Twelve days take a toll

Well, the Spätzlepuffer might be something that sounds better in the mind than it ends up being in the pan. On the other hand, there was so much disagreement on the proportions between the two recipes I checked (3 eggs to 100 gm of flour in the one vs 5 eggs in the other) that maybe I just need to fiddle around more. I went with the eggier version and wasn't enamoured of the texture. Scaling it down from about a kilo of Spätzle to 200 gm probably didn't help either. I did get better results once I upped the heat a bit and added a little more oil. I mean, the whole appeal of the recipe is turning those big soft noodles chow mein-crispy, isn't it?

So, yeah, looks like after all that time off, even a three-day week is too much for me. Yesterday I was sluggish and addled, but I had an undemanding day and pushed through it. I went to bed at 10 p.m. and yet still woke up this morning wanting only to sleep, so I called in. The pounding sinus headache has abated and hopefully the zinc will take out whatever's sapping my energy. That's assuming it's a cold, of course, and not some other random crud of the cornucopia of varieties which have ravaged my organisation and social circle. (We had at least seven confirmed guests for New Year's who ended up cancelling due to illness.)

Tomorrow I've got about a dozen guys coming over for cocktails, if the responses to my Facebook invite are to be believed (which they probably aren't). My only concern is that two of them are coming in from Wisconsin and will have to stay the night, so I won't have quite as much time off from playing the happy host as I might want. Ironically, I ended up getting sick the last time they stayed over as well.

Update: Indeed: more onions + less eggs = better result. Being more generous with the seasoning probably didn't hurt either.

Una memoria como goma

Now there's a word I haven't thought about in maybe twenty-five years: jebe. I learned it as a Peruvian slang term for "condom". You see, my high school was Marianist, and the order ran schools in Peru as well. So one year we had a bunch of Peruvian students come stay in the dorm with us. It was kind of a fiasco--they were spoiled Lima boys and this was their summer break, so they weren't at all interested in being in school and mostly rubbed us all the wrong way. And even though I was taking Spanish, I didn't learn much of anything from them except a few informal terms like cachar and pinga (which my Spanish teacher even marked wrong on a test of anatomical terminology). But the tiniest of them showed me one of those calculator tricks whereby "bebé" becomes "jebe", and he had to explain the joke to me.

I don't think I've encountred it in the wild since. Its range seems to be very limited. The DRAE gives two synonyms: alumbre ("alum") and hevea ("rubber tree"). WordReference lists only the second of these, plus a variety of extended meanings (mostly informal) including goma ("rubber; eraser"), elástico ("elastic"), porra ("club"), trasero ("backside"), and finally the definition I know. The etymon is apparently Arabic šabb "alum", and how this gets transferred to rubber is a mystery I'm well unqualified to attempt to solve.