Small But Weird

I made an upleasant vegetable soup for dinner this week. I even bought vegetables especially for it. Stupid health kick. I mean, it's not that bad, but it's vegetables. Blatantly vegetables. Not even well-hidden, like when I put onions and celery and peas in a couscous pilaf.

The reason I was inspired to eat healthy was because last week I didn't eat healthy. I was in New Orleans for a conference for work, and I ate some good things. A peanut butter burger. Beignets. Cauliflower au gratin. Chocolate cannoli. Baked fettuccine. White chocolate bread pudding. Regular bread pudding. Notice how there aren't a lot of fruits or vegetables in that list. On business trips I can always tell my nutrition is suffering when I start telling myself fruit juice or the lettuce on burgers counts toward the 5-6 servings a day the government suggests for health and wellness.

I did try some regional specialties besides the beignets. The gumbo was all right, I don't see why it's a big deal but it's all right, but the crawfish pasta was the worst thing I've been forced to eat in a long time. I wasn't sure I'd like crawfish since I hate all other shellfish, so I thought crawfish pasta was a good idea since I could eat the pasta if I hated the crawfish.

Crawfish flavor migrates.

And thus my seafood list is still salmon, fish sticks, and tuna fillets out of the envelopes.

Oh, the conference was good too. It was on a lot of topics besides my actual area, which I found interesting. Best parts: when an expert on a panel answered the question "What is your opinion on the field of detecting subvisible particles?" with "I wish we had any ways to detect subvisible particles" and when one guy a few rows behind me in the audience began snoring ludicrously loudly. I also brought home six pens, a t-shirt, four or five reusable bags, a luggage strap, an eyeglass cleaning cloth, two full-size chocolate bars, and one pill within a pill that a company was advertising and I thought was really cool.

I drove around on my way back to the airport to see if there was any Katrina damage still. It took me about half an hour to find an alternate route over one bridge that was still out, so that answer is "yes". Trying to find another bridge led me through a neighborhood that had empty plots, boarded up buildings, and some houses with the spray-painted X's from search and rescue. But oddly, when I got to the lower 9th ward that was supposed to have the worst Katrina damage, most of it was being rebuilt in a different, obviously more hurricane-resistant style, on top of pilings with rooflines diagonal to the river. My cousin told me afterwards that's Brad Pitt's pet project.