Daily Report: Successful Attempts

I've been to the pool 2 days in a row... a little sun, a little swimming, a little soak in the hot tub. The gelid depths February in America... who knew?

Tonight, I tried making chicken and dumplings after watching Alton Brown make it on Good Eats. I can't say I failed in the attempt: Mom and Paul finished what I served them. It wasn't hard to make either.

I'm going to try to spend more time focusing on meals from scratch like that. Food prices are going to be going up astronomically this coming year, and I imagine that the pre-packaged stuff is going to be the most notably inflated. Doing meals from scratch and saving a few dollars per person per meal will not just make economic sense, but it should be fun honing my culinary skills, and obviously healthier as well.

I've been watching "Jeopardy: IBM Challenge" on television, where a computer is competing against two trivia masters in the word-tricksy, aphorism-laden, double-entendre-filled question-as-answer quiz show... and it's simply kicking ass. You humans should be embarassed.

After that was the Westminster Dog Show, which I watched on the TV next to my desk as I worked. Beautiful creatures, though I must say not as well trained as I would have expected — some jump-ups, lots of shaking of fur, lots of being distracted. That Scottish Deerhound as Best In Show was an easy pick though: it's bouncy prance and an seemingly self-assured comportment was really the only feature on all the finalists that stood out for me. I imagine that every time that golden doggie whelps over the next decade, the owners will make a fortune.

I finished the second book in the series "A Song Of Fire And Ice". Then I went online to read about the rest of the series. It looks like the author might have given up on the series or something: The fifth book was finished 5 years ago but still has not been released. The sixth and seventh books haven't been started yet. You'd think that if HBO came along and was making a TV show out of your books, you'd want to be able to give them an ending. (You'd think HBO would have taken that into consideration when buying as well.)

Now I'm going to put more of my attention towards my Dostoyevsky... another 500 pages to go.