{"id":782,"date":"2009-06-25T10:38:55","date_gmt":"2009-06-25T14:38:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=782"},"modified":"2009-06-25T10:38:55","modified_gmt":"2009-06-25T14:38:55","slug":"fingerpainting-with-a-spoon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=782","title":{"rendered":"Fingerpainting with a Spoon"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/06\/yogurtbowl.jpg\" alt=\"yogurtbowl.jpg\" height=\"355\" width=\"499\"\/><\/p>\n<p>I surfaced yesterday after several days immersed in copyedits, which are done and returned now through chapter 8, of 12. (Another batch will fly out from NY on Monday, if I understand the sked correctly.) My publisher surprised me last night by sending me a first draft of the book&#8217;s catalog copy, which was so unspeakably horrible that I immediately volunteered to rewrite it from scratch. I used to do that a lot at Coriolis and I&#8217;m <em>good<\/em> at it, and I think my editor knows me well enough to know that I&#8217;m good at it. She might have just asked me to do it (I certainly would have) but I&#8217;ll admit that seeing what other people would say about my 200,000 words if I did not added some urgency to the task.<\/p>\n<p>Done in a trice. So I woke up this morning with no more work to do than I generally have, and that&#8217;s a feeling I haven&#8217;t felt in some time. Over breakfast I let my mind wander, and when I got down to the bottom of my bowl of yogurt, I had an idea, an idea born out of irritation: <em>There is no way to get the last of the yogurt out of the bowl<\/em>. I mean, you can scrape with the spoon until you&#8217;re purple in the face (which can happen, with blueberries in the mix) but that&#8217;s just fingerpainting with the spoon and you&#8217;re always going to leave a little. This yogurt is peculiarly good, too: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.greekgodsyogurt.com\/html\/ypomegranate.php\">Greek Gods full-fat pomegranite<\/a>, just half a notch thinner than cream cheese and capable of keeping me cranking most of the morning. (A scrambled egg, its partner-in-breakfast, takes care of the rest.) I am loath to leave any, even for the dogs&#8230;and besides, having a pure-white dog lick purple yogurt out of a bowl has <em>consequences<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>Then it struck me: All-metal spoons are just <em>so<\/em> third-century. Why are we still eating Greek yogurt with the same implements the ancient Greeks used? Is this not 2009? And so I sketched out what I wanted: Spoons with metal handles but bowls molded from heatproof silicone rubber, formulated to be a little stiffer than a kitchen spatula, but sufficiently flexible under a little force to conform to the curve of the bowl and get enough of the yogurt out so that leaving what remains wouldn&#8217;t bother me.<\/p>\n<p>I looked online for such a thing this morning and came up empty. The basic concept is feasible: We have a silicone-rubber serving spoon in the drawer, but it&#8217;s far too big to fit in my mouth. Could it be that nobody else has ever thought of this? Or could it be that we just don&#8217;t like our food enough to want to finish <em>all<\/em> of it?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I surfaced yesterday after several days immersed in copyedits, which are done and returned now through chapter 8, of 12. (Another batch will fly out from NY on Monday, if I understand the sked correctly.) My publisher surprised me last night by sending me a first draft of the book&#8217;s catalog copy, which was so [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[37],"class_list":["post-782","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daybook","tag-food"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/782","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=782"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/782\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=782"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=782"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=782"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}