We're watching March Madness and playing with the dogs. I'm also trying to get some wedding garbage straightened out. Ho hum, ho hum!

Thank goodness you commented, I was about to think the rapture had happened and I was LEFT BEHIND.

I also want something ultra tasty for dinner. Maybe I will look at some recipes.

If you find anything that sounds good, via, let me know. I'm supposed to be "thinking about what we should do for dinner," and I'm uninspired.

me & Pips are watching Dr. Phil. These two sister in laws are fighting really snarkily with eachother. The first thing I thought is 'this sounds like an Mefi flameout.'

TPS, where is your new phone? I'm trying to call it, but the recording says to please call the PINK courtesy phone. Hmph.

Hahaha, I don't believe it's arrived yet. Should come in some time next week.

Ha, I saw that Dr Phil...the blonde seemed normal if a bit immature but the brunette-that gleam in her eye reflected teh crazy.

Occhi -- all I got is a recipe for Aglio e Olio. Basically some olive oil, pasta, veggies, garlic & romano cheese. Not very elaborate but let me tell you -- this picture of it looks SO.GOOD. Also, a broccoli & cheddar quiche. Let me know if you want either recipe. I am making myself hungry.

His second guest is this mother/son team. The son's a budding sociopath. He'll ultimately give shit to the wrong person and get himself killed.

Oh, aglio e olio is an old favorite of mine. It's the perfect "I've been out all night drinking in Roman bars and must eat something before passing out" food. :)

And I think we just used up all the broccoli at lunch.

Sigh. I'm in the mood for fish, but not in the mood to go to the good place that sells fish. Stupid fish.

Also, it's about ninety thousand degrees here and I'm not really in the mood to do much.

Coq au vin! That is what I want.

Hurrumph for recipes that require multiple days to prepare. Grrr.

That's what makes it worth paying people to do it.

I just hit my shin on the edge of a table so hard it made me cry. I also swore a whole bunch. I iced it but it still hurts real bad.

I have a mystery package at UPS that I have to go pick up. It's going to take an hour each way on the bus. There's better be something good in that package, dammit.

I need to go grocery shopping but I need so many things that there's no way I can carry everything so I'm going to have to pick and choose. This makes me grumpy.

On the other hand, it's a beautiful spring day here!

I got four hours of sleep last night so my head is killing me. Tonight is gonna suck.

I'm thinking about wedding stuff, which is hard for me because I'm an engineer and want to make a Work Breakdown Structure, along with a Gantt chart, and develop some cost estimation packages. After that, I can finally make the Linear Responsibility Chart. However, I don't think his family would appreciate being referred to as "resources" or "potential risks to on-time completion".

I ran out of my heart meds on Monday, and of course, I'm on the ones that have some very unpleasant withdrawal effects. I finally got come cash this morning to refill the prescription but the pharmacist said I will still feel like crap at least through the weekend.

muddgirl: My former carpool partner is a project manager, and looking at the notebook he used to plan his wedding was kind of mind-blowing. Also it's the only time I've seen a man be more than 10% involved in the planning of his own wedding.

I had a quiet day working from home on an internal briefing about Disability Discrimination, not the sexiest subject in the world. The window surveyor came round to take detailed measurements, a different guy from the one who gave me the quote. This man was horrible, a real creep, his conversation was full of innuendo, and after he had a crap in my toilet he didn't wash his hands. I didn't shake his hand when he left, and I cleaned all the surfaces he'd touched with antibacterial spray.

This evening turned out different from how I'd expected. I met my friend at the Barracuda Bar at 7 for the ceilidh band gig. The pub is vast, it's the biggest sports bar in London and, natch, the cricket was on (there's something like 25 screens round the place).

The place was packed to the rafters (my friend said he'd sold 500 tickets, and they were selling lots more on the door), and we were really lucky and bagged a table right by the door because somebody got up as we came in, so we were slightly away from the noise and smoke.

The pubs I go in these days are either nice ones with restaurants or, á la MeFi meetup, smaller pubs where people want to hear themselves talk. This place was a vast drinking den and it seemed as if a lot of people had been there for much of the afternoon and evening. You know when there's that almost imperceptible undercurrent that makes you think it's all going to kick off at any minute. It wasn't pleasant.

So, Helen and I sat and chatted, as best we could over the noise, for a while, the band started and they were ok, not great, nowhere near Pogues standard. So we left and went to an Indian restaurant across the street, a lovely restaurant, but a party came in and sat near us. One of the young women had the loudest, screechiest voice I've heard in ages, and an attitude to go with it. So we didn't linger in there after we'd eaten.

I walked Helen up to Liverpool Street where she got the train back to South Woodham Ferrers, and I drove home, listening to a jazz station. They played a track by a friend of mine (Annie Whitehead, a jazz trombonist) and some fantastic George Benson (the theme from Summer of '42). I'd forgotten what a great guitarist he is, usually all you hear of him on the radio here is 'Love Times Love' and 'The Greatest Love Of All' or his other vocal stuff, not the guitar pieces.

So now I'm all mellowed out, makeup off, with a cup of strong coffee next to me. Yes, coffee at nearly 11pm isn't the best idea, but I can sleep in tomorrow if I'm up late tonight.

This man was horrible, a real creep, his conversation was full of innuendo, and after he had a crap in my toilet he didn't wash his hands. I didn't shake his hand when he left, and I cleaned all the surfaces he'd touched with antibacterial spray.


Ladies love a man with fecal bacteria all over his hands.

(BTW, is "had a crap" British idiom? We say "took a dump/crap/shit" here in Los Estados Unidos.)

After work, I headed to Fairway over on the Yupper West Side. I love Fairway. I hate the (other) people who shop at Fairway. And I'm not going to elaborate on the details here because I don't want to be too negative.

Headed home with my loot and decided to test out my latest kitchen toy, an 8-liter Fagor pressure cooker, which I used to cook some rye berries. I was a little dubious at first-- the smell was a little off, like licorish or somethin'. I pressed ahead, with some apprehension -- is that hiss OK? How much noise can the thing actually make before IT BLOWS THE FUCK UP? But I was pleased with the results. A nice chewy bowl of grain, which I had with egg whites and mashed avocado. And no explosions.

My mystery package (mentioned aboove) turned out to be two very expensive bottles of wine from a friend in LA. When he asked for my address, I thought he was going to send me a card or something!

Three naps later I feel one helluva lot better.

j_p, I am scared of pressure cookers.

Me too, Jan.

But you only live once.

If it works, I've got good food in a fraction of the time it would normally take. I can expand my dietary range and include dishes that would normally be impossible to prepare on a weeknight.

And if it blows up, I get a funny story out of it.

Win-win scenario.

(Actually, in all seriousness, there isn't much of a chance of a contemporary pressure cooker blowing up. The technology and manufacturing have, according to my sources, improved a lot in the last couple of decades. And I did spend a little extra on a name brand. It's true that there is a learning curve, that it demands more attention and skill than, say, a microwave. But I am confident that, as long as I give my pressure cooker the respect it's entitled to, nothing awful will happen.)