Passing For Normal

Why do people everywhere insist on ruining perfectly lovely salads by putting raw onions in them?

Yesterday I brought home a vegetarian (vegan?) "all the proteins salad" sort of thing from the natural foods store deli counter -- soybeans, wheat berries, tofu, sundry herbs & veggies, some sort of light creamy-ish dressing -- which on the whole was reasonably tasty and healthy and I'd like to buy it again... except that they put green onions in it. Not nice big pieces I could eat around, but little chiffonade bits that are so inextricably interwoven with everything else, there's no getting past them. Now I get to spend the rest of the day with that unlovely raw onion aftertaste. Bleah. And I still have another couple of servings of the stuff, which is an investment I'd rather not waste. Bother.

Raw onions: Yum or yuck? Discuss.

On other fronts: I've been working incredibly hard at not thinking about the fact that I lost a completed big bang podfic and all of the interim work files, plus my completed Summer of Giles podfic (15K words), a couple of weeks ago in a hard drive crash. I couldn't even post about it at first. It was too crushing.

So now I get to start over on both, while rethinking whether I can still do two dS/C6D big bang podfics, as I had planned. There's still enough time to do both before the final deadline, but there is not necessarily time to do two "rough drafts" before that deadline at the end of this month. I'm not even sure how that's interpreted for podfics. Anyone doing a complementary work could just read the text; they wouldn't have to hear my reading. But I guess the point is to make sure that there's going to be a completed work for their complementary piece to, uh, complement.

Anyway, that happened. At least I'm at the point where I can talk about it now. That took a while.

Update on my brother: He's okay. He has a new phone number that neither I nor his other relatives knew about yet. So it's all right... this time, anyway. *digits crossed* Thanks to everyone for your concern and support. That was a rough interlude, waiting to find out.