Thunderstorm tonight

I hadn't seen it rain in days. (We needed it.) Not a duck-drowner but decent. It started around 8:00 and is still sprinkling now. It was supposed to stop at 9:00. I drove to the store 20 minutes before. Needed umbrella going in but the storm had slacked off by the time I'd done my shopping. Lucas is a little wary of the thunder and lightning, but Boozy isn't fazed a bit.

Today I cleaned up the kitchen some and made a bottom-round roast and chicken salad (3 cups). The head of celery I had in the fridge was *past wilted*, so I bought fresh at the store tonight (celery sticks in a bag, since I'm tired of tossing out celery) to add to the salad to finish it off. Then as I was shaking a little paprika over the top, dead paprika-colored weevils started coming out. So I had to skim the top layer off the salad - what a waste. I'll never buy Hungarian paprika in a can again, or else I'll store it in the fridge with everything else the weevils get into (flour, pasta, breadcrumbs, etc.). Luckily I have the giant-capacity French-door fridge now (still half empty). (The exterminator here said the weevils come from the grocery store.) (See more about that here.)

Chicken salad came out great, though. Had half a sandwich on toast earlier tonight, before adding the celery. In addition to celery, I used minced red onion, dill relish, white pepper (weevils don't get into that), a little salt and Kraft mayonnaise, my favorite. I'll be eating it at work tomorrow on sourdough Melba toast.

Another weevil story: When I was in high school, my parents were having a dinner party and my mother was making Beef Burgundy, which back then was something new and chic. (Cooking with wine. Wow!) At one point I was watching Mom make it and I noticed, as she was shaking some dried herb or spice into the pot, tiny dead bugs were alighting in the pot. I wasn't about to tell Mom that her Beef Burgundy was ruined*, so that night she served Beef (and Bugs) Burgundy to her dinner party guests. (To her dying day, she never knew.) (The guests had loved Mom's dish, by the way.)

[Later] Watching a hoarding show now (for lack of anything better to watch). These are so predictable. It's an illness. (Glad I don't have it.)
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*by Western standards at least, since we generally don't (knowingly) eat bugs. Easterners might well appreciate the addition of this ingredient to Mom's Beef Burgundy. (The idea of eating bugs doesn't really bother me, so long as they're not poisonous, of course. And weevils apparently aren't.) (I think I've eaten roasted caterpillars and/or grasshoppers, and possibly chocolate-covered ants.)