Sunday, August 18, 2013

Get Me to a Vomitorium

It's a myth, you know.  The Romans didn't really have places where they went to vomit after gorging on food so they could eat more. Apparently Aldous Huxley first misused the term in his "Antic Hay" in 1923.  A real vomitorium was "a passage below or behind a tier of seats in an amphitheater or stadium through which big crowds could exit rapidly at the end of a performance."

ANYWAY, I want to use the word in its "misused" sense.   I need a place to vomit and empty my stomach so I can start over again.

This morning started after we'd all had a nice night of sleep and I made blueberry waffles for us.  From scratch, even.  Not even with the assistance of Bisquick.  They were yummy too.  I was so glad, later in the morning, that I'd only had one of them, though I was tempted to take a second.   Somehow I knew that I shouldn't.

After Jeri and Phil got dressed, we headed over to Atria for a visit with my mother.

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Phil and I checked out each others phones.  He has the Samsung and its picture taking ability is far superior to mine.  E.g., I took this picture with his camera and I took the identical picture with my camera and I could not get both women into the picture.

My mother invited us to have lunch at Atria, but we are eating there tomorrow, at the Sunday brunch, with Ned and Marta so we decided to take her out to lunch. I'm always thinking that an excursion away from Atria will be fun for her. That may have been a mistake.  She has become like Walt's mother, whose appetite had diminished so much that she got angry with restaurants for serving her so much food.  My mother is the same way.  But she's also, like Walt's mother, a product of the Depression and she can't see wasting food, so whatever she can't eat, she has someone wrap up for her, she brings it home, and it sits in her fridge until I throw it away.  When we were served our meals today, she told me more than once that it was "disgusting" that they served so much food (though everyone cleaned their plate except her!)

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With her diminished appetite, she also isn't interested in "new" food.  It's really no special thing for her to go to a new restaurant. She almost ordered a veggie pita sandwich (which Jeri had) today. She loves vegetables and this was loaded with all kinds, including mushrooms, her favorite.  But for some reason she went for a turkey sandwich, which is what she has been eating for lunch most of the time for the last couple of years, when she made it for herself in San Rafael and now in the Atria dining room.

But the rest of us embarrassed ourselves by finishing our lunches and we were all so incredibly lazy that we decided we all needed a nap.  We dropped Momma off at Atria and she staggered off to her couch.  The rest of us come home and instantly went to the nearest bed-like thing where we all slept for about an hour.

The last thing I wanted when I woke up--or ever again for the rest of the day--was food, but we had been invited to a BBQ at Ned's friend Jon's house.  Jon is the guy who roasted the whole pig the last time Jeri came home for a visit.  A little bit lower key this year, but still Jon is not noted for skimping on the foodl

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It's a good thing my mother didn't come to this dinner!

Before dinner we were treated to the sight of some parachuters jumping from planes, since there are a lot of empty fields around Jon's farm, and the Yolo county airport is nearby.

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Ned also made friends with one of Jon's sheep, Periwinkle (the other one, Zinnia, is hidden in this picture)

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It was a lovely evening and I didn't feel I ate all that much, so I guess this feeling that I could use a vomitorium is leftover from our lunch.  I don't want to eat again until tomorrow's brunch at Atria.

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