Paprikahead is Expecting

Since March when I plunked down my bags on the well-worn oak floorboards of my TenderNob flat, I've been busy making the kitchen look less like it faces on a garbage chute, and more like some chickens could wander through at any moment. My favorite thing is the pantry with its dutch door, which faces on crocks and jars and tomes.

And now -- if the old desk lamp over the stove didn't do the trick -- I can officially call it my office. My laboratory. My nursery. There's a little something in the oven, and it's due before I turn 25. The learned culinary historian Ken Albala and I are putting our crocks together and making an antiquated cookery-book, which Penguin/Perigee is being so kind as to publish, probably in early 2010.

I can scarce believe it. Does the year 2010 even exist? Let alone contain a book authored by ME? As I told the agent/author I intern for, I seriously couldn't have chosen a better lot for myself if I were eight, and that's saying a hell of a lot. I mean, at six, I knew that when I grew up I would sustain myself on lima beans, venison hearts, and rice pudding, and keep my two dozen babies dressed like 18th century nobility in an underground catacomb-house. But at seven I composed a felicentric novella and by eight I was on to poems about the rainbows on fairy wings. I haven't looked back since:

Flicker flicker
Quickly trick her
Snidely snicker
Let them bicker

Flutter flutter
Bite the butter
Spill and clutter
Tongue's a-stutter

(Glitter glitter?
Now I'll get her
Gnash and spit her
Wings are bitter!

Haven't lost the knack.

Anyway, now I can be an author writing about venison hearts and rice pudding!