Hodgepodge

A mix of topics to catch up.

Cooking- I attempted to make spinach con queso last night. I followed no recipe and had nothing more than a rudimentary grasp of ingredients or cooking method. It was fun!
I used Montery Jack cheese, spinach, crushed red pepper, butter, milk, a little bit of tomato and some chopped onion. My main criteria in determining that these belonged in the dip was that they were in my fridge.
I would have to rank it as a qualified failure. The result was not really recognizable as a queso dip. It was clumpy and runny and required more utensils to eat that I would have preferred. But it tasted pretty good- almost even recognizable as what I intended it to be- and I'm quite sure it was not healthy, so 1 and a half thumbs up!

Softball- 1st Sunday loss today. We had everybody there for the first time all year, fielded an outstanding lineup, and scored only 1 run (5th inning. I led off with a single, we loaded the bases with 1 out, I scored on double-play. It was that kind of outstanding offensive performance.) Pathetic.
Yogis-Tuesday we're pretty good. 1 loss. It's a decent league; we should be competitive. Our last game we won by a 20-run mercy rule in 3 innings, 25-4.
-Wednesday we've lost two. We followed our Tuesday outburst by fielding a better- and very solid lineup Wednesday, and we lost 18-4.
I'll never figure that out. But as a guy who makes out the lineup and wants to get everybody playing time, I have to say it takes a lot of pressure off. It really doesn't matter who sits and who doesn't; if we come to play we're fine, if we're lifeless then it really doesn't matter who is on the field.

(softball adendum which I almost forgot: we play at 7:00 Tuesday at St. I's, and David thinks we play his team that night. He's not certain, and I'm clueless, but he was at St. Martha's watching volleyball tonight and that's what he thinks.)

Books- I finally read "Henderson the Rain King" by Saul Bellow. I've passed it up for years but finally tried it. I should have kept passing it up. I got nothing out of it.
Currently, I've just started Divisidaro, by Michale Ondaatje. I'm not really into it yet and I might put it aside for awhile, but it seems promising and I've liked his other work.
The only thing I've read lately that I really liked a lot was "Shades of Grey: The Road to High Saffron" by Jasper Fforde. Fforde has a very vivid and wild imagination and I have difficulty describing his work, so I'll just crib the entire Wikipedia description:

Chromatacia is a future society that exists five hundred years after the collapse of our own future civilization, referred to by the residents of Chromatacia as The Previous. All life is governed by The Rules as laid down by Munsell, the founder of Chromaticia. Most important of all is the ability to see colour, which is limited in most people to varying degrees of one shade, e.g., Red, or at most two. People without the ability to see any natural color are called Greys and are lowest in the social order, or Colourtocracy.

Eddie Russett is a Red who has been sent to the outer-fringe town of East Carmine to conduct a chair census, as punishment for a practical joke played on the son of a prefect. There he meets Jane, a Grey with a retroussé nose and a fierce temper. As Eddie tries to get back to his normal life and find a way to marry Constance Oxblood, he falls in love with Jane and with her discovers that the world he knows is far more controlling and ruthless than he had imagined.

I'm sure that doesn't help much. But it was loads of fun to read.

Weather- gosh it's hot. Did I used to sweat this much and I've forgotten, or is it just the difference between my various former weights and my current 205 pounds? 204 pounds. 203 pounds. 202 pounds... I'm sweating a lot!

(Not) Politics- Oil pouring into the Gulf is not Obama's fault. He's not a scientist, or an engineer, or Aquaman.
I blame Bush for a lot, but a hurricane which flooded a below-floodplain city was not his fault, nor were the weak levees. The levees were inadequate for 30 or 40 years. I wish Bush hadn't agreed with rebuilding a below-sea level city, and I also wish he hadn't done a long list of other things in his 8 years, but I don't blame him for Katrina. What was he supposed to do?
Similarly, what the heck is Obama supposed to do? He's a lawyer by training. As I would expect any intelligent person to do, he's relying upon the most qualified people to fix the problem. Unfortunately, the most qualified people work for BP.