No Migas...'Nuff Said

No Migas
I've been awake for hours on this grey and dreary day. When I awoke, it was still very dark outside. The sun has long since brought daylight to the sky, but the cloud cover is thick. I had hoped to entice my wife to go with me to breakfast at my favorite place for migas (a long drive), but she's still asleep. She told me yesterday she would have to go to the office today because the volume of payments coming in for a client's meeting is so high...not enough time during the regular work-week to process them all. So, a dull day. No migas and a choice of going to the office or staying home or going out and doing my own thing on this grey day...that's not the way a weekend day is supposed to play out!

Grilled Stuffed Jalapeños
At least I can think about food...that's a good idea. My wife told me yesterday, as we were driving home, about an interesting recipe I may try soon. Remove the seeds from large fresh jalapeños (from the stem end...leave the jalapeños intact). Mix cream cheese with very large amounts of freshly-pressed garlic (4-5 cloves of garlic to a small package of cream cheese). Using a gadget one would use to do cake decorating (I can't recall the name), inject the cream chees mixture into the jalapeños, then wrap them with a slice of bacon and affix the bacon to the peppers with toothpicks. Then grill the bacon-wrapped jalapeños until the bacon is crisp. When they have cooled enough to eat, do so. I think I'd doctor the cream cheese a bit with comino, chile powder, etc.

Phobia
I seem to have developed a phobia almost overnight a few years ago; maybe I have written about it here, maybe not. It is, I assume, somehow related to a fear of heights, but it is not quite that simple. I feel what I can only describe as almost a sense of panic and paralysis when I am driving acar over a high bridge or highway overpass. I feel that I must clamp my hands hard on the steering wheel and I must focus very, very carefully on what I am doing. I have a sense that any distraction, however momentary, will result in my driving off the bridge. It's particularly acute when the bridge or overpass I am on curves. The first time I felt this sense of absolute panic was when my wife and I were driving over the Red River from Texas into Oklahoma, about three years ago. It caught me completely off guard. My hands got clammy and beads of sweat broke on out my forehead...very wierd. It's still with me and I live with it, I just don't like it. Since then, I have on occasion driven miles out of my way to avoid what I think might be an especially uncomfortable bridge.

Not a Neologism...or Maybe...
I just used the word "forehead." I remember when I was in school...I'm not sure when, it could have been as early as junior high school or as late as college...I was involved in an exercise in which I was to select the word from a list that was not really a valid word. I don't recall what the other words were, but the one I chose was "forehead." It didn't make any sense to me when I read it. I remember feeling awfully embarrassed when I realized what I had done. Now that I'm thinking about it, it was probably in college, because it seems linked closely in my mind with my creative writing professor, Michael Mewshaw, discussing "insinuendo" as an example of a neologism. I wonder what ever became of Michael Mewshaw. He had authored at least one novel, I don't recall the title, that was set in Washington, DC. I'll have to look him up. Now I'm thinking of related words...on occasion I listen to Whad'Ya Know on NPR (though I generally do not like Michael Feldman, the host) and always find it amusing to hear the name of his book, Something I Said: Innuendo and Out the Other.