lesson in life #5741: meringue with a fork? don't even think about it

i can feel myself starting to slide again.

after some extremely cathartic discussions with a couple of people from the darbnet list, i feel a little better about the whole deal. well, i guess 'a little less insane' would be a better description, but still. sometimes it helps to give a name to your problems; apparently mine goes by "ultra-rapid cycling type III bipolar disorder." soon, i will gather the courage to see if my health insurance will cover a visit to the psychiatrist so i can try to talk them into medicating me. in the meantime, i'm trying to be more proactive about my coping methods, using some of their suggestions.

actually though, when i force some perspective into my outlook, some actually reasonably nice things have happened recently, most notably that icgs found my great-grandparents's birth certificates! that was the last hurdle that might have prevented completion of the process, but now it's just the bureaucracy of getting all the american certificates translated and notarized. i'm going to be officially italian soon! dual citizenship is going to rock.

and sunday, enno and i finally did the agnolotti, which came out surprisingly well. sure, it was a learning experience, and we made plenty of mistakes, and only slightly averted certain disaster multiple times throughout the afternoon, but it was all in good fun, and despite not being perfect, they still tasted damn good. i also tried my hand at a lemon meringue pie, and the fact that it came out at all has come close to renewing my faith in a higher power. hahaha. nothing short of a miracle could have reasonably saved us on that one, and yet the final result looked and tasted almost perfect. okay, so the principle problem was my lack of an electric mixer, or even a whisk, but we tried hard, took turns (mine significantly shorter than his, to my everlasting shame, but still), and thanks to enno's biceps (see related post from last month), we actually got meringue out of it. but if you have any shred of sanity, don't *ever* try to do it by hand. it's fucking ridiculous.

what was also ridiculous was that enno kept pronouncing it "merengue" (meh-rang-gay), which has absolutely nothing to do with egg whites, but rather is the national dance of the dominican republic. :)

anyway, the sunday before that, i went ice skating with markus, christine, and daniel, which was cool. damn, those things make my feet hurt, though. i'd almost go so far as to declare them the worst failure of engineering since the tacoma narrows bridge. i mean, it doesn't look like it should be that bad, but you put them on, and stand up, and it suddenly feels like you are standing on a knife blade down the soles of your feet.

then on thursday, for movie night, i finally convinced them to watch "the best/funniest movie ever," also known as "what's up doc?" and despite making fun of me for it (just like most everybody else), they all seemed to really enjoy it anyway (just like most everybody else). i felt amused, and slightly vindicated.

saturday, i bought the huge polished granite mortar and pestle from the little asian store that i go to. the newspaper that it was wrapped in was printed in thai, which i found kinda neat. now i just need a mixer, and few other things. (well, actually, there will probably never come a time when i can't think of some kitchen toy/gadget that I want; there's just so many...)

that's about it for this week's update. maybe i'll actually even manage a mid-week post this time... we'll see...