Poison

The weekend started off auspiciously, with a Friday night Penguins game, complete with chicken fingers and fries with a side of barbecue and honey mustard dipping sauce. The hard lemonade was a nice compliment to the salt and grease. And my poor Penguins, (who will most likely miss the playoffs this year*), played a stellar, sixty minute game against the Columbus Blue Jackets.

It was a chunk out of a wheel of Giant Eagle double crème brie with herbs that nearly took me down for the rest of the weekend. With J at his parents for most of the day and I at loose ends, I decided that brie with cracked pepper crackers and black olives would be a perfectly respectable lunch.

I continued to believe this even after a close examination of the wheel of cheese showed a slightly brown coloring on its normally snowy white surface. I continued to believe this after slicing into the cheese revealed a slightly runny interior instead of the firm texture I've come to expect out of a wheel of Giant Eagle double crème brie with herbs. The odor was a little more brie-ish than usual, the flavor a little bit stronger.

Having eaten very smelly, very strong tasting cheeses before, I was not put off by the appearance and smell as much as I should have been. After all, there was still several weeks left before the passing of the sell by date.

Lunch finished, I continued enjoying my day of sloth (the only one available for the next several weekends) by watching home improvement shows (Eighteen THOUSAND dollars to renovate a bathroom?) and stretching out the folding of a basket of laundry over two hours. J and I see a play and go out for what turned out to be an infuriating dinner for reasons I shall not digress to discuss.

Almost immediately following the end of the the infuriating dinner I began to fill unwell. I should have known better. This is the third time in a year I have purchased brie from Giant Eagle, to find out that it was bad weeks before the sell-by date. Only this time I did not have enough sense to throw the cheese out. Instead I ate it, and spent half the night very uncomfortable, drinking as much chamomile and ginger tea as I could possibly stand.

J, penitent for being the cause of the infuriating dinner, made me the tea.

*That, in short, explains why I have not been writing about them this year. With their two of their top defensemen shelved due to injury for most of the season and the constant changing of lines and shuffling of WBS players in and out of the lineup, it has been frustrating.