turnkey systems.

There's nothing quite like spending all day reading badly-translated technical manuals. I always wondered why people paid other people to set up their already-expensive home theater systems...12 hours of creative cursing later, now I know.

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In happier news, I'd like to present a brief survey of what went into my mouth yesterday. During the breakfast hour, I made some bulgur that did exactly what I was just bragging about mine never doing (turning out gummy and useless), and Dad presented his first exotic American grocery item of the day, ice-cold pumpkin-flavored soy milk:






















....which was very unusual and actually very good. It's hard to believe that enough people thought that this was a good idea to turn it into a released product. Yet it exists. Nice!

For lunch, my dear mother put some more ribs on the ol' grill:























...while I had some more of my gummy bulgur (mmm!) and a leftover spring roll from Friday.

For dinner, there was a bunch of already-cooked shrimp strewn about, so I used some of them for a shrimp + habanero-pineapple salsa quesadilla or two:

















...and the rest went onto the grill for a minute, after which they chilled out on top of a nice salad.

















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When I first listened to the new Radiohead, I thought it was something that I couldn't really imagine listening to again, or more like I couldn't imagine where I'd listen to it. But it now sounds like it belongs here in the vast sandy-colored space we call the kitchen, looking out into the rocky foothills behind the house.

It makes me wonder how this jibes with their intentions....would they be juiced to know that In Rainbows is one of the few whole CDs on my laptop that I thought my parents (average age: 57) and I (mental age: 5) might both enjoy (or at least not find obtrusive or disagreeable), and that I thought it adequately soundtracked the expensively beautiful suburban kitchen in which I'm currently situated? Are we the target audience?