Elisa's blog

On my way to the supermarket last night, I discovered that we were having our first really cold day of the season, which put me in the mood for nothing more than copious amounts of hot soup.

Ever since my rendition of the minestrone alla romagnola recipe I found in Marcella Hazan's Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking had been a resounding success as part of my family's holiday festivities last year, I have been occasionally riffing on minestrone to see if I can perfect it. --read more

We made an appointment to see the place for that very afternoon. The building was even more impressive on the inside than it was on the outside. The very nice manager showed my mother and me the 24/7 gym and reception hall for private parties on the first floor. Both were absolutely gorgeous. The reception hall had a capacity of 50, with a grand piano, a full bar, several clusters of sofas and couches, and a formal dining table. The apartment was on the fifth floor. It had one (spacious) bedroom, a beautiful kitchen including a brand new fridge and a built-in dishwasher, gorgeous tilework, and plenty of counter and cupboard space, a nice living/dining area, big windows with a beautiful view, brand new carpet, central air and heating, an intercom system, a doorman in the evenings, laundry on every floor, and a garbage chute. And all of this for only $50 more than I was paying already. I stepped outside to confer with my mother, and - in the light of recent experience - decided to put down the deposit and fill out the application, hoping against hope that they'd take me. A move-in date was set for the next Tuesday (the exact date I would have to be out of the old place), and I was to come back on Monday to sign the papers and get the key (giving them time to look at my credit, hopefully not seeing the ongoing eviction proceeding).--read more

One of the crowning Kafka-esque absurdities of my county courts' custom of ignoring the procedural rights of tenants (see previous post for details) is that a tenant who files counterclaims has to prepare to litigate those counterclaims while at the same time frantically searching for a new home in our city's awful housing market. --read more

I haven't written here in a while. Enough has happened in the past several months to fill up an entire year.

Amongst other things, I moved this May. After a dispute with my ex-landlord heated up around the beginning of April, he ended up filing in court to evict me. The main issue was the fact that he is a slumlord who takes his tenants' money and refuses to do even basic upkeep on the buildings, let alone provide the air conditioning that tenants like myself paid him for. At the end of March, he called me up early in the morning, as was his custom (other customs of his included excessive familiarity and and general assholery). At one point in the conversation, he asked:--read more

On Lynn's advice, I picked up a copy of Stitch 'n' Bitch a couple of weeks ago to see if I could figure out the whole 'knitting' thing. After a week or so of casting on increasingly well and swearing at the yarn every time it foiled my attempts to make a stitch, my mother, who knitted once when she was 19, managed to figure out where I was going wrong.--read more

Well, I just got back home after spending a long weekend with my mother and sister over Christmas. I do believe we've finally figured out the right way to go about it, too - a long weekend of large quantities of good homemade food and enjoying each other's company. --read more

This has been one of the better weeks I've had in recent history. It's had everything one could really ask for in a week: a lovely night with DGF, one step closer to being out of the hole that I fell into due to what might be euphemistically called "market fluctuations", and I've actually managed to stay on top of the housework (amazing how much one needs to do to take care of a place occupied only by one woman and one cat) for an entire week.--read more

Well, then. This afternoon, I returned home after spending the weekend at my mum's. I was rather looking forward to getting back, since it was to be the first time in recent memory in which I have not had a sink full of aging dishes to ignore or any other mess at home. --read more

Well! These past seventy two hours have certainly been interesting. On Wednesday, just as I decided (partially because it was about time, partially because I wanted the place to be nice when DGF came over Thursday night) to take care of the massive backlog of tidying up that had accumulated over the past few months, a client of mine called me to ask whether I'd be able to take on part of a rather large (about 100 pages total) Italian-English editing job, which needed to be delivered by Friday afternoon.--read more

The short version: I'm Élise. I work out of my home as a translator, writer, editor, student, and single mother of a 14 year old cat in Cincinnati. I found TNH during a recent period of soul-searching.--read more