Home again. My student workshops were exciting but a few minutes shy of endless, so I'm tired, and now my house smells like polyurethane and the living-room rug is covered with sawdust and we're out of dog food. Boy Land took over while I wasn't looking.

But at least I got to spend a lovely Friday evening with my friend Charlotte, whom I love. At her house she manages a somewhat different version of Boy Land, so it's fortunate that I am fluent in Nerdy Eighth-Grade Boy. That makes visiting so much easier on all of us.

Charlotte said I should go back to writing blog letters about food, and it's true that I have purposely drawn back from the food chatter here--partly because I couldn't imagine that you wanted to wade through so much repetitive housewife stuff, partly because winter cooking excites me less than garden-season cooking does. Still, I will attempt to start them up again . . . but not this morning because, as far as I can tell, we have no food in this house, unless you count the jar of maraschino cherries someone bought (while neglecting to purchase dog food). Maraschino cherries. These are the depths to which they cheerfully fall when I'm out of the way.