"Exotic" Food My grandmother gave me pig's brains once. We were talking to my parents the other night about going on a trip to Holland again this year, and somehow the subject turned to food. Daryl was talking about when he went to Lithuania with his ex-wife and was served a thinly sliced meat that he found out, thankfully prior to eatting, that it was raw, sliced cow's tongue, and was a delicacy in their country. Now Daryl is certainly no picky eater, and we'll try almost anything once, but he wasn't *that* adventurous, and as it was an expensive delicacy to them, he gladly left them to it. This brought to mind how my grandmother used to, and still does I suppose, make pig's brains. Born and bred on a farm, with 12 (I think, maybe 14, I can't remember) brothers and sisters, I suppose they had to make use of *everything* for food. Anyway, when I was younger, my grandmother made and served something that looked like scrambled eggs but not... quite. She gave me some, told me it was good, eat it. In my family you ate what was put on your plate, so I really had no choice in the matter. I asked what it was, and she wouldn't tell me until *after* I ate it and had already told her it was good. Of course, once I found out what it was, it wasn't quite so good. The way she's make it was she'd take the pig's brain and scramble it with eggs. Gross, huh? What's even worse is when you get a piece of bone. Ugh. I would be just fine when she made it, as long as I didn't think about it, until I got a piece of bone. You know how disconcerting it is when you're eatting clam chowder or something like that and crunch on a bit of sand? This was even worse, because... well... it wasn't sand. Talk about your immediate loss of appetite. If you had an appetite after learning you were eatting pig's brains that is. I figure if I've eaten pig's brain and survived, I can try almost anything. But I'm with Daryl on the raw cow tongue. And at least my grandmother never tried to make me eat mountain oysters.

Freaky I was sitting at work today... working, of course... when I got a call from my mother on my cell. She doesn't usually call me at work, since technically we're not supposed to talk on the phone at work unless we lock our computers and go in the hallway, but I heard it beep, so I answered it anyway. Everyone does, so it wasn't like I was going to get reported. Anyway. Across and a few yards down from my parents house, within visual distance at least, there is a Union Planters bank. This is about... a mile, a mile and a half from where Daryl and I live. There is a teller there, named Brenda, that I knew. Not a friend, really, but an acquaintance, and when I used to bank there I would to talk to her. My parents knew her, too, so she'd always ask me about them, and how I was, and to tell them she said hello. She was a generally nice, sweet lady, around 40. My mother was calling me to tell me that my father just called and told her that this morning, Brenda got to the bank before anyone else, and shot and killed herself. No one knows why yet. You hear about stuff like this happening all the time, but when it happens to someone you know, just down the street from you, in a small town... it's weird.

Updates I talked to Robbie over the weekend and he was saying his supervisor (hello) had been going to my page, and was ... um... commenting how I don't update it very much. I have a really good reason for not updating my page often and that is this: my life is not that interesting. Here's my typical day. Get up. Get to work late. Be annoyed by my cow-orkers. Come home. Kiss my husband. Talk about our respective days. Watch TV. Play EverQuest. Go to bed at 3 or 4 in the morning. Not that exciting is it?

Birthday Daryl's birthday was Saturday. I didn't know what to get him, so I just took him out for dinner wherever he wanted to go. He picked a chinese buffet in Sprinfield that my parents had recommended several times. I don't have the words to describe that meal so I'll just say... "yuck". Our waitress was a skanky looking oriental lady with a tacky skin tight blouse and glitter painted over her arms and upper body and a bad dye job. The food was "eh"... and got worse when Daryl tried what looked to be sliced bananas in a sweet glaze and the glaze actually tasted like... well, I don't know what it tasted like. It was just really nasty. Although the face he made when he took the first bite was quite humorous. The atmosphere was less than desirable, as, instead of normal bad chinese music, we were forced to listen to bad hip-hop. And worst of all... the bathrooms had no soap. I'm not saying they were *out* of soap. Just that there was a noticable lack of it in any way, shape, or form. "Maybe the employees have separate bathrooms," I said. "Yeah, right," Daryl said. "Maybe the employees have separate bathrooms," I said slowly through clenched teeth. Come on, let me have my small fantasies here. Daryl also said the bathrooms had fake wood panelling wall paper. Someone had peeled away a section of the fake wood panelling wall paper to reveal... *real* wood panelling! Then to top it all off, Daryl got a depressing fortune cookie about how age can't catch up to you as long as you're young at heart or some such nonsense.