Out, out!

We knew Easter was coming up sometime soon, really. We just didn't realise it was last week, so we didn't organise anything. Himself got some work done in preparation for being away on a work trip and I had a massive clearout, even going through all my jewellery supplies and throwing out and reorganising a whole pile of stuff. I've come to the realisation that I like not having boxes, cupboards or piles of stuff with unknown contents. Strange, given how lax I am at filing and how happy I am to just throw things everywhere (there's a reason why I can probably never live with my brother) but that's the way it is.

In other news, we decided to celebrate Easter by cooking some eggs. I came across a fantastic recipe for 宝袋の卵, eggs in treasure bags, or eggs in deep-fried tofu pockets if you want to be more prosaic. We tried the first one in a pre-made inari-zushi pocket, but it was too small for the egg. I had some abura-age on hand, so we tried that and it was perfect! And we made, um, seven of them in total, including the technically failed but perfectly edible first one. Himself has an amazing internal clock that allowed him to disregard the instructions and pull them out when they were just right, not quite hard but gooey instead of liquid. We used up the remaining inari-zushi pockets by filling them with rice seasoned with goma-shio and yukari, I cooked up some koya-dofu and we had some of the budo-mame I'd made the previous weekend. We were about halfway through it when we realised the entire meal was soy, rice and egg.



The only other remarkable thing we did was walk over the ridge to the lake and take the ferry over to Zurichhorn for a walk around the park. Photos are here! It amuses me that people go down to bikinis to sunbathe by the lake, and slightly surprises me that underwear seems to pass for bikinis here. There were several women in their bras, and one in bra and knickers.

I also got a lovely gift from a friend who spent Easter unwinding in Nice - the supreme de tomates makes an amazing pasta sauce. ^_^



Other than that, just been thinking. (Working too! But thinking...) While it's good to reexamine things every now and again, pulling the carpet out from under yourself is never fun. It may prove valuable - even necessary - in the long run, but it's never pleasant. I've been having trouble focusing, so I tend to flick back and forth between different things, and one thing I've been doing is reading through a blog written by a writer I kind of used to know when I was doing my first postgraduate degree. She kept on and never gave up on her writing, which I really admire. She had a lot to say about throwing things away and starting again, thousands of words of writing set aside when they just didn't quite work.

The thought makes me go cold. I've never written that much (not that I write anything anymore, unless you count user manuals and security guidelines) but I cannot imagine just... starting over. Except that sometimes it is the right thing. I know I sometimes try to stay with things for too long - which has come back to bite me nicely in the shape of a contested invoice from the first accountant I hired here, who I never really trusted but convinced myself to go along with until there were issues with my business registration. Sometimes, things are hard and that's just the way it is. But sometimes they're hard because you're doing them wrong. And sometimes, they're hard because they're the wrong thing to do. I just need to figure out which one is in play. I can see why people want to believe in fortune-telling. I miss my magic 8-ball.

She also has a wonderful post on the cold-blooded necessities of being a writer, and there's quite a bit of overlap in advice between writing and translating.