Pumpkin Cookies and a Pas de Chat

This morning I went to work as usual, and for lunch we had an Asian-style dish of pudgy udon noodles with chicken or beef (I can't remember which), perhaps ginger, and certainly miso, with a few curls of spring onion on top. That said, I don't think I know what miso even tastes like. There was also a salad with spinach and beet greens in it, and I really like the colour and the earthy flavour of beet greens. They also remind me of the time (a really long time ago) when one of my grandfathers grew beets in the garden. They looked like overgrown radishes and they had a real, fresh, lively, comforting flavour, and you could also taste a hint of the dust that they were caked in before they were washed and cooked.

Anyway, in the evening I went to the ballet class. Thanks in part to the rush hour train traffic, I arrived over 15 minutes late. The preliminary floor exercises had ended, and so I began with the barré. We practiced tendus, pas de cheval, ronds de jambe, and glissades; then went over to the floor exercises that were less about turnout directly and rather for strengthening the abdominal muscles and the muscles along the insides of the legs; and finally performed the usual sets of four pliés followed by four jumps. Today was one of those rare but appalling days where I jumped like a potato sack, and did not suggest springiness and grace in the least. We also ended the class by trouping across the floor diagonally, two at a time, in a sort of Noah's Ark of pas de chat, and it would require time and consideration to determine where I disgraced myself less.

Either way, I'm afraid that I consider that my inflexibility and un-ballerina-like stature give me a carte blanche. I try not to bring my teacher to tears with how horrible everything looks, and to achieve technically what I am capable of doing. But in return, I happily suppose that nobody demands that I become a new Margot Fonteyn.

Then I went grocery-shopping, almost weepy with gratitude at having the leisure to do this given the schedule of the past weeks. And I bought frozen berries with quark; eggs and bacon and other ingredients for a quiche lorraine; as well as dark chocolate to chop up and add to vegan pumpkin-and-oat cookies that I am thinking of trying to bake for a colleague.

In the U-Bahn I read more of the Politics and De la littérature. Altogether I felt that this day was an islet of peace and sanity in the ocean of Black Friday.

Then, of course, tomorrow (or the day after, due to the time zone differences and the length of time it takes to count ballots) we will know what happened in the midterm elections in the USA...