Thursday? Free food? It sure does feel good to be back.

This job rules. This is the kind of temping assignment other temps will shiv you for in the temp repository and wear your face as a mask in a ruthless bid for power.

I had a feeling it was going to be a free food day today. It was, after all, Thursday, named after Thurstarski, Norse god of fertility and tax write-offs. My contracted employer being a Jesuit institution, it, of course, upholds these time-honored Pagan practices.

All the same I have some pride in being able to provide for myself, and free food for us serfs doesn't kick in till the nobility have their fill, which means waiting till 2 or 3 for lunch. Free coffee + late lunch = cranky serfs, so I packed a few things for the slow crawl to 3pm that you could kind of call breakfast. Over the course of the morning I had a cup of vanilla yogurt, two pepperoni rolls, and some peanuts. Eaten periodically over the morning this kept me going. I didn't have time to mess around in the kitchen and make any kind of impressive breakfast and there was still some of my heavy dinner right before bed on Wednesday knocking around in my system.

Free lunch was a little upscale yesterday as it was some sort of sponsors meeting. Still sandwiches and salad, but nicer than the spread I was used to. I had half an herbed chicken breast sandwich with roasted red peppers and some caesar salad. You could actually taste the anchovies in the caesar dressing and it was all quality cuts of romaine lettuce. The chicken breast was not particularly inspired, but it was actual breast fillet, not over-preserved slices of lunch meat.

There were cookies, but not like the cookie parades of Thursdays gone by. The dessert selection was actually a little depressing, considering the apparent attempt to impress. I had an oatmeal raisin cookie and half of some white-chocolate-chip-in-chocolate-cookie-lookin-kind-of-cookie. It wasn't bad, I just only wanted half.

I also ate quite a bit of pineapple, several strawberries and a blackberry. Fruits are good for you and take on a nice sparkle when you soak them in ginger ale.

In addition to the soda and water, there were two bottles each of chardonnay and pinot noir. I don't remember the vineyard; it wasn't anything I recognized from Trader Joe's wine selection, anyway. I only had a splash of the pinot noir because reds tend to give me migraines. I had a glass of the chardonnay because it was there and it was already after 3 on a kind of slow Thursday afternoon. Both of them were palatable, but I am fairly deficient in describing wines beyond "ugh, bad!" or "WOOOOOOOOOOOO! I'm rather plastered." I think often the people that write those wine descriptions just make them up, anyway. "Tones of apple and mahogony with an edge of cut grass and whisps of the dreams tulips have in April." Complete B.S.

And then dinner, well, let's just say that dinner left me hung over for work on Friday. Well, let's say a little more so that my mother doesn't think all I had for dinner was two 22oz. bottles of Private Stock and a Budwiser pounder. I also had one modest black bean and chorizo burrito, well, more of a soft taco, anyway. Beer has lots of calories so I didn't need to eat so much food, right? I think I also had a handful of "Hint of Lime" tortilla chips and some salsa.

Lots of vitamins in salsa, there is.

There is, however, little wonder as to why I woke up with quite a headache on Friday.