Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Ooookay. Been feeling off-kilter, sluggish, and off my feed most of the past 45 hours or so ... I've got food in the house, a halfway decent selection in fact (often not the case), but have not been able to figure out what I want to eat, and doing so has seemed too much trouble to be worth the effort. So I just went downstairs with the idea that the first thing that caught my eye that didn't require thought or patience would be dinner. I discovered that one habanero pepper is a little bit too much for a cream-cheese, tomato, lettuce, and spinach sandwich on toast. (One serrano would've been right. Or two thirds of a habanero. But the last habanero was already starting to go bad and I didn't think the leftover portion would've kept long enough to get used, and since I'm still not really used to using habaneros (eating them in things other people prepare yes; cooking with them myself, only recently) I underestimated the effect of putting the whole pepper in the sandwich.

No sweating, no tears, no turning red (as far as I could tell by feel), and no hiccoughs, so it wasn't OhMyGodWhatHaveIDone hot, nor even "prove you like spicy vittles, padnuh" hot. It was merely "the flavours would balance better and I could more easily just wolf this down like I'd planned if I hadn't used quite so much" hot. Y'know, I really do like the flavour of habanero peppers, but their heat : flavour ratio is rather unfortunate if you want to use them for anything more than MakeItHot. *sigh* (That, by the way, is why I like serrano peppers so much: of all the hot peppers I'm familiar with that are hot enough for me to consider "worthwhile hot", they've got the strongest flavour for a given amount of fire. After that would be chipotles (smoked jalapeños), which are often good when the "greenness" of the serrano flavour doesn't quite fit. I like regular jalapeño peppers too, but I find the serrano flavour more interesting as well as stronger. But I digress ... )

Afterwards, I grabbed a small chunk of dark chocolate, and noticed that my immediate reaction was to want to eat a lot more of it. So on the assumption that my body was trying to tell me something, I prepared a theobromine megadose -- hot cocoa with serious extra cocoa powder, just enough sugar to make it palatable, a drop of vanilla extract, a small sprinkle of cinnamon, a generous dash of nutmeg, and a dusting of cayenne, made so dense that it dripped off the spoon more like motor oil than like most beverages. I'm not sure whether it was close to saturation or not, but if I'd dissolved more cocoa in there, I probably would've had to eat it rather than drink it. The idea was to get as much theobromine as I could without completely overloading on sugar. Now to see how my body reacts to this. I'm guessing that I'll either find myself with more energy for getting ready for tomorrow, or go to sleep early tonight. Either way, I'm hoping that it makes me more comfortable than I have been lately. (I'm mostly ready for tomorrow, actually. I'm pretty sure where the tunic I plan to wear is, as well as my knife, goblet, and belt hook; I do know where my belt and pouch are; and the instruments and other gear are already by the door. I mostly need to pack a lunch and decide what camera equipment to bring.)

And in case anyone local doesn't already know: both days this weekend, Thrir Venstri Foetr (Three Left Feet) is performing at Marching Through Time, a military re-enactment event that includes pretty much everything from the Roman Legion through Desert Storm, at Marietta Mansion in Glen Dale, MD.

I'm considering attending a concert in Baltimore tomorrow night, depending on how much energy I have left over after spending the afternoon at MTT. It's also memorial for Dawn. If the theobromine reaction goes in the fresh-energy direction, I'll post details and links for both MTT and the concert later.