Wow, where does the time go? This weekend flew by, and this day at work has mostly flown by.

Spent most of the weekend running errands. I made a Target run, a drug store run, a bank run, a grocery run, and finally a gas station run. We now have enough food, medicine, cash, gasoline and household sundries to last us at least until next weekend. But I noticed this morning that we're almost out of coffee. Ooops. Forgot to schedule a Peet's run.

Some days I feel like I'm never going to crawl out from under my to-do list.

I also got to do some more kitchen experimenting this weekend. Saturday I made a lentil soup recipe from a recent issue of Cook's Illustrated. (Cook's Illustrated is my new favorite cooking magazine - they take a very experimental approach to cooking. Most of the articles list all the things the cook tried that didn't give such great results, and many have cute little sidebars on topics like why sweating the lentils before cooking them makes them less likely to fall apart. Great fun.)

Sunday night, I made buffalo burgers. I'd never eaten buffalo before. It was pretty tasty, though if I hadn't known it wasn't lean ground beef, I might not have noticed that it wasn't lean ground beef. (Of course, I'd prepared it with plenty of minced garlic and worcestershire sauce, a preparation that would make wet cardboard pretty tasty. Next time I'll be braver and use a preparation that will let the flavor of the meat stand on its own more.)

The real problem with cooking buffalo is that I can't stop myself from dancing around the kitchen humming "Buffalo Soldier" while doing it.

I started trying to put together a mix CD for a friend who feels that he's out of touch with present-day popular music. I feel like I'm out of touch with present-day popular music, but I figure I can put together a CD's worth of good songs from the last decade that he probably hasn't heard. Of course, I started putting this thing together, and went to look for something on iTunes, and didn't find it...but I did find the Portishead song that my sister played so constantly when she got the CD that I'm convinced that the bass line is encoded in my DNA ("Biscuit"), and the Van Halen song that I need to complete my ultimate driving mix ("Unchained"), and an all-female acoustic cover of AC/DC's "You Shook Me All Night Long" that was just so wrong and yet so very right.

iTunes really shines in the weird obscure covers and tribute albums department. These are things that I would never go looking for in a record store, and would be very unlikely to buy even if I came across them in a record store, because most collections of cover tunes have at most one or two songs worthy of repeated listening. iTunes lets you pick out those rare gems and leave the dross behind!

Sure is a time sink, though. I guess I know the answer to "Where does the time go?"