I think my house may be running out of food. Hunger pangs are shitty. 

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I have discovered I have nothing to buy for Holland because I already have about 356456 winter coats in varying lengths. Except that they are all black but I can live with that. But I need socks. And tights which are not footless. And preferably not black or brown or some boring colour. WHERE DO I FIND THESE? TELL ME!

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In other news I just watched the first part of the CTKTIIYOU DVD. Oh my god. I want to be there right now. The 2008 tour has started and the reports are coming in, and I am feeling rather sad. 

The atmosphere during a live show is really different, huh? I felt like that at the 伍佰 concert. After The Eagles I couldn't stop smiling. And even Eric Clapton, which was woefully short, left me high. 

GLASTONBURY AWAITS! Next summer baby.

Actually, I really like this movie. Saw it in the theater when it first came out, with Small Children in tow. It was hysterical, then; today I can appreciate the storytelling, characterizations and acting (voice-wise). You know, all the stuff you're supposed to care about when you grow up. Overrated, but it does matter. Sometimes.

Ended up buying it twice around the after-Thanksgiving sales period. (When I say twice, I don't mean I have two copies or I gave one away as a gift. I mean I bought one at Target for $19.99 just before the sales, then bought it again for $14 at Target during the sales and returned the more expensive one later. Why go thru all the trouble?, you ask. Just because I have a shopping habit doesn't mean I will pay retail if I don't have to. And I'm not sure if Target does price matching on itself. I don't think they do, especially for special sales. Plus it came with a bonus disc - available only at Target stores. See what I mean?) The only issue I have with Ratatouille is it makes me hungry. Really hungry. Maybe Pixar is just that good or the subliminal messages really work on me (or both), but every time I watch this movie, I feel the need to eat something. The rendering of the food are just so...GOOD. I want to eat the screen every time another dish comes up. Over time, I've developed the habit of cooking Tostino's pizzas with mushrooms on top and eating it during my favorite food scenes in the movie. It's gotten to the point I can't watch the movie without craving a Combination pizza smothered in criminis or cook one without popping in the movie. It's a symbiotic relationship I have no problem with.

The Small Children like the movie, too (tho I never watch it when I'm making a Tostino's. They always ask for some). It's my go-to film when they're over and I'm not feeling watching more Sponge Bob or Drake & Josh. The bigger one likes it better than the little one, but that could be because it's not Cars.

Nothing.

Ugh, bleh.  Feh.  I feel really drained.   The diet says to drink more lemonade if you feel this way.  How do you get satisfaction out of the one thing that sucks the worst about the diet? 

 I don't care what people say.  I don't crave veggies and healthy food.  I crave horrible, dripping, disgusting, gooey crap that clogs my arteries and makes me fat and lethargic.  I don't want a salad.  I want a fucking steak.  I want pizza.  I want the appetizer sampler.  ALL OF IT.

I just feel horrible.  Slagging along through the day without any energy to cope.  I don't feel clear-headed.  I go through these bouts of total exhaustion and then moments of total jitteryness, but without any mental clarity.  In fact, the opposite happened.  I was attempting to add up how  many lemons we'd need for the rest of the diet, and I kept slipping up.  I just kept fountaining numbers.  I was like, "we need 3, so 6, but 4 because 2 go into the bottles, but i need to double that, no it's already doubled.  i think our doses are too low, wait, no, we can use the 6 for the 7, so we just need 2 for the 3."  In my head, it was making perfect sense, but I couldn't lucidly cogitate actual figures.  I had to sit and count on my fingers. 

Fasting is fucking hard.  I don't care how much fucking pancake sauce and beer toppings you drink.  It's difficult.  But I guess that's the point.  I'm trying to break my body's obeisance to foods.  I'm trying to teach that bitch who's the boss.  And it sure as shit ain't Tony Fucking Danza, it's Tony the Fucking Tiger and his frosty delicious flakes.  It's Ronald The Tap Dancing Clown and The Burger King.  It's all those foods you crave.   Your body doesn't naturally want them.  It wants good food.  But that want gets buried under all the crap you shovel in over it.  So I'm trying to dig it free.  But it's hard.  It's very hard.  And I've got 4 more hard days of this.

I want.  FUCKING. FOOOOOOOOOD.

Mmm. You see what I mean, right?

So, imagine my surprise when I got home with my little treasure of a dessert and sat down to eat it, only to discover some ass clown had peeled back the edge of the package and stolen the Buttons! What kind of savage does something like that?! Either steal the whole thing or leave it. Don't just abandon the velvety chocolate pudding there all by itself, Button-less. I mean, it's just common courtesy. There must a Thieving Bastards Conduct Code out there that prohibits the stealing of only one half of a chocolate treat.

I know I should have thrown the whole thing away since it had been opened and tampered with, but I wasn't going to let the Thieving Bastards win. So I ate the pudding angrily, with narrowed eyes. I'll show them. *shakes fist angrily at sky*

So, as I rummaged through cupboards looking for a meal I could put together quickly and easily, I came across the popcorn popper that I received for Christmas from Paul's aunt and uncle. I'd been meaning to try it out for weeks but there was always something preventing me from doing so -- no popcorn kernels, didn't have real butter in the fridge, didn't want to wake the baby with all the noise, or just plain didn't fancy it.

But, I'm a Hoosier. Being from Indiana, the home of popcorn, it is my birthright --no, my DUTY-- to prepare and eat popcorn, as well as propogate its spread over the industrialized world. I didn't move to the UK for love or for a new experience in a different culture. No. It was to salvage the UK's paltry popcorn record and teach them the ways of fresh, buttered, salted popcorn instead of the processed, bagged crap with toffee on it that they eat here. I travel the depth and breadth of this island, standing in cinema lobbies, quietly handing out literature near the 'help yourself' buckets of stale, cold popcorn in its sterile containers, encouraging a revolution in cinema snacking, demanding change and enlisting others in my cause.

And so, since I was feeling particularly popcorn deprived that night and, it being a tradition amongst women in my family to have it for dinner when husbands are away, I plugged that baby in and let 'er rip. I was like a kid in candy store, nose pressed up against the glass, watching and waiting with semi-glazed eyes and with the slightest hint of drool forming at the corners of my lips. I watched the little golden nuggets of corny goodness spin and spin in the chamber, furiously working themselves into a frenzy of heat and motion. The whirring air rose up through the vents. lightly feathering my hair and filling my nose with the unmistakable smell of melting butter and the burning of the seeds, about to burst. Ahhhhhh. Then the popcorn began swelling and spilling out of the chamber and into the bowl I had placed below it; filling, overflowing and then tumbling from the edge. I cupped my hands under the 'spout' and caught a few freshly-popped kernels in my hand. So warm, so lovely. I smiled and closed my eyes, savoring real popcorn as it should be, in its natural habitat.

And then, as I marvelled at its tastiness, an unpopped kernel exploded forth, escaping the 'kernel catcher' above the spinning chamber, and shot out of the machine, directly towards my head. I squeezed my eyes closed in the nick of time and felt a little ping and a burning sensation on the bridge of my nose, just a few millimeters from my eye. I looked down and there, burning a hole into the tub of butter on the counter, was the renegade kernel. It had tried to blind me, resentful, I suppose, of its maker, the machine's, inability to turn it into a proper piece of popcorn, relegated to the wimpy guys at the bottom that never muster the strength or stamina to make it to the top of the chamber and propel themselves forward, multiplying and fulfilling their duty as good kernels.

It's survival of the fittest out there and, like in life, it isn't very often that the little guys at the bottom manage to make it out alive. But when they do? Man, are they feisty!