mediocre soup and a manicure

1. The hibiscus bag came for a walk to the store today, and I'm happy to say I think it'll work out just fine. It fits a truly unbelievably amount of stuff in it without looking distressed, and except for the unfinished straps I'm using to tie it closed right now, looks so professional I can hardly believe I made it. Perhaps if I make more I can streamline the process so it takes less than eight hours?

2. Today, being Sunday, is traditionally the day when I realize that I can't put off my homework anymore because I have class tomorrow. I have a pretty good routine down for avoiding my homework - cleaning the house, painting my nails, cooking, nothing that could be called fun per se. I've also started working around it by getting started with the procrastination early in the day, so I look up at 4:30 with a clean house, lunch for the week, and lovely nails and realize that I have nothing left to do except homework.
So today I straightened up the kitchen and cleaned the living room, and then set out to make eggplant ratatouille soup from my soup cookbook. The beef and barley from last week was definitely a four star recipe, so I figured this couldn't miss; after chopping and spicing and simmering for hours, though, I'm kind of disappointed. Eggplant goes spongy when you put it in soup - in fact, as I've never cooked with it before, or really eaten it outside of baba ganouj - and there's so much eggplant in there that it is kind of unavoidable. I guess I was expecting it to be more like zucchini, which is rather nice cooked almost any way (I don't hold with deep fried zucchini, though, it always turns into tongue-scorching slime). I'm hoping that a night in the fridge will help my ratatouille; many a mediocre soup has been made delicious by an overnight stay in the icebox.
And I sat down to do my Latin, and read a lot of blogs and news stories, and worked on Latin for a while, and then played with the soup for a while, and decided to paint my nails, and then Latinned some more, and then I read a lot about Scientology and checked the news again, and so on. I've gotten what I like to call "the bare minimum" of Latin done (ie, all that we're likely to get through tomorrow, but not the assignment due Wednesday), which is better than no Latin, but gosh it's easier to get work done when Sean is here to look up as I walk past towards the cookbooks and say, "Hey, don't you have some Latin you should be doing something about?". At least I have some mediocre soup and a manicure to show for it.

3. a couple of links:

• a new blog for my list, linked to by Kim at Yarn Abuse: Yarn Ball Boogie. A male knitblogger!
  
• and thanks to the new blog, I have a hat pattern that I really, really want to make: the Frivol hat!
• and, lastly, thanks to the blog formerly known as Apartment Therapy Kitchen (now thekitchn.com), I am wishing that these were not probably very very bad for the points.