journal for 2002-10-17
beer and curry
There’s this weird eating habit here: everyone puts curry sauce on all kinds of things. People love curry, and the highest form of food with curry is “a curry.” “A curry” seems to mean just about any Indian food, evidenced by the fact that at dinner tonight neither Matt, Dave, nor I ordered anything I’d call a curry but, despite this, Matt commented later that, “That was a good curry, that was.” It was good Indian food, anyway. My chicken jalfrezi had a bit too much onion, and I nearly lost my ability to taste when I ate one of the chilis in it, but it was tasty. The proprieter of the restaurant looked a exactly like Abraham Lincoln, if you ignore the fact that he was Indian, while Abe Lincoln was not. (I was going to make a clever joke about Lincoln being Indianan before I remembered that he was Illinoisan. Oops.)
Matt introduced me to a tasty beer called Caffreys, which (only when poured right, he warns) is really smooth and nutty. I don’t know if I can get it in the States, but I doubt it. I should stick to my “don’t drink much beer” habit when I get back, anyway.
Work was so-so. I had a few little fires to fight in the US, but they were fightable. I had a long talk with The Big Boss, and it was very positive, in my opinion. He went through a long list of things that we need to do to put software development into order, and wound it up by explaining that he was going to need me to take on these tasks. Hey, these are things I’ve been saying we should do for over a year now! Getting told that we’re going to do them, and I’m going to be “forced” to head the effort is A-OK with me.
I’ll have to see how this plays out in reality, but I think it’s a good start.
Otherwise, work was unexciting. I did some work on our training system and on spec’ing the ERP stuff that should’ve been spec’d before I came. For lunch, we went to Tesco (the grocery) and I got some tasty “hot and spicy” fried chicken and curry flavored Pringles, and also these snack sticks called Twingles. I was assured the Twingles would blow my mind.
The Pringles were edible, but not very good. I like curry, and curry on french fries was OK, but curry Pringles just didn’t work for me. The Twingles were like little puffed wheat sticks, but they tasted like burnt cheese and feet. I tried to eat a whole (small) bag, but I couldn’t. I surrendered them to The Boss’s Boss and Godfrey. I also had an apple Tango, which was good—but a can would’ve been enough. A half liter was too much.