No Joy in Mudville

There are bad ideas. Then there are REALLY Bad Ideas. And then are REALLY, REALLY, BAD IDEAS.

And then there's "Cooking with Dr. Pepper"...

As the commentator notes: "Any man comes home and finds his bride pouring a bottle of Dr. P in the sauce pan, he's going to snatch from her hand, grab her wrist with one hand, clasp the back of her neck with the other and bring her face to his, just to reaffirm his horrible suspicions: she's been drinking again.

He would be wrong. He would be a brute. She was only doing what the book suggested."

But to give you an idea of where I'm at right now, I'd have to tell you that I would personally gnaw my way through steel bars and low-crawl naked over a kilometer of broken glass to devour a thick slab of Dr. Pepper-marinated meatloaf with Dr. Pepper slaw and a Dr. Pepper on the side.I'm freaking famished. My internal flora has gone completely, dramatically wrong and has been for almost a week now. I've been subsisting on crackers and bread for three days without result. Today is a complete fast - water only. And of course, my unruly brain has been tormenting me with images of charcoal broiled New York strip...fresh tomatoes direct from the garden with sea salt, brie and basil...buttery prawns in garlic sauce...clean, briny hamachi with the sweet ginger and hot, hot tang of the wasabi...

Sweetbabyjesus, just kill me now...arrrgh.

Anyway, yesterday was a long, rough day in the field, working a steep site in Portland's West Hills. Hard drilling in the drizzly cold, and me just wanting to lay down and sleep all freaking day.This is the worst kind of internal disorder; it just feels like someone has stuck a tap in me and left it wide open. I can feel my energy draining away like...mmmm, let's not talk about water running, eh?

At one point I just lay on my back in the ivy and didn't move for five minutes. I could have gone to sleep there. Seriously.

The one interesting thing about yesterday was that the part of the West Hills I was working in was the site of the famous West Hills Martini Glass, a Christmas light icon that has loured over our Xmas drinkers since some time in the 1970's. During the MADD '90s the glass got one of those "no" red-circle-and-slash things that the homeowner would turn on at 10pm to signify Last Call.

So one of the few high points of the day was a long moment in the late afternoon when I could stop and just look over the railing across the Portland basin and enjoy the whole wierd Portland goofiness of this gigantic cocktail glass.

The story I've heard is that the homeowner actually inherited the martini along with the house and the damn thing is now a multi-generational project. It's funny to see the actual hooks and wires behind the big martini I've seen for years while zipping along I-405...

I'll try and get back soonest; it's just hard to find the energy to blog when you don't have the energy to, say, cook, clean or work.

Ugh.

(h/t to Jim Lileks for the Dr. Pepper cookbook)