ADSL acting up - More or less Non Food Related

And when I say acting up I really mean acting up. The line drops and resets, literally, 15 times an hour and I have to get this post in during the 3 minute window between one failure and the next. The longest continuous up-time today has been 55 minutes; when I shut down all the connections and network activity except for 1 application monitoring the status of the modem - and went to make some tomato sauce with leftovers from the fiesta last Saturday.

One interesting thing about the fiesta and cultural differences… for the party I bought loads of beer, wine, sodas and waters (and 100 pounds of ice to chill it all). And assorted guests brought a whole lot of (very very good) wine too. It was a warm (hot?) sunny day. On Sunday the clean-up and residues count showed that most of the beer, almost all the Fanta Orange, half the colas and all but one bottle of sparkling water were left over (and I recall drinking that one lonely bottle). Most of the wine was consumed (except 3 bottles of white) and 100% of the bottled water.

The cultural difference? Wine rather than beer is preferred except for maybe having 1 beer while chatting before the real food comes out. Once there's food then it's an all-wine weekend. Second, the little kids run around with a bottle of water in their hand all day and not (I repeat, not) a can of cola. Thus the roots of some difference in obesity rates between people over here in in the americas.

Sadly enough, over here the average weight/build has been rising (visibly) the last 10 years I've been here and the Mediterranean diet is being "supplemented" by international food styles such as hamburgers and fast/fatty foods. More products with crap ingredients like high-fructose corn syrup, margarine and aspartame are on the shelves. I mean, I like Chips Ahoys and Oreos once in a while, but I'd rather not see them on the grocery shelves in 7 different styles and sizes. I'd rather see the traditional Magdalenas (cupcakes) made from flour and butter and not a single artificial ingredient.
Oops - turned out to be a food-related post after all.