Dichroic Reflections

I'm sweet, but Me sucks

Despite a small accident with the chili powder, I've got a nice batch of Purists
Beware Dam'Fine Chili cooked up for dinner. (I use ground beef, and beans from cans instead of soaking them all night. Fortunately chili powder, even the "Hot Mexican" kind we've got, isn't really all that spicy, and anyway I think you're supposed to put a lot in. (Not quite sure -- I don't measure the spices in chili anyhow, just toss them in with a liberal hand. For some odd reason, it tastes a little sweet. I did put cinnamon in, but not very much, and I can't think of anything else that would be sweet, unless they're adding sugar to canned tomatoes these days.

Maybe it's just me. Last night I made Scampi La Riviera, from (of all places) a Charles Kuralt book, which turned out to be what restaurants around here usually call something like N'Awlins Shrimp. Rudder loves the sauce, and has been known to ask for extra bread to sop it up and refuse to let waiters take the appetizer plate away while there was still sauce left. In this case, I blame the sweetness on the balsamic vinegar I had on hand, and will be sure to use plain red wine vinegar next time. Maybe it's just me, though I can't imagine the sweetness of my character is affecting my cooking! Maybe my cycle is affecting my tastebuds instead.

The recipe was excellent and the stories were good, but I'd have enjoyed the rest of that Charles Kuralt book more if I could stop thinking about the mistress and family who surfaced after his death, and wondering how he squeezed in visits to them in among all the other traveling.

I tried to get help from Compaq customer support this,
another thing that didn't contribute to the sweetness of my character. Basically,
my new computer has been running way slow -- actually it runs at normal speed, but stops to think about what it's doing every few seconds. There are no extra tasks listed that could be causing this; I defragmented the hard drive and ran a clean-up yesterday; I even turned off Active Desktop. No use; I've still got an absent-minded laptop. The Compaq guy asked me to check my System Resources. They were 63% percent. He told me he could help but my software warranty had expired, so either I could pay for the help or I could extend the warranty. I chose the latter, so I'd have someone to bitch at for the next year when my computer doesn't work, paid $59 I really didn't want to spend, and got transferred to another guy. This one got the system resources up where they should be, all right, but that still didn't solve the problem. All he could tell me to do was to back up everything and try reloading everything from scratch -- advice I got from Rudder, yesterday, for free. The real problem, I think, is just that Windows Me sucks. Compaq support officially sucks now, too.

Time to go cheer up before I terrorize a bunch of high-school rowers!