here goes

Chilis bows to pressure

Earlier this year, Chilis made a fabulous showing with 3 entries in in the 20 Worst Foods in America. The 2nd worst food was the venerable Chili's "Awesome Blossom."

Now it's gone.

We tried to order on on Saturday night (May 3rd) and were told it had been discontinued on May 2nd!  Is it just missing in our market? Will we need to move to another market to find one, perhaps?

Granted, we only ever ordered it when we had more than 4 people.  Even so, we want it back.

Mundane mystery #1

So, I work in corporate headquarters of a Fortune 500 company (who'd'a' thought? It's a long way from the farm).

Not only that, I also work on the same floor of the same building as our CEO. This is more by coincidence than necessity.  I could be off in one of the new building outposts and he wouldn't miss me. But, every once in a while, I run into him as I'm heading for the restrooms and he's on his way out.  Or, he'll pass me as I'm in one of the two break rooms on our floor making myself a free cup of gourmet coffee.

Even though we have a cafeteria two buildings over and we have subsidized meals at lunch and dinner, from time to time I bring my lunch.

There are three mini-refrigerators on our floor.  The one in the break room furthest from the CEO's desk is packed with smelly foods. It's dirty. And, worst of all -- it ISN'T EVEN COOL!  I might as well keep my food at room temperature.

The two refrigerators in the break room nearest the CEO clean, cold and are nearly empty. Guess where I keep my perishables?  It puzzles me why the crappiest fridge is crammed and the two best fridges are ignored. 

Why use the crappy fridge at all?

It couldn't be the distance, could it?  From where I sit the crappy one is 107 paces away and the good ones are only 77 paces away. It has to be similarly close for half the people on our floor.

Could it be because people think the CEO will see them cooling things off?

It's a mystery.

Book processing plan -- how to manage the stacks

Each week, I buy about of two books. Each month, I manage to read about two books. My reading stack is getting huge because on average, I accumulate seven unread books per month. I felt guilty about not reading. My silent stacks of books chide me when I pass them on my way to bed after a couple hours of watching TV or DVDs, so I resolved, near the start of the new year, to do something about it.

My plan is simple: I read the introduction of the non-fiction books and the first chapter of the fiction books to decide if  I really want to invest the time in reading the book. After a couple months of trying this, the approach shows a great deal of promise.

So far, I've read the first chapter of How Doctors Think by Jerome Groopman. It is definitely a keeper. It's all about language and how medical doctors use and process verbal and nonverbal cues from their patients. It also describes how doctors can err and harm patients just by not paying attention. Other books captured me in and - to be honest - have sidetracked me from reading further first chapters are Elizabeth Samet's book called Soldier's Heart: Reading Literature Through Peace and War at West Point, Lee Siegal's book Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob, Tom Segev's book, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate, and Clara Cooper Marcus's book, House as a Mirror of Self: Exploring the Deeper Meaning of Home.

Not all books are winners in capturing my interest. Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, Richard Dawkins book, The Selfish Gene, Azar Nafisi's, Reading Lolita in Tehran, and Stephen Greenblatt's Will in the World will be waiting in the stacks a while longer.

She spent her life

The January 21st issue of The New Yorker had an article about Lee Miller. The first sentence explained that Miller was a model and photographer. This much was evident from the topless photo of Miller wearing nothing but a fencing helmet and a wistful look that took up the entire facing page. Later in the  first sentence, I found out Miller spent most of her life seeking adventure in Europe and the Middle East.

I stopped reading after that sentence, already jealous of this Lee Miller who knew what it took to seek adventure and how how to one spend an entire life doing it! How would I describe my own life that way?

I would be content to be reasonably confident that people would talk of me as a "writer and photographer" after my death. As of now, that would be a stretch. However, it would be a complete falsehood to say I was an adventure seeker -- at least in the same sense Lee Miller was. I was never much of a traveler, never a war correspondent and never a consort of artists and writers.

How would I respond to the question, "How did you spend your life?"

How would I fill in that blank: "Oh, me? I've spent most of my life (fill in the blank)." The answer I first think of to fill that gap is that I spend most of the week making other people's ideas work. Frankly, that doesn't sound very fun or rewarding. That amounts to saying that I spent most of my life avoiding poverty.

I could say that I spent most of my life seeking interesting and rewarding friendships. Many of my best friendships have been stormy, or long-distance ones, or so brief that I feel I must keep seeking them.

I could say that I spent most of my life looking for another "affair of letters." Those are even more difficult to come by than good friendships, but they never fail to provide fun and excitement.

If I want to feel gloomy and down on myself, I could say that I spent most of my life avoiding work and productive and creative endeavors. If I were writing myself an encomium, I would say I spent most of my life in service on non-profit boards, especially in the areas of housing and human services.

If I change my ways now, and poured all my time, energy and passion to work, say, on an attempt to create a great and heart-wrenching novel, no one could say "she spent most of her life" on something (assuming I live to age 88 or more).

Speaking of heart-wrenching novels, I'm nearly done reading Suite Francoise by Irene Nemirovsky. She was a famous Jewish novelist in the France who was killed by the Nazis during world War II. Her daughter, quite by some miracle, saved her mother's last novel from oblivion, carrying without knowing what it was from safe house to safe house for the rest of the war. Irene spent the first part of her adult life as a party girl and the last part as a writer, an author who wrote as quickly as possible, knowing she faced death almost any day at the hands of an occupying army. Her partial and final book is a marvel.

Lee Miller had no easy time of things either. She was raped at age seven and, perhaps in some demented form of therapy (according to the New Yorker article), her father made her pose nude. Outside. In the winter.

These women overcame what I consider to be great obstacles to create lives where someone could say "She spent most of her life" and "She spent her last days writing quickly."

I aspire for a spilt posthumous assessment like, "She started out playing it safe and getting her balance. Then, she really let loose."

Romantic coincidence

W. and I celebrated Valentine's day quietly at home.  He got me a book I wanted, and I got him some fancy French-style chocolates and chocolate-making lessons at a nearby chocolatier.

He watched a movie I selected because I thought he would enjoy it, namely The Illusionist. I haven't told him yet that I actually fell asleep between the time he started in with the show with the apparitions and the time Paul Giamatti's character figures things out in the final scene. (Usually W. is the one to fall asleep and the one to pick the movies.)

We shared some chocolates and gave each other the exact same card with the exact same sentiment.  Awwww.