Please take with food.

I sucked it up and went to the Doctor to whine about my broken ears. Indeed, my whining turned out to be justified and now I have two fancy pill bottles to make my life less awkward. This brings the prescription grand total of the last two years to.. *drumroll* TWO!

Hopefully I'll be able to hear again by Tuesday because that's when I run out of pills. One of them is actually steroids. So now if I'm suddenly drafted for a sports team I will fail the drug test. Tellement tragique.

A big fancy yellow sticker on one bottle tells me to 'take with food'.

Are mini-eggs food? I certainly hope so, because that was the accompaniment of choice. In a related note, I am done with Mini-Eggs. A bientot, mon ami, je ne te mangerai jamais encore (until Easter 2011). Also taking temporary hiatus from red peppers. Apparently I felt the need to eat them excessively recently.

In other food news, I'm also 'over' chicken. I haven't purchased any in ages. A French friend helped me realise why in a random explanation as we strolled the streets of Aix: French restaurants don't serve a lot of chicken, and the French don't eat a lot of chicken, it's considered a cheap meat.

So then I thought about it. I recall reading a stat somewhere about chicken consumption in North America and how much it has increased in the past x years. Basically, North America likes to jump on random healthy wagons (apparently acai berries from the rain forests are the new make-love-to food?) and chicken was cleverly promoted as a great, lean meat and source of protein. There's a bit of a catch though: chicken is boring. To quote a friend, chicken is "unoffensive", which is why you get it at every wedding and every luncheon and ever catered business-y thing you will ever go to. It's true, no one *dislikes* chicken. It's bland on its own. The only way to really enjoy it is too add bunches of other flavours. If you have a chicken veggie stir-fry, it's the sauce and veggies that give it the flavour. When is the last time you bit into a plain chicken breast and said, "Mmmm! So delicious!" Chicken can be good, but I sort of think of it the same as toast: toast on its own is boring, toast with peanut butter is a culinary delight.

My new roommate is a student at the culinary centre and agrees with me, so I must be right, yes? You can eat a relatively plain piece of salmon and it is good. Ground beef ("hamburg", in PEI) is good.

Of course, I may be biased as the last point in my life during which I cooked a lot of chicken was in third year uni when I was living in Ottawa. I guess I was convinced I was going to die from salmonella or something because I would put a chicken breast (because it was healthy and wonderful?!) in a George Foreman grill and basically cook the crap out of it. Ugh. My mind sometimes travels back to cooking class in junior high: why didn't they teach us to make real food? We made muffins, baked potatoes, and in our final exam class: chocolate chip cookies. That famous delicacy that most children assist in the making of when they are four years old.

Why didn't we learn about spices? How to properly cook steak? (Or at least explain that all steak doesn't have to be cooked extra well done a la PEI.) Maybe show us what a sweet potato was. Other bizarre fruits and veggies. To be fair, I don't think the fruit and veggie sections of the local groceries stores were nearly as diverse as they are now, but still.

Unrelated, but I received my first flat of the year yesterday. I noticed it this evening when I suited up for a bike. Ugh. If I have as many flats this year as last year I'm going to have to get a lot more efficient at changing them. Also, I don't have a bike pump. My bike here has schrader valves, and my bike in France had presta valves. My wee pump is apparently good for both, but seemed to commit suicide after trying to use it on my schrader valves at home after using it in France for a few months. So I, naturally, lost my temper and threw the wee pump at a tree when it wouldn't pump my tire post-basement storage retrieval. Eventually I composed myself after fishing out another other pump (first other also was faulty) and did retrieve it, but I don't remember where I put it. I'll probably find it after my unborn (unconceived) child graduates from university and leaves the nest. The entire point of this paragraph is that I had a flat tire and no pump. But my bike desperately needs a tune-up, new cables, and new brake pads, so I'll take it somewhere tomorrow morning and get my darling all shiny and sparkly new-like again. Except the scratches. And the pedals (I broke the originals somehow?!). And the Hawai'i stickers I put on the frame.

Ah, 1:00am. You always come so quick. Happy daylight savings, children.