Come to me my Husbands Awesome Chili

 I decided to get a head start on Dinner today since both kids (Bean and MiniMonster) were down for a snooze, something made possible by us having tortilla chips and all the ingredients for my husbands fantastic, beanless Chili.

 For some of you this may be heresy, but I have to admit I've never been a big 'bean' person, and never even really big on Chili, though I like spicy food, so being introduced to Tilmani's chili for the first time when we were still dating was virtually a religious experience for me. It was Chili, WITH BACON IN IT. It was chili full of meat and smokey goodness, tomato sauce and a touch of salt from the chips, and just a little heat. Enough that I could enjoy it, not so much that Tilmani, who's not so big on Spicy food, couldn't.

 Since I've got a batch simmering in the Crock Pot now, to continue cooking until we're all ready to dive in (or until my willpower caves and I go after it early), I thought I'd share it with you, my patient handful of readers, that you may experience this godly stuff for yourselves.

 What you Need to cook this amazing stuff is the following:
  1 lb or so of Ground Beef, 90% lean ((A little more or a little less is just fine, depending on your preference, but you don't want to get too fatty a meat for this.))
 1 small can of diced Chili's.
 1/2 jar of -REAL- bacon bits. Screw the artificial stuff. ((You can use and crumble regular bacon, but this works just fine for me and I'm a bacon nut. .... actually I cheated and put in the WHOLE bottle of bacon bits. He doesn't need to know if he doesn't notice.))
 1 6oz can of tomato paste
 1 29oz can of tomato sauce
 1 onion (we use sweet), chopped
 and 1 pack of McCormic's Chilli seasonings: OR mix Black Pepper, Red Pepper, Garlic and a Dash of Mustard Powder.  ((this is my twist on the original seasonings.))
 
 and Tortilla Chips if you like Chili with Chips. Use your favorite brand.

 Put everything except the seasonings and ground beef into your crock pot and set it to start heating up. It can start to simmer together while you take the ground beef, put it in a pan, season it with the above seasonings, and brown it carefully. When it's nice and brown and chopped up into smaller bits to your liking, drain off the fat carefully and put the meat into the crock pot. Set it to Low (or Warm, if your crock pot runs hot.) and let it simmer with the lid on for as long as you'd like. Technically since everything's ready you could eat it as soon as it's hot, but Chili's one of those meals that's really great when it has time to sit and converse with itself, so why not let it do so?

 Have a blast and try not to think too much about what it might be doing to your arteries. ((Hey, the bacon bits have lower fat than pan cooked bacon, you can always comfort yourself with that. And more Chili.))

 Serve

Hagravens don't take rejection well

 We got a copy of Skyrim earlier in the month: Tilmani and I both have characters, though he's played more than I have... which lead to the interesting discovery that inspired the title.

 Hagravens in Skyrim, if you don't know, are pretty much exactly what they sound like. Part Hag, part Raven, and they're generally unpleasant characters, as probably anyone would be if you looked wrinkled, bent, grouchy and feathered. Anyway, Tilmani's character... named Tilmani, got drunk, and apparently one of the things he did while drunk was go get a wedding ring and propose to this delightful woman he'd met while smashed out of his mind. The jeweler was happy to inform us how he'd described the most ROMANTIC of evenings in the moonlight, and let us know she'd take the ring back if we weren't engaged, but sounded a bit less than approving that he didn't seem to remember any of this. ((Surprise surprise.))

 So we cruise around for a while and he finally gets around to finding out who he went and got engaged to while drunk and when we get to the area, the lovely beautious lady is... a HagRaven.

 A Hagraven who is VERY. VERY. Angry when asked to return the ring (the only option the game gives you on this front... sadly... otherwise I think this could be kind of awesome.) And she attacks on the spot. Tilmani won, though since he'd JUST been fighting a equally angry dragon (maybe it knew the Hagraven?), it was a little on the close side. Don't know where the rest of this particular quest will go but that was a rather funny discovery.

 So yeah apparently HagRavens don't handle rejection well. Sorry lady.

Faggedabadit

 Arguments are complicated things, aren't they? At the roof of things, they're really kind of simple, two people disagree about something, and it either goes in a relatively civil fashion, or it turns into insults and anger, either from one side or both sides.

 I was recently in an argument with one sided insults. I'd rather not really get into depth about the subject of the argument, since it was pretty personal, but over the course of several hours, using text messages and email, the subject I was arguing with repeatedly insulted my intelligence, my judgment and financial skills, and MY HUSBAND.  Apparently, entirely based on the fact that I don't own a microwave or an I-phone, and because we haven't decided to stick two 'twin long' beds together to make a larger bed instead of continuing to use the futon we have until we can afford to get a nice bed that's already the right size... and probably a handful of other things, means that I am clearly in a horrible and abusive relationship and I'm brainwashed.

 Well... they'd probably insist that they meant nothing of the sort, but when your compare my spouse to an known abusive asshat with cryptic warnings that said asshat supposedly 'magically' turned into asshat overnight... yeah. I don't think I really need to explain that one, do I?

 Anyway, this was a major anoyance for me, and I did everything I could to stay calm cool and collected, and pretty much just stopped responding to the chain of attacks and roundabout accusations.

 This morning I got an text from the same person noting how amazing the weather was outside, since it's finally decided to act like April and be sunny and warm ((Although it did 'Sunny and warm' all over me while I was driving out on a few errands. Hello April showers...))

 I didn't respond to that one either. I mean I admit, I used to spend a lot of time fighting with my sister, and we used to kind of just do a 'Faggedabadit' and pretend the whole thing never happened. Sometimes that works. Sometimes that's the only solution if you're stuck with someone... but I'm not ready to do that yet.