Ebony's Pearls

This week (actually, the past month and a half) has been tough at work. It's my busiest time of the year and I've been going in to work at 6:00 a.m. and getting off at 6:00 p.m. and bringing work home because there was just that much to do.

Of course, I'm only being paid for 8 of those hours per day since my job was re-classified and no longer qualifies for overtime or comp time outside of making up state holidays that I have to work through. I also don't get snow days. No matter how bad the weather is or how dangerous or if the entire city is on lock-down because of ice, I still have to go to work. Unless ice days happen to occur on a pre-arranged vacation day...it's happened before, but not near often enough. We tend to get ice storms and snow days during the week instead of close to a weekend.

Anyway, the upshoot of all of this is that today is the first day I don't have to be at work long before the sun rises.

I celebrated by baking bread last night and mixing up hummus. I baked a black bean and salsa bread and a pugliese and a sourdough made with Heike. I sliced and cut into fat quarters some old bread and toasted then with garlic. I mixed half the hummus with sun dried tomatoes, carrots, scallions, parsnips, and radishes and the other half with a roasted red pepper and bell peppers and garlic. I also made a bruschetta topping of eggplant and tomatoes and black olives.

I'm taking all of this to work to share around. The hummus and bruschetta topping I'll serve up in some pretty little serving tagines I was given and the bread will be mounded on critter-shaped ceramic plates - a ladybug, a snail, a butterfly, and a grasshopper. I think that will look really cute.

Of course, now that all my work is done, everyone around me is about to get very busy implementing all the stuff I researched and pulled together, so while this is a celebration of an easing of my workload, it can also be viewed as "sweetening" the upcoming workload for others.

Today is supposed to get very cold, with a winter mix coming in. It's already very windy, but the temperature is warmer than it was yesterday at this time. I fear we are at our high for the day...The critter plates and festive tagines will make the gloomy day seem brighter, too, so that's an added bonus for doing this.