Cast Iron Chaos: 2011-10-20

Last night I ate at Pizzeria Uno for the first time in years, and found the experience completely underwhelming. I had a so-called "deep dish" pizza with mac and cheese, also deep-dish. After the past several months of eating mostly home-cooked meals in cast iron, the food I ate there simply could not compare, especially considering how much I paid for the meal. The "deep dish" pans used at Pizzeria Uno are seven-inch aluminum pans, clean on the inside. The outside is coated with a baked-on or burned-on seasoning that gives the pan a blackened look. The "deep dish" is perhaps two inches deep. The pizza crust tasted had a dry taste of flour, whereas the toppings were skimpy and light. The mac and cheese wasn't bad, though all through the meal the thought kept repeating in my head, "…even I could cook better than this!" I gave a standard tip to the waiter because he wasn't the one who'd cooked this; in fact, I doubt there was an actual cook at all in the restaurant. More likely, they just heat pre-made dishes delivered to them by the chain. If nothing else, this has made me think I'll be trying again to make a deep dish pizza this weekend (especially since I'm staying home on the pager this coming Saturday).
I'd intended to eat out and then go to bed; but then I was up late again last night. This time, though, I was struggling through a Windows system restore, brought on by my attempts to get my iPod to sync with iTunes. I hadn't been able to sync it for about three weeks or so, even though the iPod was recognized as a USB device whenever I plugged it in. I'd performed the diagnostics, and checked to make sure the services were running; but still it would not sync. Finally, while doing a reboot of the PC last night, the system crashed and I had to do a Windows restore back to about one month ago. After restoring system settings and doing a restore of the iPod, I was finally able to get it to sync. So, somewhere between 10:30 PM and 11:00 PM, I finally loaded the new Peter Gabriel album onto my iPod and went to bed. And then I got up at 5:00 AM (I needed my alarm to wake me this time), only to find out that during the night, Windows had loaded a number of "important" system updates and then rebooted. And once again, I could not sync my iPod. So, out of frustration, I've completely removed all Apple software from the PC and shut it down. I'll re-install the Apple programs tonight and see if that resolves it.
At least the pumpkin bread and the fish chowder were nowhere to be seen when I returned to work this morning. Hopefully that means they finished it all last night.
If nothing else, I'm looking forward to this morning's meditation as I walk; compared to the past twelve hours or so, it should be very relaxing.