Great Giant Slabs Of Meat

I went to my mother's for supper last night. We usually gather in her den for about a half an hour before we eat. When my sister arrived, she stopped by the kitchen to talk to mom, before joining my brother-in-law and me in the den. "She's cooking giant slabs of meat!" my sister said, with a look of horror on her face. A few minutes later we went to the kitchen, where mom handed me a large dinner plate with a huge T-bone steak and baked potato on it. I carried it out to the dining room, where there were individual tossed salads at each place setting, and a large serving dish of asparagus at one end of the table. I love asparagus, so I fished a few stalks out of the serving dish for myself, but the great giant slab of meat took up three quarters of the plate, and the baked potato took up the remaining quarter. The steak had to be repositioned, so that it was cantilevering out over the rim of the plate, in order to accommodate the length of the tender green shoots between it and the potato.

Now I eat meat, but I'm not a great red meat eater. I will occasionally have a hamburger or small steak, but I usually eat chicken or fish. I knew that eating that T-bone was going to be a challenge. The small tenderloin side was easy, but masticating the larger and somewhat tougher NY strip side took a little more effort. When I was a teenager, I would have eaten that entire steak with ease, and afterwards gnawed the meaty remnants from the bone, but today that much beef weighs heavy on my aged digestive tract. However, with the knowledge that I couldn't expect to have any pudding, if I didn't eat my meat, I applied myself and finished the great giant slab. No gnawing on the bone this time though. For all that effort, it turned out that there was no pudding after all, but there was pumpkin pie with a whipped topping, an acceptable substitute. It was still warm too, and even more flavorful than when cold. I fear I will be digesting that meal for a week.

Later, my sister wanted to access my mom's email account for her. Because mom has never learned to do anything more than play bridge on her I-Mac, she relies on us bring her email up, so she can see pictures sent to her by extended family members. Well, it turns out that Comcast, her broadband provider, has upgraded their system, and they no longer supported her older version of Safari. So I tried to download the latest version of Safari, but mom didn't remember what her system pass word was. I had written it down in her computer manual, when I first set it up for her, so a search ensued to find the manual that I had told her should never leave her computer desk. About ten minutes later, it was found on a card table, at the bottom of a basket full of miscellaneous pamphlets and papers. With that, I was able to start the download of her software updates, but by then I had to go, and left my sister to monitor the download and rebooting. I still don't know whether that did the trick or not. Mom's computer problems never seem to come up, until right before I'm ready to leave for my one hour drive back home, and strangely even though we both have I-Macs, her's seems to be set up differently than mine, always requiring different commands to achieve the same results.

When I got home last night, I watched one of my favorite events in the Olympics, pairs free skating. It was a bad night for most of the pairs, with many unfortunate falls, except for the top two pairs from China, who to my untrained eye skated flawlessly. For someone who vividly remembers the dark days of the Cultural Revolution, where everyone, male and female wore olive drab Mao jackets, and stodgy propagandist displays passed for art, it was pure joy to watch these two beautiful Chinese couples, skating so gracefully and expertly to romantic western music!

The spring catalogs are starting to find their way into mailboxes now. If you are interested in some pretty, girly clothing and shoes, at affordable prices, check out Chadwicks.com . Unfortunately for me, their shoe sizes only go up to a US size 10, but much of their clothing goes from Small, all the way up to 2X, or a size 4 through size 24.

Melissa XX