I survived jury duty today! I knew it would be boring, but man, it's been a while since I've been that out-of-my-mind bored. The ladies behind me were really good at making the best of the situation and made jury selection into their own personal game show. They would watch each juror as they were called to talk to the attorneys at the front of the room and then speculate whether that person would make it to the final jury. There were about 120 of us and there was only selection for two trials, two serious trials, that day.

I spent most of the day doing crossword puzzles and writing out the noun pluralization system for English as a finite state automata until my eyes rolled around in my head. I'd anticipated that there wouldn't be an internet connection, so I opened a bunch of websites that I wanted to debug in advance. However, due to the fact that windows sucks I found that my computer had restarted on its own and all of my preparatory measures were lost. Death to Windows XP.

I also cooked dinner for the first time in a month. Clark cooks about three or four times a week, so I feel pretty guilty for neglecting my spousal duties along with my increased workload. I try to make up for infrequency with creativity. I came up with a new recipe for brussels sprouts (or mini-cabbages as they are known in Japan).

I never really knew how wonderful brussels sprouts could be until I had dinner with my in-laws about five years ago and they served them after they had been soaked in cooking wine and balsamic vinegar. Ever since then, I've been experimenting with different ways to cook brussels sprouts. So far, Clark has liked everything I tried, but he seemed to be especially fond of today's concoction. Either that, or he's a good husband and knows to say something out loud when I make a change.

• Ingredients:
• ~1/2 cup Mirin (sweet rice wine seasoning)
• ~1/2 cup Ponzu Sauce
• 1/2 pound brussels sprouts

Labels: food, projects

posted by Alison 1/26/2009 09:41:00 PM : (0) comments : splink