Sickness Going Around, and Chicken (Matzo Ball) Soup

One of my coworkers is sick, so the entire office smells like Vicks Vaporub or menthol or whatever it is... a mediciny sort of smell in any case that is yucky. A significant percentage of Wonderful Husband's office seems to be sick as well, from what he says, as well as at least four of our friends. And here I am, wondering how for a change I managed to miss my annual holidays sickness. In any case, as a preventative measure I've made up salsa, because anything that can bring me down really doesn't stand a chance against my mother's salsa recipe. Burn, vile little sick germs, burn!

Making salsa also helped clean out the vegetable bin some--used up the bag of jalepenos and Caribbean reds, as well as the cilantro. I'm sort of in the mood to continue cleaning out the fridge by process of eating, which ends up with some interesting meals. I /usually/ don't have microwaved egg rolls for lunch.... I just need to figure out what I can do with the celery. Toss a few stalks into tonight's stir-fry, maybe, and if we get some chicken at the store, maybe use more up in hoshikage's jazzed up matzo ball soup recipe...? (Huh. And while I'm thinking of it, toss some of the frozen edamame into both.)

On the shape of books

There is something within the specific shape, weight, and composition of a book that has the unique ability to warp time around it. Much like way the surface molecules of a drop of water have a unique tension that keeps the drop rounded rather than flat where it rests on a leaf's surface, if you gather words and ink and paper together and arrange them in just the right the right combination, you produce a time warp effect where you sit down at six o'clock to read a few pages and the next thing you know, your Wonderful Husband is informing you that it's after nine and would you like him to heat some soup for dinner as it's too late for the stir-fry you'd planned, and you realize that something like five hundred pages have flown by and where did the time go?!

Inspired by the likes of kelbebop and snarkyllama, I've decided to do the "Fifty Books in 2007" meme/challenge/thing. I've started in on the year's books with Firebirds Rising (page count: 523), a short story anthology I bought on the strength of it having a story by Tamora Pierce in it, and am actually fairly pleased with. The worst complaint I've read online is that it's heavily biased toward fantasy over science fiction. Its subject matter ranges from human empathy to serial killers to the dangers of assumption in planetary colonization. There's a quite good story on the dangers of technology, too, but I know few if any of my friends will agree with me on its point, as I am admittedly a luddite and suspicious of the role technology has come to play in modern society. One of the most pleasant surprises was a story dealing with a second human society of little people, like in Gulliver's Travels or Mistress Masham's Repose or The Littles. It's made me interested in checking out the other of the author's works in the same universe, as well as in rereading the first two of those books later this year. And, yes, the Tamora Pierce story I bought it for was good if unusual--I'm not used to reading low fantasy from her, only high, so there was a touch of cognitive dissonance for me.