Malted balls. It's that time again.

I know it's that time because I've seen elsewhere various exegeses on the much-loved, much-maligned peep. Count my comments as malignant. I don't like peeps. Yeah, I often purchase them -- but only for the irony. Half of what my generation does is for the irony. Buying peeps is ironic; putting them in the microwave is just plain fun. And yeah, I'll often enough eat a peep -- but only grudgningly, because the good candy has already been consumed.

A malted ball, on the other hand, I'll often eat willingly -- because I too-easily forget that I don't much like them. But how can it be that I don't like them? They've been around forever, so there must be an established consumer base. So I know my reaction to the malted ball (the Whopper, if you will) is probably not representative of common taste. It's probably not even normal -- and I suppose that's why I can't quite accept the fact that I don't like them.

They look like the kind of candy that would taste good.

So I eyeball it, roll it between my fingers, test its airy heft, and toss it into my mouth for a quick crunch.

Blah.

There must be something wrong with me. But at least in my older age I'll remember my condition. That is, I won't accidentally purchase a bag of Whoppers for myself. In fact, I was in a Florida Wal-Mart not too long ago staring at a bag of Whoppers, musing again on my distaste for them.

"How could anyone like those," I said out loud, to no one in particular. "Malted balls."

That last part went over as if it were to someone in particular -- a woman who'd hovered the Easter-candy aisle about as long as I had. She smiled nervously and fled. What kind of conversation did she expect, hanging around in a convenience store at midnight?

Well, we've got some Easter baskets set up, ready to give the boys tomorrow morning. No malted balls there, I'm happy to say.

Gloomy day here in NYC, but warmer at least. There are positive reports coming from Spumoni Gardens South (which reminds me: I saw Mario Battale this week on Food Network haunting the kitchen of the Brooklyn original -- he devoured a slice of Sicilian and approved of its quality).

Notice the colon in the previous sentence. It's not only grammatically correct, it's also symbolic. It's not quite a dramatic pause, but it does introduce food.

And we all know where that leads.

We're going to the mattresses here in Florida. Like Fat Clemenza says: sometimes war has to happen every few years; it gets rid of the bad blood. Big Vin is in the hospital and we're all on stand-by to see what we can do. If anyone is in the Juptier area and wants to visit, just look for the hospital room with the provolone hanging over the bed. They have Vinny heavily sedated -- an IV drip of Cinzano and orange soup. He's got a few issues to deal with: pneumonia, infection, other nasty stuff. But he's got a very hard head. Very big and very hard. Vito and I are booked now to return to LGA tomorrow morning. Still not sure who I'm going to roust from bed at 5:30 tomorrow morning to take us to the airport. I'll save it for later tonight -- make it a surprise.

Anyway, we're all headed back to the hospital. Everyone's optimistic, even though we know it's a long hard road ahead.

I just spent over six hours trying to boot a PC and get it properly configured for... children's games. Yep, at this very moment John Paul is playing Freddi Fish -- and has been at it for over an hour. Well, at least the effort was worth it.

But the roadblocks strewn in my path!

First, it won't boot properly. Meaning, it won't boot at all. I keep landing in IBM's hard-coded error/testing screens. I messed around with the configuration until it finally booted -- probably a fluke, but there was plenty more to come. Once booted, I reached for an OS update, which went fine until the HD ran out of space. Odd, I thought -- I don't remember this HD being only 2 Gb in size.

Well, it hadn't been. I had to find the boot partition and activate the rest of the drive. Oh, and format it. All of which I did. Then I did the rest of the OS updates, rebooted, and got... an error.

So I looked up the error messages online. They all seemed to have one thing in common: check the voltage on the backup battery. Screw that -- I went to the old-and-busted ThinkPad I've been cannibalizing and ripped the backup battery from there. Installing that cleared most of my errors.

Except for the one about NTLDR being missing.

More online searches revealed a plan to copy some W2K files onto a floppy disk (a floppy disk!), boot from that, then copy the missing files.

The boot part work (whew!), but the missing files weren't missing. So WTF?

More poling around revealed that by activating the D: drive on that earlier partition work I'd de-activated the C: drive -- where the OS lives.

That cleared it all up. I set up a restricted-rights user for the boys (who have a habit of claicking randomly on everything, hitting keys, and totally fucking up a configuration) and installed Freddi Fish. Which leaves me here. Blogging. With the Simpsons on in the background. And a bottle of port in the kitchen, calling my name.

Did you ever notice:

When Mastandreas make conversation, their sentences are most often punctuated by colons.

That observation was first made at the tail end of the infamous "Vito Storms the South" tour of 1997. Which should not be confused with the "Roto-Virus Tour" of 2000.

Not so sure about turkey sausage. You know what I think works out very well, though? Sausage and peppers -- with chicken cooked with it. White meat, thighs -- whatever. Just throw it into the mix and let it all cook together.

Forgetaboutit.

The Pros and Cons of Turkey Sausage

Like patient paparazzi
Vidalias and Cubanelles
Quietly anticipate the arrival
of their dish's number one star.
On the advice of the experts,
a last minute substitution,
Pork is fired,
Turkey gets hired.
The end result? A dish renamed "Gigli".

Now this is truly odd -- a room full of Mastandreas and all we have here is eerie silence. It's unnatural. It's unhealthy. Mastandreas not telling stories? Next there'll be Mastandreas eating macaroni without gravy. Espresso without Anisette. Bagels without swiss cheese.

I got an IM from Steve earlier. He said he had Mark with him. I call on them to post here the tales of this weekend's adventures. I also call on Vito to get signed up with this thing and send invites to our long-lost cousins in Bari. I call on Bazzukajoe to relate to us all that he has eaten while driving in his car this week (with footnotes on the crumbs that accumulated on the floor mats).

As for me, I'm home with da boyz while Alane shops at Kohl's. Maybe she'll buy me some socks. Got the news on TV. They're interviewing a moron who has just declared that favoring tax cuts is the equivalent of class warfare. I am disgusted. I watch TV to get disgusted.

What would Uncle Viny say?

Can you believe this guy?

Alas, the end of summer. The hot weather has come and gone for 2003. And so has blogging, it seems -- where did everybody go?

Well, I suppose I've fallen off too. No time to call people, visit, write e-mails, anything. Blogging goes the same way.

Well, maybe we can rejuvenate this forum with a little but of "What I did on my summer vacation." For me, that's a short essay, not having done much of anything. Well, we did head out to Colorado for the final week of July, and it was great fun. And a couple weeks later, I did lay crumpled beneath my office desk to weather the dark night of the great blackout -- just me and some office mates, listening to AM radio, staring out the windows into the immobilized city. Metro North Railroad ought to learn how to deploy its diesel engines during an emergency -- the next terrorist strike just might put out the power (and that'll most vertainlhy be a night I will not want to spend in my office).

Today was nice -- spent time with Guido and Key, as they were having Regina and Greg (and their two lovely children) over for the afternoon. Homemade beer and beef. Nice. And children in various stages of potty-training (all except Mojo, who really has no interest -- none, zero -- in doing his business anywhere but in his diaper).

Anyway, it's time to reach out to Steve and get him to post some political diatribes on this blog. Hey Steve, I hear London had its own little blackout last week. I heard on the radio that Hillary Clinton thinks that was George Bush's fault, too.

Thoughts?

This afternoon I found a lime in the refrigerator. This inspired me to mix a batch of my favorite summertime cocktail. I do no know if it has a name; I call it Windex. It's basically a Kamikaze, but instead of TripleSec, I use Blue Caracao (thus the Windex coloration). Vodka, Rose Lime Juice, and the blue stuff. A pile of ice. Lime wedges.

Ahhhh.

Just try not to drink it down too quickly -- it'll get you there fast enough (sooner than you think, actually).

So I sat outside with a giant glass of that stuff, grilled some burgers for us and the boys, and ate and drank in the late afternoon sun. Nice. Then Alane went to get some diapers. I stayed and did a little more scrubbing of the rug from the boys' room (the one we dragged outside following a noxious potty-training mishap earlier today). The boys were particularly filthy, having been playing in garden silt, so I tossed them in the shower. Now they're squeaky clean.

Perhaps another tall cold blue thing before Alane returns?

Destiny calls.