I'm at Duff's right now my car's getting some maintenance. And while I am looking at my plate of wings I ponder one of the great mysteries of life: why is something as bad for you as wings almost always served with celery? I've never understood it. Are you supposed to eat the celery and then pretend that it balances out the enormous amount of fat you've put into your arteries? Or is there some more sinister purpose for this bizarre paradox?

There are also those days where you skimp on necessary ingrediants and steps required to prepare a dish in the interests of saving time and money, only to find you have a culinary disaster barreling towards you...sigh...

"Getting a Wegman's calzone will be an enormous mistake" my better judgement told me. Two hours later my stomach is doing cartwheels.

Hopefully my body will chill out by tomorrow. I really want to see the Queen City Roller Girls/Harlots match in Hamilton. Why does this kind of stuff always happen to me right befure stuff that I really want to do?

Today, I hit up Casa di Pizza two get two slices of the last truly enjoyable bready thing I'll get to have for the next eight days. Once pesach starts, it'll be no more bread and eight days of a boring dry cracker that reminds me of the fact that my ancestors had to high-tail it out of Egypt.

To go off on a tangent, it's kinda of strange that in a city with so many pizza joints like Buffalo it's so hard to find a place where a single person can sit down and quickly get an individual slice of pizza with exactly what they want on it that hasn't been sitting in a warmer for 12 hours and do so without involving wait staff. It's like you're expected to buy an entire pie if you want it your way, and you're usually expected to bring it home. If I had a dime for every time I've gone into a place wanting a slice of plain-cheese non-pork pizza only to be told "sorry, there's only what we have in the warmer", I'd have a lot of dimes. It's actually one of my biggest gripes about living in Buffalo. There are a very few places I've found in Buffalo that meet all my criteria, but they're few and far between.

Back home in civilization North Carolina, we had lots of locally owned (i.e. not Sbarro) places that filled in the function of fast-food restaurants where you could reasonably go out on a lunch break and get a slice that had whatever you wanted on it, and it was always shoved into the oven and served piping hot.

As I can't get what I want up here, I don't eat pizza too often, save for the once a month at the Buffalo PHP meetup at Casa di Pizza. This is probably a good thing, given my family history of cholesterol problems. But it's ironic that when I visit back home, the thing that I want more than anything is not biscuits or sweet tea, but pizza.

It's so like me to think "ah-ha, I will save some money on eating out by making this at home" and then end up spending the rough equivalent of four big whopper value meals buying all of the ingrediants at Tops.

It is also like me to be easily deceived into believing that such things as totally fat free ricotta and mozzerella cheese, which I didn't find at Tops, could actually exist in this universe, and that such concoctions if they do exist could plausibly not taste like cardboard. At least I did have the common sense not to try to make the thing for dinner at 9:45PM tonight, as I'd probably still be making it now; it probably means that I'm getting better with sense of time (which is not like me at all).

And all these coffee-related posts by (e:theecarey) during the last several days finally pushed me and my craving over the edge--I took my percolator out of storage, the really nice one with the long snout for pouring, and fired it up with a Starbucks dark roast. I'm probably like that anime cliche of the good guy who carries around a low-tech revolver--drip makers just don't do it for me, I don't care how fucking programmable they are and yes I really do recognize a difference in taste. I'd take a cheap percolator or french press over these latest thing from brookstone any day of the week; at least I know I'm always going to have a reliablly good cup of coffee.

I had originally dismissed my Foreman grill-owning friends as members of a kookie brand-worshipping cult. But after 4 months of living up here with a harried work schedule and having to make a variety of quick meals, I have come to the conclusion that these devices are in fact "The Bachelor's Swiss Army Knife".