Engineers will eat anything.
But first, a project update: Haven't done diddly over squat. There, that was easy. Of coures, I _will_ edit at least one story and send it out to my second-readers this month. And I _hope_ I write something more, too.
This month, my son Nik is in town, so that's cool. We are working on zombie sculptures that we hope to finish today, mold next weekend, and cast the one after... hope it goes well! Between work and school this year, our time is abbreviated... which sucks. But still, he's here, and that's nice.
Back to engineers and food now.
My wife Marla was doing some pickup shopping in the store the other day and, while wandering down the Asian Food Aisle (a favorite place to gawk), she did a double take near the creme wafer cookies. What kind of fruit is _that_!? Durian! What an amazing find.
She came home and told me about it, a fun curiosity found amongst the strange food. I, of course, exclaimed, "what, and you didn't buy one!?"
I then proceded to run out and buy one.
Dinner passed, and the evening wore on, the package of cookies sitting there tempting me. Mmmmm, exotic cookies.
Now, on the off chance that you haven't heard of Durian fruit, it's a fruit that is so smelly that it has been banned from many public places and is almost universally reviled for its odour. It is, however, supposed to taste much better than it smells!
This eveningm, Nik and I sat down to watch a nice movie after dinner. A few minutes into the movie and I felt I had digested enough dinner to approach dessert. Mmmm, exotic cookies!
So I opened the package and, a brief moment later, yelped out an exclamation of disgust (something like, "Good god, that's awful!") and set the package on the table behind me to "mellow".
It took a few moments for the stench to dissipate a bit, and a minute or two more for me to work up my courage again. I picked up the package, inhaled a reserve of oxygen, carefully slid the package open, removed a very ordinary looking wafer, and ... pausing just a moment... took a bite from the wafer and chewed.
And handed it to Nik. The moment his teeth hit the cookie I mentioned, offhand, that no, these do NOT taste better than they smell.
Apparently, in the moment that I chewed my piece of wafer, Marla caught an amazing expression on my face that Nik must have missed, else he would NOT have bitten into the cookie.
The task done, I choked down my bite and Nik went to the back door to spit out his, while I popped open a beer and flushed the bulk of the evil from my mouth.
Whomever tells you that Durian fruit tastes much better than it smells... lies. It smells like something that came the wrong way out of a dog and tastes much the same. It's horrible.
There is a teeny, tiny, off chance that the artificial Durian flavor used in the cookie is significantly different than real Durian. Or that fresh Durian is remarkably tasty while cookie-shaped Durian is not. But do I want to take that risk? No.
But now I had an entire package of Durian fruit creme wafers. What to do with them? Why, the only sensible thing!
I took them to work and left them in the breakroom on my floor.
Through most of the morning, the breakroom smelled distinctly like... Durian. But in spite of that, by the end of the day about half of the wafers were gone. Eaten, I assume.
Coming home that night, there is a pervasive smell of... wintergreen! With an underlying hint of Durian. It took about 24 hours, all told, before the stench entirely left our house... and our houes is not one bereft of odors, either. But Durian stands out.
The next day at work, I put the package back into a prominent place in the breakroom (from where it had been tidied up to by the cleaning staff), and by the end of that day... it was empty.
Proving, indeed, that engineers will eat anything.