Rampant Silliness

It occurred to me that I should blog now, because I won't have time early in the week. I'll get the sad news out of the way first. One of my oak trees died this week. As you can see from the picture, it's quite large. Our neighbor/landscaper thinks that it was from all the dirt piled on the roots during construction. Plus, the weather has been extremely hot. This is the hottest July in over fifty years and we had several days over 100F this week.

Monday, I went to RTP for an interview with a recruiter for a particular job with a startup. That went well and the building was very nice. I've been amazed at some of the interesting architecture in the buildings that I've gone to recently.

I don't really remember Tuesday, but I know it involved lots of phone calls and e-mail. That might be the night that my dad and I went to Vinny's for dinner.

Wednesday, I went to a recruiter's office in North Raleigh for no job in particular. That was interesting and the building was even more impressive than the one I went to on Monday. This one had glass and marble, rather than just glass.

Thursday, I went to the career center. I originally went there solely to prepare for interviews with the instructor of the workshop I took in June, but then I found out that a bunch of the former IBMers were going to have lunch in the break room. How could I not participate? I grabbed a surprisingly good egg salad sandwich from the vending machine and joined them. I met some interesting new people nad participated in some interesting discussions about resumes, business cards, and just what categories of people got laid off.

Thursday was probably the night that I made faux jambalaya. In fact, since I left out the tomatoes, onions, peppers, hot sauce and added curry, it wasn't really like jambalaya at all. It was, however, good. I had two packages of pre-cooked Jimmy Dean sausage, which I cut up in little pieces. I sauteed a lot of minced garlic and then I added the sausage, shrimp, thyme, curry, parsley, chives and eight ounces of chicken broth. That was all served over basmati rice, with peas on the side. It turned out quite well but, in hindsight, it would have been better in a bowl than on a plate.

Friday night, my parents and I went to Nikos for dinner. They actually had fried oysters! I've been going there since 1992 and I have never seen oysters there. Apparently, they've been having them for lunch periodically. I almost always go there from dinner. Of course, my regular readers probably know that.

Saturday, I met GM and AE at SouthPoint and we saw Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Now, I've never seen the original version of the movie, but I did read the books forever and a half ago.
Johnny Depp seemed somewhat creepy to me in this movie, but I think this was primarily because they must have done something strange to his teeth. Parts of it are quite funny and clever and overall it's a very good story. It was well done.

Afterwards, we went to Rockfish. JH, back from Princeton, joined us with a friend of his. That made it an evening of rampant silliness. I had fried oysters, for the second night in a row. They were different, though. Really. Then, we headed over to Marble Slab Creamery and I had a cup of coconut with pineapple and shredded coconut. Finally, we wandered over to Barnes and Noble for a while.

This week I tried a diet avoiding all vegetables in the solanaceae or "nightshade" family. That includes tomatoes, potatoes, eggplant and peppers. My mom read on Eschaton that a doctor told the writer of a comment that many people with symptoms of arthritis are actually allergic to those vegetables. Avoiding those foods has really worked for my mom. I, however, didn't really notice a difference after almost a week, so was I back to eating waffle fries with ketchup for dinner tonight. I'm sure I will try it again sometime, although it's very hard to avoid tomatoes.