Are We Having Fun Yet?

I identify with raccoons. They have great manual dexterity, they are incredibly adaptible, they're primarily nocturnal, and, when they're not raiding your garden late at night, they're pretty cute. And like me, they sometimes eat a lot of garbage.

Visiting Toronto is my opportunity to indulge in the nostalgic favourites of my childhood or young adulthood. Not all of them would be considered healthy habits. Well, practically none of them. But they taste sooooo good!

Me: *standing on the sidewalk, woofing down a slice of meat supreme pizza from Pizza Pizza*
Friend: You know that's trash pizza, right?
Me: Yes, but it's the trash pizza I used to eat at 2am during my walk of shame home from the bars in my twenties. Don't take that away from me.

In other guilty pleasures, I had a double burger from Harvey's, a small burger from A&W, the Thanksgiving special from Swiss Chalet, and any number of not-found-in-the-US chocolate bars. There was also a visit to the Bulk Barn which would bring shame to my ancestors as well as my Visa. Best not to talk about that.

I don't know that I've gained any weight from this shameful extravaganza --mostly because I've avoided stepping on a scale-- but there is much atonement at the gym in my near future, and possibly for the rest of my life. If there's any consolation to be found, it's that I had a clean bill of health recently before leaving the US so it's unlikely that this binge will kill my body. My soul might be is another matter, but hen again, it's been safely kept in storage for many decades so it should be mostly OK.

And now I'm hungry.

That I'm not a great cook is no surprise to anyone who has lived with me. I can keep myself from starving to death but I have little more than a rudimentary ability to boil water.

The largest part of my problem could simply be described as a lack of imagination. I can follow a recipe easily enough. In fact, that's primarily how I cook and think: I picture the final product and then assemble the bits required to make it happen.

The problem I was dealing with tonight: I have a freezer, pantry and fridge loaded with basic food items but no concept of how to select the required few to assemble something edible. The enormous range of items was so overwhelming that I couldn't figure out where to start. (Well, that's not exactly true: I found two jars of chocolate sauce and a bag of chocolate chips so I was a little tempted to gorge myself into a diabetic coma.)

I think and organize in a top-down fashion but my array of ingredients are a bottom-up kind of problem, hence my state of brain lock.

Tomorrow, I'm going to be a bit more assertive in the face of overwhelming choices: I'm going to dig into the freezer again, thaw ground bird & vegetables and see what I can do with rice or pasta, depending on my mood at the time. Prayers for residents of our immediate neighbourhood would be appreciated.

I slept in this morning. While it felt utterly fantastic, it didn't exactly help me have a productive day. Ah, well... I consider it an investment in myself.

Last Friday morning, I learned one of our blades had a failed hard drive. OK, no problem: swapping a dead disk should be an easy operation. It turned into more of an educational field trip, giving me the opportunity to check into some supporting details.

( Light-weight geekery follows... )

I still need to open a support case with IBM for the disk replacement.

I was home again around 2pm and promptly flaked out for a short while.

kent4str and I spent nearly an hour digging out some details to help the DC Diamond Circulate treasurer figure out some allocations for the final convention report due in Chicago later this week. Her computer suffered a disk crash a month ago and while she's been able to recover much of the data, there were still some chunks left in limbo. Witness the importance of backups, people!

This evening, we went into downtown DC to collect bibliocub and then skip over into Arlington to pick up Jeff M. for a mexican dinner in Del Ray, VA. I keep telling myself I have to stop stuffing my face with the complementary chips & salsa so I'll have room for my entrée, but I blow it every time.

After dinner, we walked a few blocks south to Dairy Godmother for ice cream. I had the chocolate brownie sundae. Again, I ate too much. I really need to cut back.

We're home again and I still need to iron shirts so I'd better get busy!

The *wheeze* new bottle *gasp* of horseradish mustard *owowowow* kent4str bought *cough* while shopping today *sniffle* has a particularly *heave* brutal kick.

More please!

There's something not right about broccoli on a pizza.