now she’s with one of my good time buddies, drinking in some cross town bar

#: Unless something changes, I may end up doing karaoke on three consecutive nights this week. I may have a Problem that needs Care.

#: I’m almost done with Scrabble Scrabulous on Facebook. The idea seemed cool enough – play a low-pressure game of Scrabble Letter Tiles with your friends. Let the computer do the hard work of calculating scores and validating words. What I forgot at the time: I’m bad at Scrabble this game. I’m really not good. Sure, I’ve got a decent vocabulary, years of Internet fora notwithstanding, but I don’t have a good sense of the game’s strategy. I think I lost the thrill when Zabeth got three bingos on me in one game. Damn her.

#: I got a massage on Sunday to loosen up after throwing stuff around for two hours on Saturday. A healthy woman named Tamika bore down on my lats and traps with the full weight of her body, delivered via elbow. Sadly, I didn’t realize that most of the soreness wouldn’t set in until two days after the event, so the massage didn’t help as much. I had a stiff but not painful neck on Monday morning. Verdict: Tamika’s not bad, but she’s not my favorite masseuse at Inman.

#: My cooking experiment continued last night, but with new and exciting developments. For the first time in my culinary history, I deliberately diverged from the cooking instructions on the package! The results: pretty mediocre!

Here’s the scoop: I thawed two chicken breasts and pulled down some lemon pepper seasoning while the frying pan heated up. I was supposed to coat the chicken in a mixture of lemon pepper and flour, but I had none of the latter. I pulled down the rotisserie mix to see if that would work, noting that this bottle advised a mixture of seasonings and olive oil. “Well, if it works for one,” I thought, and kneaded the chicken with olive oil and lemon pepper.

Next, I threw the breasts on the greased up skillet. I’m no Gordon Ramsay, but I very quickly feared that a frying pan’s heat might not be sufficient to cook this chicken all the way through. I double-checked the instructions: thinly-sliced chicken breasts. Ah. So I let the chicken grill for a few minutes longer than recommended, until the insides were warm though still pink, and called it a day.

Despite all this it still tasted all right. Cleanup didn’t take too long, and if I had to hover over the stove for longer than I might normally like, the savory smell of the (top quarter-inch of) chicken paid off.