Or rather, there it goes.

Meant to write something a little more substantial and meaningful today (and for that matter, earlier) but my usual bad weather is clouding my mind and making it hard for any of my thoughts to stay dry enough to write down, so I am afraid all you are going to get tonight is a rain-swollen stream of consciousness and whatever thoughts have managed to find shelter, or at least a leaf to cling to while they float downstream.

I am talking, of course, about my bad sleep, and incidentally, my tendency to really put a metaphor through its paces.

I knew this was coming. I had been “up” for too long lately for there not to be a period of the deep dark intense sleep to follow. This is not fatalism, merely a sense of how things balance out.

So before I took a nap this afternoon, I said to myself “Well… here comes the flood. ”

And came it did. I seem to have this kind of bad sleep most often when I am asleep in the late afternoon. Don’t know why. Perhaps it has something to do with being asleep when the sun goes down. Or maybe that is simply my natural sleep schedule, sleeping in the late afternoon. Hard to be sure.

So as you might expect, I am all tried, incoherent, confused, dehydrated, and vaguely depressed right now. This too shall pass, I know. It always does. It always feels like it will go on forever, but usually I spring back fairly rapidly from it, in the long view.

It’s just that life sort of sucks until I do, and the obviously corollary to “time flies when you are having fun” is “time drags when you are miserable”, and hence, these periods of ill weather in my brain seem like they last a lot longer than they do.

It is the inability to concentrate that bothers me the most. It makes it so hard to get anything done. Even writing a simple diary entry like this one takes a certain amount of focus and attention, and when I am all scrambled up like this, where I have to watch that I don’t fall asleep in the middle of a sentence…… wait, what was I talking about? Whatever.

Point is, these times suck.

Life wise, nothing really special going on. Feeling the financial pinch due to recent expense adjustments pretty hard, and that certainly does not help things. It is not like I was rolling in the green before the recent reckoning, and losing another eighty dollars a month is just about a death blow for me financially, but somehow, I keep moving on.

Phew, almost feel asleep at the keys again. This shit is getting really old really fast, and I am not even half way done this diary entry yet. Rarely has a thousand words seemed like so many to me. And all I ca do is just keep plugging along and sooner or later, the storm will pass.

Let me tell you about my tasty if strang soup experience last week.

(Audience : “Oh boy, tell us now! TELL US NOW!”)

Maybe the free coffee for people in the lineup was a bad idea. OK, I’m telling it, I’m telling it!

When I was doing my post therapy grocery shopping last Tuesday, I decided I would pick up three potatoes and an onion, and try out my crock pot again.

Recipes? Who needs recipes? Add stuff and water, turn on, come back when it’s soup.

SO I pick up what look to me to be three really big but otherwise normal potatoes, and take them home with me, thinking nothing of it.

But when I decide to cook my little recipe, I discover something. Specifically, I discover that the “big potatoes” I picked up have very firm orange flesh.

Yup, I had gotten me three sweet potatoes instead of the usual white or yellow potatoes that I was expecting. Now it all made sense. That is why they were so big and heavy,and that is why they were not in the usual part of the produce section, but in the smaller section with the specialty items.

That would be a great big duh from big ol inattentive me, that’s for sure. I just grabbed three of the first things that seemed vaguely potato like to me, and did not even read the sign that presumably would have told me this was not a normal potato.

I even recall thinking “Wow, they are making potatoes really big these days. Must be genetic modificaion or something like that. ”

Uh, nope, ya big dope. It’s not a normal potato at all!

And I have no experience with sweet potatoes. I have never eaten them except as yam fries. (Are yams the same thing as sweet potatoes, or what?

But I figured, what the heck, so I just went ahead as planned. And it turned out quite nicely! All that I put in there was chopped sweet potato and onion, plus Italian spice mix and garlic powder and a little sel de mer, and yet a few hours later, I had some very nice soup.

The broth had a surprisingly dark color, almost black, but what the heck. It tasted good, and that is the main job for all food. And all this without starting with a soup stock!

And speaking of soup stock, in what I thought was quite an inspired move, I took some of the leftover soup stock and used it as part of the base for a batch of rice in the rice cooker, thus transforming the rice into a rice pilaf of the previous day’s soup.

And that turned out pretty nice too.

So as a cook, I am pleased with myself.

And as a writer, I am pretty pleased with how these are the last couple dozen words of my daily dosage, and how very soon now, I will be able to go back to sleep.

Seeya later folks!