bye-bye nono


Noreen left this afternoon after a 5-week stay that turned into 5 months. I’ll miss her, and so will Nova and Mike, I think. She was possibly the easiest-to-live-with housemate I’ve ever had, and entertaining, too. She did introduce Nova to smoked salmon, which is getting expensive, but since it’s practically the only meat Nova will eat, it’s probably for the best. She also brought us nice cheese and good bread and bottles of wine all the time.

Now we get to live on our own as a family, at least for a short while, and it’s a bit of a novelty. I suppose it will be more peaceful, but it’ll also be a bit dull. Who will help us keep Nova entertained now? We’ll have to get a dog.

We made a cake for Noreen this afternoon before she got on the bus. Or rather, I mixed up some cake batter, baked it, and tried to roll it up into a nice roulade with some whipped cream, but I skipped a step and it fell apart into a cracked, disordered pile. Mike got out the writing icing and wrote “Go Away Nono” on the one straight stretch of unbroken cake. He had a small slice but Noreen and I basically ate the whole thing between the two of us in the space of half an hour. What it lacked in appearances it made up for in taste, now it's sitting like a lunk in my stomach. 

We’ll move on, but right now I just feel sad, and it's all a bit up in the air.

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