DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

This is the Good Samaritan Hospital’s idea of a vegetarian breakfast: greasy sausage, scrambled eggs, and a pot of oatmeal with a skin so thick it must have also come, somehow, from an animal. Also, the food tray offered the hospital’s ubiquitous serving of Jello substitute, a generic geletin whose label actually reads, “gel-type dessert.”

Generally the nurses don’t ask what flavor gelatin the patient wants — they ask what color. That should give you an idea of the product’s nutritive value.

It may be that our order for non-beast meals was misplaced. We put in another request and were gratified to find that subsequent meals were more in line with our expectations — although still not anything to be enthusiastic about. One of my co-workers pointed out that the insurance companies are probably behind this poor-food initiative, on the theory that if patients hate the meals they might stay fewer nights.

One entree triggered a pleasant wave of nostalgia. Until about a year ago, one of my all-time favorite dishes was a peculiar American concoction called “grilled cheese.” Because this might mean different things to different people, I’ll explain the recipe in detail: put two slices of American cheese between two slices of white bread, pan-fry in butter, and serve hot with tomato soup. In a pinch, ketchup can be substituted for soup. But by no means can one use wheat bread or put ham or Swiss cheese into the sandwich. Occasional uses of alternative (non-Swiss) cheeses are tolerated, so long as they melt, and they don’t come from goats.

These days I avoid white bread, cheese, and anything fried in butter, but the sight of this sandwich presented a temptation I was unable to resist. Steam-soggy and cooling, it had no business tasting as good as it did. I’d have traded my salmon plate ($5.10 from the hospital cafeteria) for a few ounces of ketchup. But, I’m now happy to say, I ate only a bite of the sandwich; I was afraid I’d be next in line for abdominal surgery if I’d eaten any more.

In fact that’s probably the real reason hospital food is so bad… they’re just ensuring a steady supply of future customers.

In the past 30 days I’ve bought a house, sold a house, taken a week’s vacation in Colorado, read four novels, and helped a family member survive abdominal surgery. I’ve hacked into the heart of the Monaural Jerk codebase, baked bread, and connected to the Internet via four different networks in six different locations. I’ve commuted. I’ve slept in many different beds. I’ve eaten numerous ethnicities of food in many restaurants. But I’ve spent almost no time writing content for this site, as you can tell by scrolling down the page.

Somewhere in the bottom of my laptop bag is a business card with story ideas jotted on the reverse. They’re backed up like the chunks of undigested red meat in your colon. And, like those impacted, foul-smelling blobs, they may never experience release. Such is my schedule. Such is your colon.

I plan to write more in the coming weeks. But, to be honest, I always plan to write more in the coming weeks. Sigh.

The Union Chinese restaurant in San Jose, CA, is a pretty nice place to order take-out… the stench of incense nearly masks the stench of the hostess’ BO, but the kitchen is fast so you don’t have to endure it for long. And they happily accomodate off-menu orders, or maybe they just fry up some other miscellaneous garbage and stuff it in the to-go bag, figuring the customer won’t notice until they’re too far away to complain. (I’ll find out in about 20 minutes, I guess.)

It might also be true that writing sarcastic, negative restaurant reviews while sitting in the restaurant waiting for food is a bad idea. You never know what might get stirred into the stir-fry.

My first thought was, “Damn, I’ve lost a filling!” My second thought was, “Ewww, the cook lost a filling.” But it was just a little chunk of plastic after all. There was no evidence that it came out of someone else’s body first.

When you buy a house, the day your offer is accepted is a high point. Soon after that, you hire a squad of experts to dissect the place as if it were a sack of dirty clothes, reporting back on every stain, odor, and sagging bit of elastic.

Armed with these reports, you as a buyer have the option of asking the seller to fix the problems, or asking for cash, or doing nothing. Or, technically, you can back out of the purchase altogether, although in my experience the problem would have to be huge for most people to cancel the transaction… because by the time the inspection reports come in, you’ve been in escrow for at least a week, after having come out on top of the bidding war that marks the sale of any nice property (in Northern California, anyway). You’ve toured the property two or three times, mentally put your family and furniture into the new home, imagined driving down the driveway with groceries, imagined entertaining friends on the deck, wondered how the heck you’re going to get broadband access there, given that it’s way the heck out in the sticks. In short, you’re committed, and only something devastating would break the commitment.

We endured about 10 days of pain. Buying and selling simultaneously, we had inspection reports from two properties to contend with. In both transactions, the buyers submitted “addendums” to the original purchase contract, requesting repairs, money, or both. In both cases, the sellers issued counter-addendums.

For my part, I had to scramble to get a heater repaired. The house inspector discovered that our heater was spewing carbon monoxide into the basement den. I heard his report from the buyers’ realtor, who enthused “We love the property, and the inspector said everything is in fabulous shape. There’s just the matter of the carbon monoxide from the heater; that’s the SILENT KILLER, you know. But the house is really great!”

Fortunately, a few hours’ worth of cleanup and TLC did the trick. The flue was obstructed with the grime collected over 25 years, causing insufficient draw, causing the combustion byproducts to vent into our basement. The heater expert opined that the CO levels were safe before the repair, but we’re all happier now that they’re 100% lower.

Meanwhile, three miles away, we discovered that most of our 2+ acre yard might be leachfield. Subsequent research indicated that this is probably not entirely true, but for a few days we believed that the only way we’d be able to build our new music and dance studio would be by redirecting the output line from the septic tank into the “seasonal creek,” which, by the way, is realtor-speak for “drainage ditch.”

Anyway, after way more difficulties than I expected, we pushed through terms everyone could live with. We and our buyers removed contingencies… and now it’s just a matter of time before loans fund and we move to the new house.

And, no, I really won’t have broadband way the heck out in the sticks. Fortunately there’s a local wireless co-op that’s running WiFi from peak to peak to share a big DSL pipe. But that’s a story for another time.

I often intend to assemble a summer reading list, for any of you who have travels planned and appreciate recommendations for worthy books. But then I spend my summer reading, and I never get around to writing up my reviews until too late in the year.

This is happening again. Watch for a whole mess of reviews in about six weeks’ time, just after you return from boring airplane rides and lonely ocean crossings. But don’t blame me if you end up reading some schlock grabbed in haste from the bestseller rack at the airport news concession — I have more than a year’s worth of older reviews archived on this site. (See the “Media Reviews” section of the navigation area.)

Also, I have managed to write up some recent thoughts on two excellent works of non-fiction. The stories are entertaining enough to be untrue, so don’t let the genre bother you; both these books are a lot of fun:

• In Search of Captain Zero (Allan C. Weisbecker)
• Kitchen Confidential (Anthony Bourdain)