It's May and Spring's Not Arrived Yet

Although the roses are trying to bloom intermittently. A few pop out every day and then the rain quickly destroys them.

After the fiesta in the garden things have been hectic here. The s.o. headed off to New York and so, again, there's been nothing cooking in the house. The pizzeria's been busy though. It was the May Day (extra) long weekend; which, in Madrid, gets May 2 added - to celebrate when they rose up against the French occupation and Joseph Bonaparte (the "king" of Spain), Napoleon's brother, in 1808. The uprising failed on that particular day but the French left by 1814 (after the six years War of Independence).

Also occupying my time this week is something which happens to us chef types with some regularity. I've had someone propose opening a restaurant with me. This occurs about 2 or 3 times a year. The difference in this case being that the guy actually knows how to run a restaurant, there is a bank that actively wants to finance the project, and a pretty good spot that's available. The financing part is usually the main thing that these ideas (dreams) lack and typically the spot available is far from ideal. Not to mention that the person who's idea it is normally has _zip_ experience in the hospitality industry. So there's been a fair bit of chatting going around here on that topic.

I'll see if I can work up the energy to post an entry with actual food in it.

Good news about the ADSL; after 3+ months of wrangling with the phone company they finally went to the effort to actually, visually, check the lines and found a whole mess of corroded/oxidized connections. Having those reworked seems to have fixed the endless problems we've been suffering through. So now I can stream video of the New York Yankees baseball games from the mlb.com site.

Lastly, but not leastly, Happy Birthday to my niece. Belatedly.