My life is pretty boring right now, but I don't mind boring. Boring lasts.*
I feel like I passed some sort of adulthood milestone, though; we finally have matching plates and silverware.** Despite being married for, what, seven years now, we still had hodge-podge bachelor dinnerware. So we went to Target*** and had our consumer Bar Mitzvah and today, we are a man.
We're test driving the stuff tonight with a small dinner party. Cold vegetable soup, chicken with shallots and garlic, mashed potatoes, green beans, and a chocolate strawberry tart. Have I mentioned how much I love Alton Brown, the creator of the chicken recipie? Well, he is my hero. The tart recipie is from the Silver Palate cookbook, which is way more foodie-elaborate than I normally do, but sometimes I like to fuss with a dessert. And it's strawberry season; 500g for $1.50.
My God, your collective eyes must be crossing with boredom right now. Sorry. I don't even have any interesting links.
Oh, OK, here's a pretty funny story from work. One of the senior people here is a very dignified middle-aged East Indian gentleman. I'll call him V. A while ago, he was touring a chemical plant belonging to a prospective client. The tour guide was nattering on, and V's attention started to wander. He was standing beside one of those emergency eye-wash stations, one of those waist-high things with the two angled nozzles that spray water up into your eyes if you get bad stuff in them, and he started to wonder if the two streams actually met. Being a curious sort, he pressed the activating pedal, intending to just turn it on for a second to see what happened. "I just cannot keep my hands to myself," he says, recounting this story. The streams did in fact meet, so he went to turn it off.
The trouble is, those things don't turn off; they're designed to thoroughly wash a panicking person, so they just empty their reservoir. V realized this just as he also noticed that his shoes were getting wet. Turns out these things are also designed to just empty onto the floor, since you don't want the nasty rinsed-off stuff getting into the sewers. So V had to ask the tour guide to stop the tour so that the mini-flood could be mopped up and all the incident reports filled out.
Well, I thought it was funny, anyway. And we did get the contract.
* An approximate quote from one of my favourite books ever, Good Omens: "The boredom you got in Heaven was almost as bad as the excitement you got in Hell."
** Like, not matching between categories (stainless steel plates?) but matching to each other. Duh.
*** Pronounced "Tarzhay" for that extra touch of class. It's like Zeller's.
I recall something similar from Chemistry, although it was a "oh, a drinking fountain" moment*. The rigs in the basement of Thorvaldson weren't reservoir, but plumbed in. The streams meet, intersect, pass each other (with some fluidic interference) and finally touch down a respectable distance away. After witnessing the Waters of Thorvaldson I decided the acid would do less damage than the high-pressure water jets at point-blank range.
And I am rolling my eyes a bit at the Targetware, but if it makes you happy.....
*no, it wasn't me
Ahem...
I don't like surprises. I'm old enough that there are few good surprises left. When you're little it's like "Surprise! Cake!" Now it's like "Surprise! Cancer! or Surprise! Your car exploded."
Yup, that's a fairly accurate paraphrase from our beloved blogger...
Miss you kid, and reading about your dinner when I'm sitting here hungry is not helping.
Bored? Reading about food? Not likely.
Did you convert for our Canadian sakes, or do you really buy strawberries by the gram there? And if you did convert, did you convert the currency as well?
I converted all values for y'all's sake... strawberries are sold by the pint here. Strawberries are as cheap as a cheap thing right now.