As you have heard me say before, I love my new home in Florida. It is a small city in Central Florida and it has many amenities to offer such as museums, a small college right downtown, a fabulous library, many boutiques, several ethnic restaurants, bistros and a beautiful park where the terminal for my friendly trains is located.
One of my dear friends is having a birthday coming up, so we decided to hang around my downtown. I discovered a new place to park the car for three hours, but need to move it when the three hours are due, because as we were told, the friendly police will ticket you. We went in and out, in and out of the many shops. I was holding very tight to my dinero.
The pains of hunger started to knock on my psych and when we were passing by a guy giving out samples of quinoa salad, that was the catcher. It was so good. It reminded me of tabouli, with red pepper, tomato, lemon juice sprinkled on and maybe parsley, and some goat cheese . We shared a chicken Panini made with free-range-chicken and all the good stuff they give the bird to make it safe and good for us. No hormones. There it went out of the window my vegan intentions. The chicken was really tender and juicy. It had some tomatoes, and very slim pieces of squash and other veggies. 
Highly recommended!
Then at the end of the day, we went to try…let me see how to say this without making anyone blush. We went to see how we could lift and perk up the girls. To my female audience, no explanations necessary. To my only male audience guy, just pretend you don’t have the foggiest idea of what I am talking about. Better for everyone.
Have you ever been to a fitting session? It is so stressful!! And it is not cheap to look all perked up. All in the name of looking good and feel that we are with it, it does not matter if the rest of the body is holding on to dear gravity with all its might. Finally, after making a purchase, and walking out with a very nice looking shopping bag, there we went totally exhausted back to the car. I try to rationalize it as follows. It is an investment in myself, right? Have to check with the girls to see how they like feeling all alert and higher up.
I feel a bit too daring with the above paragraph, but life is short. Perk it up!!
So…it was today…8 November, 2011…a day to become a rambunctious carnivore for the day and fight gravity in high places.
Your Happy Contessa
“Reflect that life is composed of small incidents and petty occurrences.” Samuel Johnson, English author, biographer, essayist, editor. 18 September, 1709- 13 December, 1784.
Noury's Creative World... 
I am not even going to tell you about free range chickens.
After watching what you sent me via email…I might as well tape my mouth shut. Eating dirt, that is, dirt that is “clean” dirt, might be the only option one of these days. Thanks for educating me about “free range.” Leave it to us humanoids to twist things just to make a buck. Oatmeal anyone?
Leave it to us humanoids to twist things just to make a buck. That’s it in a nutshell. If they are raising chickens and can call it free range by knocking out a wall and a putting up a little fence, they do it. If they are running a restaurant and pay double for free range chicken. Your delivery truck come up and gives you 500 pounds of cheap regular chicken and 100 pounds of expensive free range chicken, there is a huge incentive to turn regular into free range and nobody will know. Human nature and greed is very hard to overcome. I have been studying about this for years. It used to be 75% of American workers were in farming, now it is only 2 1/2 %. Everything is mechanized and untouched by human hands. The problem is that if we didn’t do this sort of thing, the earth could not support more than several billion people. Genetic engineering improved farming chemical and practices has drastically (factor of 5) increased productivity of farm land.(including oats). The good news is while this has been happening, the American life expectancy has soared, so it isn’t nearly as bad as you think.
Amen! But I may add that while the life expectancy has soared, so have the mechanisms that help us to breathe, walk, think, leave alone all the pills we are popping. All in the name of progress and hanging around longer.
We eat so much chicken we are sprouting feathers. We are opting for those without hormones – but is it enough?
Dear Raylene, I don’t know what to say anymore. I feel somedays that we are better off eating clean manure and just grow in the dark without knowing what’s hitting us. Mushroom theory sounds better and better everyday. Keep them in the dark, feed them you know what and watch them grow. Sounds just like us. Let’s stick to chicken without hormones at the moment. Cannot afford to go through menopause, the stage from hell, once again.