Dang!

Is Mercury retrograde? Is Pluto in my sign? Is it the end of computerese as I know it?


Probably just everyday experience piling up. I've counted at least 16 personal catastrophes that the month of June has made manifest. But I'll describe only one of them.

Cornbread Chicken Pot-Pie

I made it on the first day of June. Man, it had everything--sliced up chicken, many kinds of vegetables, lots of appropriate spices and plenty of salt--golden brown crispy crust from a package of yellow cornmeal mix topped with a whole stick of melted butter.


While it was baking, something kept tugging at my unconscious. It finally came through: I had taken the frozen chicken out of the freezer and put it in the refrigerator to thaw. But when? I couldn't remember when I had put it in the refrigerator. But I was pretty sure that it had been more than a week. I ran to the still functioning computer and studied up on salmonella.


When the pie came out of the oven, I looked at for about half an hour, trying to decide whether I should ignore the delicious aroma, or risk death by eating it. The compromise was to eat a small amount at the edge where there wasn't any chicken. Leaving out a frozen Hershey-bar pie, this was the best dish I had ever invented. I didn't cry, because other problems were demanding my tears and cussing. But I dumped it. A couple of days later I tried again, using fresh chicken, but it is so bad, I don't think the dogs would eat it.