I love award winning chili and falling asleep during movies

This weekend was good. J and I went to a chili cook off yesterday at one of the local baseball stadiums around here. It was pretty cool, I had never been to a cook off before. I really like chili and like most people, I'm picky about how it's made. I like mine mostly sweet but a little spicy and with little or no beans. I think we tried about 16 different types of chili yesterday. Most good, some bad and some weird. There were no strict rules like in the serious competitions, people could pretty much do what they wanted as long as they called it chili. I had read a little bit about last year's competition and knew who the People's Choice Award had gone to. I made sure I tried their chili this year and out of the 16 I tried, that group was also my favorite and had I paid $1 to vote, I would've submitted them as my People's Choice vote. We were stopped by a reporter while we were walking around and we answered some of his questions and our comments ended up in the paper this morning. That was kind of neat.

Yesterday, I found 10 four leaf clovers in my backyard. Does this mean the start of some out of this world extreme luck or is this a case of some freak genetic mutation of clovers in my neighborhood? My whole life, I've always had a thing with four leaf clovers. I could just be walking by some, look down and immediately pick one out. Over the years, I have almost every single one I've found in one of those photo albums where the sticky clear stuff folds down on the pictures. One time, when I was about 20 or so I was at my Dad's house and we were walking down to his pond and I just happened to spot a four leaf clover so I bent down and picked it up. He stopped and looked at me and said "Have you always been able to find them like that?" and I said "Yeah" and he responded with "Your grandmother could do that." My grandmother died when I was really young so I didn't really get to spend a lot of time with her. It makes me wonder what innate abilities you truly pass down to your kids and their kids and so on and so forth or if things like that are just coincidences.

See below for my confusing find. I do hope it means I'll be lucky times 10. I need it right now.




My last week of training for my new job begins tomorrow. I really hope I know what the hell I'm doing by the time everything is said and done. I am feeling nervous for the first time. Whatever, I'll suck it up and get over it. Hopefully.

TV Talk: I watched the first Kitchen Nightmares episode this past week. I really think so far that this show will be better than Hell's Kitchen. I do like Gordon Ramsay and it's a nice change to see things change up every week since he'll be making over a new screwed up restaurant each time. It got old on Hell's Kitchen where you would watch the same idiots fail at making Pea Risotto and/or Beef Wellington week after week.

In other great news, some of my shows are coming back like Heroes, The Office and Earl while others are ending like Top Chef. This season of Top Chef has been hard to sit through. I don't want any of them to win.

Movie Talk: I watched and fell asleep at different times through both the movies School for Scoundrels and Fracture. Fracture was worse than I thought it would be and School for Scoundrels was a lot better than I anticipated. I didn't know SFS was a remake of a 1960's movie until I looked it up. I'm sorry, has everything already been done before? And when will my generation of movies start to become re-made on a regular basis? A new Honey, I Shrunk the Kids for 2030 perhaps? Ooh, I don't think I can wait!