I was bad last week, and didn't write hardly at all. No particular reason, just felt drained. It's particularly funny too, because I actually had quite a bit that I wanted to say. I finished reading "A Doll House", and it was indeed enjoyable till the last scene. There were clearly a lot of problems and dishonesty in the relationship, and both characters needed to change fundamentally, and other characters, who I liked, made a point of forcing them to air out their dirty laundry. But then the main character made a 180 change, and goes through a list of all the political points that the play is trying to make, and the writer doesn't even try to mask this, and divorces her husband without ever giving his character the chance to change. I just felt as though they didn't even try to make things better. There was this, oh, it's all broken, time to give up and start over someplace else all over again. That's an attitude I just can't stand, that's not airing out dirty laundry, that's throwing it away, as though it has no value at all.

Now we're reading "Death of a Salesman", which I need to have finished reading by tomorrow, and I have sixty pages left to go. It's not impossible, but it wont be pleasant, especially since I haven't finished all my work from the weekend. I visited my mom, and she is fixing a cell phone that I'll be able to use, and that is really amasing news. I'll be able to make calls again, with unlimited nights and weekends that start at 7 pm. Unfortunately, while I was there I learned that Alan is getting drunk, and maybe worse on a fairly regular basis, and still doesn't have a job since the last one. I can't believe mom is considering moving so far away with him and taking such a big risk considering all the things he's done. He blames me for wrecking their computer, when it was pretty clearly his porn surfing that picked up the harmful programs.

Surfing for porn is the number one cause of crashed computers, I would bet. I'm really mad at him, and I don't know what to do about my mom. I can't tell her what to do, and she knows more than anyone else everything that's happening with her. She simply never should have married him. That's what you get for getting married after 2 months.

That's where I was on thursday and friday evening. I started to watch Shaun of the Dead with her, which is a pretty funny movie, but I had to leave at 11 so that I could get home at a reasonable hour and not fall asleep on the drive. Then, when I got home, chuck had Hamlet, the four hour version by castlerock on VHS waiting for me from the library. I have had plans for what to do when this got to me since we first started reading hamlet in English 1302.

See, this particular version of hamlet, the best, and full four hour play in it's entirety acted out in a real castle in denmark, isn't available on DVD. So, somebody has to make a copy of it that wont degrade over time because it's on a VHS. I'll get to this later though.

Saturday morning, I woke up and played around, after I beat silent storm, and eventually got washed and went over to my dad's at 4 o'clock. We were going to do some grilling and have lots of fun. I brought all my laundry to do at his house, and i forgot to bring recipes and to bring some of the other stuff that I wanted to show him when I got there. And, I think, I forgot to bring a thing or two back from his house, my GURPS books, mostly. Anyway, so, when we went shopping for ingredients, we stopped by my house where we found Chuck pretty much wasted, which made me pretty unhappy, but I didn't dwell on it. I showed my dad Nubbs all finished, and a few other things before we grabbed the recipes that I had and we went to H.E.B. where we got a pineapple, and a red pepper, and some potatos and porterhouses and everything else we needed for the recipes for the evening.

When we got back, we got straight to work at cooking. We were grilling artichokes, and garlic potatos on rosemary skewers, and roasting a red pepper to go with it all, and grilling a pineapple. I only recently found out about rosemary, it's a powerful flavor, and it was so fresh on saturday that I had the sap all over my fingertips, when I picked up a piece of pineapple to eat, the flavor of rosemary was all over it, and it was so perfect, that it was just like the two flavors were made to go together. When I grilled the pineapple after everything esle, I sprinkled it with rosemary leaves, and it was soooooooo good. We used all the extra pineapple juice to tenderize the porterhouses, which was a very good idea.

Before I went home, they gave me some fresh rosemary in a ziplock bag so that I could do some cooking of my own(they have a whole bush of it in their backyard), as well as a potted little cilantro plant for me to start growing near my appartment so that I will always have the very freshest cilantro as I start growing my own herbs. I think, before all is said and done, as a cook, I will have my own herb garden where I will grow most of the spices that I use. They even told me about the woman who started growing herbs of all kinds in Texas, way back when people thought that parsley was the only herb that would grow here.

After that I stuck around and talked and did laundry and we watched sponge bob, square pants together, and I went home around midnight and Pattie was online so I talked to her, and we had some really good talks, that ended up keeping us up till 5 in the morning my time, 6 her time, but there was no school or work, so that was okay. I had made plans to do the hamlet thing with George at noon, we ended up meeting at 2 instead because of sleep. We ate lunch at pizza hut, cheese pizza with peperoni. Then, after that, we took so long deciding what to do and getting the ingredients together, that it was six by the time we got back, then 8 before we got all the cooking and eating done.

We made honey mustard glazed salmon fillet, and grilled rosemary pineapple(had to show the new recipe off) and we started work on some really gormet s'mores. Everything came along great, but we didn't get to finish the s'mores because they have a part where you candy an orange peel that takes 24 hours, so we're going to finish that tonight, maybe, the candy peel should be finished, and then, finally, it was around 8:40 before we got ALL the bugs ironed out and the movie was started recording. We had so much trouble not messing with it while we watched it, we had to go to the movies and just let it record. So, we went to see constantine, which was an awesome movie, I liked it a lot, it had some very cool moments, and some very cool graphics, and it had a happy ending, which should put me in a good enough moood that I won't mind the unhappy ending of "Death of a Salesman." I know it's going to be an unhappy ending, I can just feel it.

Anyway, we got back just in time, George's computer only had about 20 more minutes before his hard drive filled ALL the way up and maybe crashed his computer. So, we recorded the first tape of Hamlet, and that should be encoded by now, and we'll be ready to do the second tape tonight, again, if I have time after reading the aforementioned play. After all that is complete, we can give the video files to Mike, who can then make up menus and burn us some DVDs of the movie, which should be nice to have.

Anyway, all that cooking was practice and searching for good recipes to use on the cookout on the 18th through the 20th. Salmon and s'mores are both out as my only dishes because Mike, at least, doesn't like salmon, or chocolate at all, so I need to come up with some other recipes too. It's really fun, means I get to do LOTS of cooking over the next two weeks in prep. Anyway, Pattie has been giving me a ton of recipe sites to look at, and that have given me some very good ideas from. Right now, one of my favorites is orange grilled chicken, made with chicken breasts and then sliced and served on a bed of multicolored peppers that have been roasted and sliced into thin tender strips, with a side of garlic potatos, and maybe a third main dish, but maybe not, with grilled rosemary pineapple for desert. But the desert might change too, if I find a really good recipe to substitute.

After that I went home and played on the computer some and went to sleep, only to wake up groggy. Then it was time to go to work, and here I am. Well... on with the rest of the week, and hopefully a new blog entry every day.