What do potatoes and fish and birds have in common? Probably nothing...

Some mornings, I wake up and I know exactly what I’m going to write in my blog for the day. Perhaps a thought has been running through my head all night, or a comment from someone sparks an idea, or I have pictures I feel like posting. And then there are days like today, where I just don’t know WHAT to write, but I have all kinds of strange, jumbled things in my head that I COULD write about.

For instance – did you know it takes longer to bake a sweet potato than to bake a regular potato? I discovered this last night, as I attempted to bake a sweet potato, which I was planning to divide in two and serve as a side-dish with dinner. I’d never bought sweet potatoes before – but the grocery store seemed to be out of the potatoes I normally buy, so I thought I’d try something different. I contemplated calling my mom before popping it in the oven, to see if she had any sweet potato-baking wisdom to share, but then I thought, “c’mon, it’s a potato! How hard can it be? I can figure this out…” I assumed it would need around an hour, maybe an hour and ten minutes – about what it would take to bake a regular old potato. So I carefully choreographed the rest of dinner to be ready at the time I thought the potato would be ready. Soon I had food piled onto plates – one third meat, one third vegetables, and one third reserved for what I was certain would be a perfectly-baked sweet potato.

But when I removed the orangey tuber from the oven and attempted to pierce the skin with a fork, I discovered that the stupid thing was still as hard as a wet block of wood. But the rest of dinner was finished, and we couldn’t wait around for it to get cold – so I told Rick we’d just have to do without the potato until after dinner. I put the sweet potato back in the oven, baked it for another hour or so, and FINALLY it was done. It took two hours. But it worked out okay, because once it was done, I topped it with butter and brown sugar and it ended up tasting more like dessert anyway… Seriously, now that I know how to bake them, I need to buy more sweet potatoes…

And as long as I’m talking about food – did you know that while cold-water fish contains a lot of omega-3 fatty acids (which is one of those “good” fats that lowers “bad” cholesterol) you can also find them in walnuts and flaxseed? This is really good news for me, because I hate fish. I will NOT eat fish. I never, ever, ever, ever… ever, ever… ever… eat fish. Ever. But with all these doctors and nutritionists writing articles and appearing on the news to tout the amazing benefits of omega-3s, I thought I would forever be missing out on some kind of magical superfood. So lately I’ve been eating walnuts and sprinkling flaxseed on my oatmeal in the morning. And I feel so much more virtuous now…

Of course, I could also talk about how Allegro and I watched The Birds on TV yesterday. Actually, I watched, and she lounged on the couch next to me, her ears perking up every time she heard squawking. She was no doubt imagining the lovely, delicious meals she could have, if only I’d let her outside now and then and give her the freedom to express the hidden lioness within her (I’ve seen her gazing longingly at the phoebes on the back porch – she can see them through the window). I think The Birds is the best suspenseful movie about a bunch of usually-innocuous creatures ever. Thinking about the movie does tend to freak me out a bit, however, whenever I happen to be near downtown. We have an overabundance of grackles in this city – these sort of brownish, blackish, crow-like birds that like to congregate in trees and talk to each other. There are streets near downtown that are lined with trees, and as you drive past them, you can see every tree dotted with grackles. If you crack the car window a bit, you can hear their noisy cacophony – and it sounds exactly like the parts of the movie where the birds were attacking innocent village-dwellers. Think about it too much, and it makes you want to drive away from those grackles as fast as you can. Leave it to Alfred Hitchcock to make a drive past a bunch of trees seem creepy…

And something curious I noticed as I was watching the movie, and I’ve noticed it in other older movies as well – why is it that American actors in old movies always seem to have the slightest tinge of a British accent? It was like, “whatever shall we doooo about the biiiiirds?” Did people actually talk like that back in the 50s and 60s? Or was it simply “proper diction” that they adopted for the express purpose of movie acting?

Another thing I could talk about is some of my strange dreams the last few nights. Like the other night, I had a dream I was on a houseboat of some sort, on a lake. And even though it was a lake, and the weather was clear, the boat started getting hit with large waves. The boat was picked up and slammed back down into the water, again and again. And this is actually one of the reasons I hate small boats – because even little waves make the ride extremely bumpy, and capsizing seems like a highly-probable scenario. The fact that lake water is always brownish-green and murky doesn’t help, either. And in my dream, the boat finally got to the point where it was about to sink, and everyone had to get out. I guess it was really more of a nightmare, actually…

So those are some of the random things that were running through my head this morning. Perhaps tomorrow I’ll make more sense. No promises, though. :)