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2009/09/29/this-weeks-series-how-to-deal-with-asperger-syndrome-at-work/

“Yes, I’ll get to it. It’s in my blog reader.”
“You follow Penelope Trunk?”
“Of course. She’s the idealized version of you.”

Interesting. That was a nice thing for him to say, right?

One of our tenants gave notice on the weekend and is leaving in, um, ten days.

Rightey-ho, then. Mark is going to spend September making the apartment functional, comfortable and beautiful as only as a storage-and-lighting-obsessed dutchman can, and then we’ll want someone to move in around the beginning of October.

Challenge to my devoted readers: time to bring any latent matchmaking skills into play!

Last night Mark came to bed and Pepe wasn’t there between us. He brought Poupoune into the bed as a substitute, but she isn’t as soft and snore-y as Pepe was. Mark broke down in inconsolable sobs. “I miss Pepe!” “Pepe didn’t want to die!” “He was so happy on his walk.” “He was so helpless. I looked after him!” … and finally, “He needed me.” I cried too, because I was sad for Mark.
 
Today we talked about why he is so much more affected than I am. One reason is Mark’s greater experience of loss, having lost both parents as well as his country and old friends. Intellectually he thinks the decision was probably appropriate, but he feels it to be painfully wrong.
 
Another reason is my own experience of suffering. I spent years trying to get my depression taken seriously so that I could get effective treatment for it, only to be repeatedly told that as long as I could function a little bit that I wasn’t depressed enough—probably not depressed at all. I got treatment after having lived in a dysfunctional relationship for years because I didn’t have the financial or psychic resources to leave; having become unable to do any kind of work; having lost contact with my friends; and having been reduced to walking the sidewalks with tears streaming down my face. As long as I wanted treatment I was denied it. When I no longer wanted it, when I had given up all hope and wanted only to die, it was suggested that I was possibly depressed and would I consider accepting treatment for depression?
 
I am still angry today at having been forced to suffer as much as I did, forced to endure completely unnecessary losses, in order to qualify for intervention.
 
Mark may be projecting his own sense of abandonment, but I am also re-enacting my own story, this time re-written to include the recognition of suffering and need given promptly and lovingly, without begging.