People are Mad about Protein

I actually got up at 10am. Saffy the cat was knocking her cone against the door. The poor thing can't do anything without making noise. When she walks, to counterbalance the swinging weight on her head, she swaggers, as my sister observed, like John Wayne.

But I think I got at least seven and a half hours of sleep. I went to bed after watching Battlestar Galactica while drinking some Speyburn scotch at around 2:30am and fell asleep pretty much immediately. I thought maybe all the things I'd consumed during the day might keep me up--switching rather abruptly from my normal diet of oatmeal, pitas, hummus, cous cous, apples, and low sodium soup, the past couple days at my parents' I ate several microwave dinners and yesterday my sister made me some scrambled eggs and toast for breakfast.

For dinner last night, she and I went to Denny's, where I almost invariably have the "All-American Slam" minus bacon and sausage and with "country fried potatoes" in place of the blackened rust scrapings Denny's calls hash browns. So the meal is potato pieces, three scrambled eggs mixed with cheddar cheese, two pieces of toast, and I get a bowl of fruit with it. My sister had some fascinating plate of french fries with nacho cheese and jalapenos.

She told me about her night working at The Roadhouse--apparently they were understaffed and short of almost every side order and even clean glasses at one point, and people had come in large groups to yell at my sister. "I don't fucking want this!" one of them I think she'd said told her when the cook had made the wrong thing for him. The Denny's was packed with noisy groups of people, too. It's gotten me thinking about what this thing called Valentine's Day has become.

I used to like walking around the mall on Valentine's Day to see all the couples who were clearly angry with each other to varying degrees of visibility, usually one person would seem bitterly disappointed and the other would seem bitter for disappointing. Last night it seemed the rabble had turned en masse against the holiday and were roaming the restaurants as marauding bands in a mindless rage.

I watched the fifth episode of Battlestar Galactica's third season last night. I liked that Tom Zarek finally got to be something of the terrorist he most naturally would have been on New Caprica, and his idea actually sounded plausible. Roslin had the right idea, of course, but you can't call Zarek a cartoon character for his.

There are so many subplots on that show, I suppose it's natural the writers simply fail to get to a lot of things. But it has the side effect sometimes of making the characters seem oddly lazy or irresponsible. Why no scene of Gaeta being debriefed? If Adama's letting him onto the bridge, shouldn't he have at least talked to him first? Maybe he did, but if he did, wouldn't he have tried calming the colonel down by telling him about the dog bowl? And where's Sharon during all this? Either of them, really? We needed at least one scene establishing Boomer's relationship with Baltar on New Caprica--surely they talked?

Well, thank the gods we spent a week watching Adama shave his moustache, or however long that scene took. It surely Meant Something.