If you have extra white rice left over from dinner and you feel like dessert, fill about half a bowl full of the rice, add a few spoonfuls of sugar and a generous amount of cinnamon, and a splash of cream. Mix it all up and you have a very nice pseudo-rice-pudding.

I'm now reading a bunch of short stories by F Scott Fitzgerald called Flappers and Philosophers. I love his style, it has so many adjectives! Also I decided I really like Goldfrapp, and Bjork has a few good songs, and so does PJ Harvey (her new cd sounds like Emily Dickinson would if she wrote songs, but scarier).

O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
to be consoled as to console;
to be understood as to understand;
to be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive;
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen.

Also, an excerpt from Between the Forest and the Hills.

"This looks to us like a dying age. A last blaze of summer and then the long darkness. But that's not what it'll look like from the other end of the night. Man! to our children's children's children this will be an age of miracles. An age of saints and heroes! The tales are already gathering round us, even while we're moaning about the drabness of everything. How Saint Malleus defeated the Saxons- how about that one then? How the Blessed Ramus and Astragalus marched out to confront them, that's another good one. Then there's the High Deeds of Torcula the Prince- oh yes, he'll be part of Our history too, and can you say he's unworthy of his place? Ye- heavenly powers, we're picking up the gold dust of legends like- like pollen on your feet when you walk through a field of buttercups. And you don't need to worry about whether or not they're facts. They're better than that- they're true!"
Malleus drew in a deep breath.
"Yes!" he said.
The red-tiled roofs of Iscium, the lime-washed plaster and pale honey-coloured stone of its walls, seemed to have soaked up the autumn sunlight, until all its colours were transmuted to shades of rose and gold. Even the deepening blue of the sky was powdered with gold from the western horizon to the zenith, and scattered with flakes of golden clouds. The whole city glowed with light.

That is one of the more beautiful endings to a book I've read. And a funny Shakespeare sonnet-

The forward violet thus did I chide:
Sweet thief, whence didst thou steal thy sweet that smells,
If not from my love's breath? The purple pride
Which on thy soft cheek for complexion dwells
In my love's veins thou hast too grossly dyed.
The lily I condemned for thy hand,
And buds of marjoram had stol'n thy hair:
The roses fearfully on thorns did stand,
One blushing shame, another white despair;
A third, nor red nor white, had stol'n of both
And to his robbery had annex'd thy breath;
But, for his theft, in pride of all his growth
A vengeful canker eat him up to death.
More flowers I noted, yet I none could see
But sweet or colour it had stol'n from thee.

All three very summery things, in my opinion.