This weekend I have been experimenting culinarily. Right now I'm having Cheesy Baked Potato Hamburger Helper, which is very interesting. It's good in a boxed way, solid and salty and ordinary. I'm also having a Bird's Eye variety of frozen vegetables which are some of the oddest I've ever had. It has little broccoli bits, water chestnuts, globular baby carrots, and, of all things, edamame. I've discovered I'm not a fan of edamame. They're too crunchy and have an unusual grey kind of flavor.

This Thursday I got to try my hand at cooking steaks again because Karen got a craving for meat, and I made her go to Whole Foods and get some New York Strip. I did it the Emeril way my mom taught me, where you sear them on the stove and then put them in the oven. I also made mashed potatoes and green beans with bacon. I must say that bacon greatly improves green beans. Mmm, bacon.

This weekend we had another Game Night, with my new board games Mental Floss and "Would You Rather". We played Mental Floss first, and enjoyed it. It had trivia we actually had a chance of knowing, unlike Trivial Pursuit, which seems to have a lot of questions about history and current events that all us Tech dorks fail miserably at. Then we opened Would You Rather, and Chris/Texas, a trombone from band, found that to win the game you have to collect a certain number of the Challenge cards, which featured activities like giving a lap dance to someone, or smearing mustard on your face, so we just read the Would You Rather cards instead. Like, would you rather be caught picking your nose in public or be caught farting? Farting, definitely.

Unit Ops is turning out to be a very annoying class. Who thought commas would come back to haunt you? As an engineer? I'm frustrated because back when we were learning grammar so long ago, I put commas in a lot of places. Someone told me that you put commas where you'd normally pause during speech. So I put commas after introductory phrases, other places you'd pause, and after the second-to-last item in a list like I just did. But then as I went through school I started getting corrected. The teachers said I put in too many commas. That you don't put in commas before the second-to-last item in a list, etc. So I stopped doing it on school stuff, though I kept using a lot of commas in my own writing. And now it's switched back again. Pick a side!

Also, I keep getting point of for being "wordy." I have to go into idiot-mode to write anything they'll accept. For instance, I can't just say "The temperature was monitored periodically throughout the experiment," I have to say "We monitored the temperature using a thermometer. We measured the temperature every 6 minutes." It's like a writing class, a public speaking class, and a lab class all rolled into one. Urgh.