21°14' N
31°19' W
0622 UT
22.2.08
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made lentil soup tonight, though sarah is reportedly afraid of lentils. also of catsup, i was informed. and tomatoes. reminds me again of mister boats-is-a-music-band and his aversion to jam. not the aversion, but the character of it. a good day of everyone busybodying. a new chore list got posted and attacked. i think tomorrow is engine room day again.

jenny made cookies tonight; somehow i don't think they are a response to my efforts in cookie making, but perhaps my little plan of limiting cookie making to once every three days (to conserve flour and to preserve the character of cookies as a treat and not an expectation) was not as well considered as i thought. my plan is still to manufacture les baguettes, but inertia is hard to overcome and we are not yet out of the rest of the bread stores. there's them U Bake things that were purchased and they are hard to compete with convenience-wise. thing is, flour and yeast take up less space and we certainly have no shortage of time. not time to kill, mind you, but time nonetheless.

as cap'n m suggested, as you get used to watch duties, watch time is great to accomplish other random tasks. pay attention, then hit the random task. check instruments, and then hit the random taks for a bit. tonight the lentil soup was a most excellent diversion. i hope that it's enough of a soup that it's not in the phobic zone. i made one while we were in france and blenderized the snot out of it. or actually blenderized the lentils out of it. it was more mush. this one i have been simmering for a while and i suspect that in 6 hours when we reheat it, the lentils will be all but mush. if i remember rightly, ms. b said that in a soup she could almost not tell that they were there and could get past the existence of the lentils. we'll see. gradually, it has seemed that the crew has got less patient and tolerant of things like food, the funny taste in the water, that sort of thing.

i hadn't noticed the water thing. when there were repairs being done on the water maker drive belt, it occurred to me that only matt and i were drinking ship water. everyone else had been back on the bottle. i think we bought a giant pile of bottled water before leaving europe and it's become more and more popular.

this is indeed the middle part when everyone is most 'in the trip' and any patience issue is most likely to rear its nasty head. so it's extra important that we're all on top of staying fed, rested and all that. important to take that selfish time and be alone with our thoughts a bit each day and maintain perspective. matt decided after dinner tonight out loud that i was having a problem with the music, which is curious as i hadn't actually said anything about that. perhaps i wasn't thrilled about the genre, but hey, it's just music, right? on the one hand, i don't feel the need to like everything and i also don't feel like it's a great idea that anyone should decide that they ought to speak for anyone else. if i reach some sort of aesthetic threshold, then i'll say something.

soup is good food. i am really appreciating the mortar and pestle as far as the black pepper thing goes. an aspect of living in serious humidity is that the pepper mill doesn't really do it. so the hand version works great, though in this soup, it certainly appears as though i missed one; just crunched down on some spicy peppery goodness.