Sunday rain

It is Sunday, and it is raining. It feels like morning still, but it is actually afternoon. Why can't weekend mornings go on forever? They are the best times of the week. Now that it is afternoon, I have to move around and do errands and clean my apartment and get all the weekend chores done.

Here are several things:

If you like flamenco music with a twist, listen to Rodrigo y Gabriela. They are fabulous; try out the video links on the "media" page. They are Irish, surprisingly. Well, Mexican actually, but they live in Dublin. Did I say they are fabulous?

I just finished watching Season 2.0 of Battlestar Galactica. I watched it yesterday while I finished up my decade-long butterfly cross-stitch project (yay! if I had a digital camera, I would show you what it looks like, but I don't). Great show, raises all sorts of questions, and I have only Season 2.5 left. Very sad. Kind of weird, the show is.

Did you know that so-called "extra virgin olive oil" is often not olive oil at all, and even if is olive oil, it may only be virgin or even lampante (lamp oil). Or a mix. There's a huge amount of fraud, and it goes back for millenia. I don't really care if my olive oil is extra virgin or just virgin, although I would prefer not to eat lamp oil, but I really do care if, instead of getting pure olive oil, I am getting hazelnut oil. Yes, that's right - some producers put in hazelnut oil instead of olive oil. Or maybe soybean oil or sunflower seed oil or whatever, but the point is: undocumented hazelnut oil. For those of us with food allergies, this fraud is not just annoying, it could be deadly. Hazelnut oil may or may not contain the allergens, depending on how it was processed. Higher temperatures mean fewer allergens, but then again, roasting hazelnuts may either lower or increase the level of allergens, and the first nut I reacted to was a roasted hazelnut. And all that preparation-specific allergen level business has been studied only in relation to people with pollen-related hazelnut allergies (oral allergy syndrome; this link claims that this does not involve an actual allergy to the foods, but that these foods might cause anaphylaxis, which could cause death - sounds like an allergy to me), and not in people with systemic hazelnut allergies, possibly because those allergies are more severe. After reading info on this stuff this morning, I don't know what to think. Since I have OAS, I will probably have less severe reactions to hidden hazelnut oil, but it's not a given, and looking up "hazelnut oil" in Google takes you to lots of sites extolling its glories but none of its dangers. If people want to eat nuts, that's fine, but why do they have to be so pervasive in restaurant rood and pre-prepared food? "It's great in salads" says one website - swell, will my server know that there is hazelnut oil on the salad before he or she gives it to me? On Friday, I told the waiter at an upscale Italian restaurant that I was allergic to tree nuts, and he looked at me blankly. He must have understood the words, though, because soon a woman in white (not a chef, but someone higher up than a waiter) came and asked, "Tree nuts?" There was a blank look in her eyes, and absolutely no understanding in her voice. How in the world can you work in an upscale restaurant without knowing what a fucking tree nut is??? Half their dishes had tree nuts, so they really need to know what they are. And these people have worked there a long time. Apparently, people with food allergies not only have to eat at home all the time, but they have to cook everything from scratch, and they have to raise absolutely all their own food - vegetables (easy), fruit (assuming they can eat any), flour, oils, meats (vegetarianism is not an option for these people), milk and eggs (if they can those), and anything else they might want to make the food actually taste good.

Frack it.