Asterisk Plate

There are lots of things I just don't need more of, like black shirts and plates. But how can one resist an asterisk plate? Alice and I found it at an antiques shop Friday night. It was cheap and an ASTERISK, which is a great punctuation mark (although an ellipsis would have been the real score, since that is the punctuation mark I abuse). There was a larger plate with an exclamation point. "Chips and salsa," Alice suggested, and she was right. But the exclamation point seemed kind of gaudy. The asterisk was just right.



It will look great filled with candy or nuts or something, right? For the time in the future when I have people over. I wanted to try filling it, but of course I have nothing interesting to test it out with. I finally settled on dried kidney beans, just to get an idea.



I like it quite a lot.

Three more things:
1. Yesterday at the bookstore, I saw a magazine called "Natural Dog." Natural dog? Are there other options for dog-hood? Maybe it's all about resisting the urge to buy your dog clothes or to feed it conventionally produced dog food. I don't know...

2. Also, in another magazine I looked at, there was an article by my train romance, whom I once wrote about here. It's all about his family's crazy adventures roughing it. I'm glad it didn't work out, because I don't really like to rough it. It's hard when you wear contacts.

3. Today I made a potato salad that contained potatoes, chives, capers, and a mustard/vinegar/caper juice/olive oil dressing. No mayo, of course. I don't normally cook potatoes, but I like this, and it was for my dad's birthday dinner. Although it is not his real birthday. On his real birthday (65th), he got into a car accident, broke his nose, cut his eye, which swelled to the size of a small egg, bled profusely all over his clothes, and had the new car he was just driving home from the dealership smashed. So for him, I make potatoes.