No big ideas swimming around in the primordial stew pot of my mind today, so as per usual or thereabouts, I will just chat with (at?) you people about this, that, and the other.

And the other left town.

Today has been boring, like Saturdays are supposed to be in my universe. Same with Mondays. I socialize in the evenings on Fridays, Sundays, and Tuesdays, and being an introvert (sorta), I need a day in between social evenings to recharge my social batteries and be ready for another fun evening of hanging out with my buddies and watching stuff on video and making snarky comments.

We basically MST3K everything. I am sure some of you do it with your own friends too. It is the post modern way to enjoy things. Watching something in icy silence is too static, too linear, too single track, too passive for us post modern Gen X types. We have to interact with our media, and what better way than to use it as a platform for comedy?

Sure, we end up having to rewind a fair bit. Often it is because we are laughing so hard that we miss what it going on. I think that makes the rewinding worth it by a very long shot.

And it is a great way to hone your comedy skills too. It’s like improv but without the pressure of having to come up with everything yourself. All you have to do is riff. And riffing is the basic building block of learning to be funny.

Speaking of “funny” things, I have been in a weird mood for a while today. A sort of tense, angry, frustrated mood. And because I am trying to be more emotionally aware and connected, I am going to try to figure out where this mood came from.

After all, you can’t avoid what you do not see coming, can you?

I think it is just the confluence of small frustrations. I was going to send Julian to the store, but that ended up not happening, which puts my evening snack in jeopardy as we are all out of popcorn and I have just a few pretzels left to form the core of my midnight (ish) snack.

And sudden change destabilizes me, and uncertainty unsettles me, and disruptions to my routine rattles me, and I guess that is reason enough to feel a tad out of sorts.

Plus, for a while, the question of whether we are doing Costco today was up in the air, and that was more uncertainty to add to my tenseness.

We will be going tomorrow instead. I am tagging along this time so I can supervise the selection of bread machine ingredients, and maybe get a deal on the trail mix that I keep buying.

I am hoping that Costco has enormous five kilogram bags of say Oriental Mix for like fifteen bucks or so. Right now, I pay between eight and ten dollars for a kilo, so that would be a big saving, and because there is so much variety in trail mix type mixes, it takes me a lot longer to get tired of a particular mix than if I bought a similar amount of, say, tortilla chips.

Even those tasty hint of lime ones.

I am looking forward to embarking upon my bread machine adventure. I will start with the plain white bread recipe from the instruction manual. Just good old white bread, nothing exotic or unqiue, but damned good when it is fresh baked from scratch.

I am really looking forward to taking the bread machine on its maiden loaf. For one thing, I want to see how big the loaves are in relation to the usual loaf of bread from the store. That will have a big impact on whether it is realistic to consider the loves I make a replacement for the bread we buy, or whether the loaves are too small and we would be stuck making tiny sandwiches.

I am not saying that it might not be worth it. Fresh baked bread from scratch is good enough that I am open to the idea that switch to elfin sized sandwiches might well be a net gain. But I want to know.

Also, of course, I just want to see the thing in action and know it works. I have this lovely idea of making it part of my routine that I make a loaf of bread every afternoon, trying out different recipes and finding out which ones rock my world, and keeping those around.

I am sure that eventually, a loaf a day will become a bit much, seeing as I doubt we can eat a whole two pound loaf a day between the three of us. (Or can we? I am keen to find out.) And there is only so much room in the freezer. So unless we get a deep freeze, I will have to control myself.

Still, the future is filled with tasty breads, and smells amazingly good.

One last thing before I sign off and end this little chat we are having. This little British gem features a very British response to a certain Internet evil.

It is a crisply and wonderfully sarcastic reply to all those awful people on YouTube who post horribly evil things as comments on people’s videos, often in a manifestly subliterate fashion.

Presumably, the pathology of these people is the same as any chronic abuser of people. It begins as genuine emotion about something, but soon the addictive lure of such ready catharsis, such easy access to strangers on whom you can deposit all your negative emotions in a big orgasmic spurt, draws the person into more and more devastating statements, till they are heaping the vilest of deprecations on total strangers without even watching the video first.

To me, the best response to these sorts of people is mockery. Refuse to take them seriously or to take offense, because that is just what they want. Do not feed the trolls! Internet Rule #1.

That sort of person loves anger, but nobody loves being mocked and humiliated. Do it well enough and with sufficient regularity, they will stop showing up.

Or self-destruct from sheer rage. Which is also acceptable.

Well, that is it for tonight folks. See you tomorrow!