So, this weekend I tried a new chili recipe. Just some random thing I got off the internet.

I don't like cooking with beer. I know the alcohol cooks out of the mixture, but it still smells like beer and since the recipe specifically called for "Budweiser" it polluted the apartment with the stench of cheap-and-nasty beer for hours.

Today I am trying my new chili for lunch. I can still smell the beer.

It's a good recipe, th0ugh. I'm going to try remaking it without the beer. Or maybe I'll just try beer that doesn't stink so badly.

I spent four hours making this chili, if you include the "simmer" time, when I was just stirring every 30 minutes. I cut the recipe down and in the end I wound up cooking for four hours to make two servings of chili. Not, perhaps, my most productive move ever.

I had to cut up meat, onions, chilis, and garlic, and I'm proud to say I didn't cut off a single finger in the process.

(On the other hand, I did bang the previously damaged finger hard enough to make it start bleeding all over again, so I'm back on thick bandaids and antibiotic ointment this week. In retrospect, this one probably should have had stitches.)

On yet another hand, I have no idea what I did to the inside of my left elbow, but it looks like the aftermath of a junkie coming off a binge weekend. Clearly I was carrying, lifting, or banging into something, but I can't remember doing anything that hurt badly enough to cause two dozen tiny bruises. It's weird.

My happy, clean, new lunchbag I bought on Saturday doesn't have a handle. I can't believe I didn't notice that. I also can't believe I didn't notice that the breakfast yogurt I dropped on the floor this morning had split. By the time I discovered it, my happy, clean, new lunchbag needed to be scrubbed.

I was trying to code logic statements to control jumps in the software this morning and Bernie kept doing annoying things like coming in and complaining because the e-mail he said to send out "just like last time but with this new subject line" went out just like last time but with a new subject line. Turns out he hadn't re-read last time's e-mail and there was something that should have been changed.

So, in the future I am to understand that when he says to do something "just like last time" that means I'm to do it like last time but make "common sense changes" (his words), which means any and all necessary changes he would have made had he been doing his job.

I didn't say anything, but I was certainly thinking things.

Things like, "Yes, well, okay, and if I had back any of those 13 hours I spent on "tech" stuff last week, I'm sure I would have been happy spending them doing part of your job instead of part of DiamondGirl's job."

I hate databases, but that's a different topic.