Sneezes

(To the tune of "I Fought the Law")
I fought my cold and...I won?
Surprisingly, I managed to contain getting sick to one day. Two and a half containers of orange juice and two good night sleeps later, I am in fairly good health. I'm still a little sniffly, and I won't be running a marathon any time soon, but I would classify myself as 'healthy' rather than 'sickly.' Success! I hope I can maintain this. Ok, well I just sneezed twice. Wait. Three times. I hope this is not the beginning of anything more ominous. More OJ and sleep! Four times. Damn. That's rare.

Saturday night I ended up at an Irish bar with a live band featuring a guitarist, bassist, and singer/keytaurist who was clearly very Irish. They played some Irish stuff you would expect and encouraged people to do some Irish step. That felt a little like Boston, and I was proud to be Bostonian, though I am in no way actually Irish. But they also played other crowd pleasers...like "Dancing Queen"! You haven't heard the song the way it was meant to be until you've heard it sung by a keytaurist with a thick Irish accent. It was ridiculous. They played songs ranging from Dropkick Murphys (!!) to Johnny Cash. It was a Guinness-drinking good time. Until it turned out the Guinnesses cost eight bucks a pop and I considered doing the dine-and-ditch. What a rip off. Eh, the band maybe made it worth it. I just spend too much money. I have to start living off nothing but Pasta and water. But I need orange juice to not be sick, curses foiled again.

I was assigned to bring gravy for a Potluck Thanksgiving tonight. Vegetarian gravy. Now I have never cooked gravy before, and especially not vegetarian gravy, so I knew that if it was going to taste moderately acceptable I would have to work on it. That's why I went to Whole Foods yesterday (found out where Whole Foods is in the process, that's a handy bit of information) to get the necessary ingredients, aka vegetable stock and herbs. Cooking gravy, it turns out, isn't that complicated. It starts out with making roux, which is basically just oil and flour in order to cook the flour. Well I am used to cooking on an electric stove which heats up considerably more slowly than the gas stove which I currently use. The result was that the oil got a lot hotter than I anticipated and when I put the flour in it basically exploded on me. Bam, smoke and burning everywhere. I threw the pot onto the balcony and had to cook onions to get the burning smell out of the apartment. My roommate loved it, don't worry. The second attempt was more successful, in that it made something like gravy, in that it looked like gravy but tasted like...nothing. Third attempt I decided to ditch the vegetable oil and use good ol' fashion fattening butter instead. Throw in some freshly ground peppercorn and thyme to the gravy and it actually came out tasting good. I'm not saying it was the best gravy that ever happened, but it was pretty darn good considering there was no dead animal drippings involved. And in regular gravy it is the dead animal drippings that give it the delicious flavor you so desire on Thanksgiving. Enjoy that thought at Thanksgiving dinner. "Aunt Joanna, would you like some dead animal drippings on your mashed potatoes?" Aunt Joanna will love it. Who is Aunt Joanna? Who is John Galt? Who is Ayn Rand?