While I wait for school to start on Monday, I've been passing the time with hobbies new and old. Some are practical (studying for the GRE), some are productive (working on a grant proposal for that perennial library project of mine), and some are just calculated wastes of time (keeping track of wins/losses playing solitaire--currently a 2:35 ratio).
Today I woke up early to walk down to the middle school and check in with the secretaries, who presumably had my schedule set. I thought this because they told me so themselves, and to come to the school Thursday morning. It was a long shot, but I thought maybe they weren't lying to me. I can't say I was surprised when they told me to come back on Monday, the day classes were slated to begin. Looks like that won't be happening, but there are always more books to read and card games to play to keep busy.
In relatively more interesting news: my lunch. Around 11 I made a trip to the library to donate the 75+ children's books that my friends had so generously given to me. In fact, there are many more still at my house in the States that I'll have sent over sometime this year. On my way home, I noticed that the Meat Man's stand (a slab from a tin roof resting on some wooden pegs) was sporting the ever-elusive meat grinder! I say elusive because it appeared once almost a year ago, whereupon Erin and I made hamburgers. Well, she made them for me. The next day, we wanted some more and returned to the Meat Man. He and his associates, in all seriousness, denied its existence and ever having owned a meat grinder.
So, when I saw the magical mystery machine, I decided to put off my lunch date with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and ordered 1/4 kilo. They took my order, found an appropriate slab of cow (skin and fat still attached), and prepared the grinder. This involved scraping out the pale gray gunk with their fingers, flinging it onto a pile of cow eyeballs and loaded my meat in. The last bits they, again, plied out with their fingers and flung into the plastic bag. What didn't come out ground, they threw onto a tree stump and chopped with their blunt cleaving knife and piled it on top of the rest. I swore to myself I'd never do this again, but I'd at least pay for it and take it back to my house.
Now, I'm not a manly-man, or a handy-man, or a knows-how-basic-things-work-and-should-be-done-that-a-ten-year-old-would-be-embarrassed-not-to-know-man, but I was willing to at least try to make these into edible hamburgers, willing to risk my health for something tasty. I figured I'd recognize what a "finished" burger would look like by sight, but I always had PB+J as a back-up. Long story short, I managed to form two patties without having to touch it (I put plastic bags over my hands) and had a little left over. I cooked them on my frying pan until they were charred, and sat down to a damn good meal. I even had ketchup I irrationally bought 6 months ago and never opened.
When I finished, I figured that if I were going to get sick from the meat, or become host to a two-foot long stomach worm, I had might as well enjoy it, so I went back to the kitchen and used the rest of the meat to form a third. I put the frying pan back on, emptied out the still-bleeding mush, and threw caution to the wind. Parasites never tasted so good.
