Beer Saturday musings

It's odd how family traditions evolve. I suppose it applies to customs and rituals that the whole world engages in, too- like Valentine's day or April Fool's day- but a family develops its own rituals and customs.

In my family, the first Saturday of the month meant that we'd go browse at Oxford Bookstore and then have a couple of beers and lunch at any of the Park Street restaurants. We could spend hours in bookshops, and routinely did. Things changed a bit, and the ritual evolved to suit them.

Nowadays, we get food delivered once in a while, but mostly on Saturdays I go on a cooking spree. This is not as easy as it sounds. I have to make allowances for the fact that the lord and master likes his lentils watery while the son and heir hates them that way. I have to factor in that they can't stand spicy stuff or chillies and I love spicy food. Even allowing and admitting all preferences, I can and do cook meals we all three of us can share.

Some days it is pasta with tomato, garlic and cheese sauce and sautéed vegetables, pureed spinach and jacket potatoes on the side. On cool days it might be adai or dosas and various chutneys judiciously toned down with yoghurt to the 'ouch' levels of my sissy menfolk. Some days it is Punjabi style, rajma and kadhai paneer. Some days it is an Andhra menu.

Things change, and new customs evolve. After I stopped reading the Statesman in retaliation to their stopping the London Times crosswords, I don't spend much time with my newspapers folded to the grid and pen poised over the clues. I do the majority of my crosswords online now. These days, Saturday means a heavy load of the Sacred Duty.

There are the two Saturday prize puzzles from the Times and the Guardian, and the extras, the Jumbo puzzles both concise and cryptic from the Times and the quick crosswords too. I am not even mentioning the Azeds and the monthly prize puzzles.

Before I settle down to the Sacred Duty, there are the weekly Solemn Duties of Saturday. This is a ritual that developed after I had to pay two whopping phone bills thanks to viruses- running my weekly checks, updating my anti-virus software, being secure.

But there's always beer, on the first Saturday of the month. It is a constant.

I finish my chores; I practically race through them before I settle down with that tankard of beer to do crosswords. Some days that gets done lickety-split. Everything clicks, my brain is in fine fettle and I complete them all rather quickly. Like last Saturday.

On such days, I visit my blog archives and marvel at the logic that matches Google ads to my individual posts. I write about birds and poetry , and Google places an ad for Birdsong Detective there. There's a strange Daily Online Devotional ad that keeps appearing, and I can't even guess why. Butchers and bakers and crossword puzzle-makers all feature in the ads. Which reminds me, here's a clue:

Oh, Candlestick? Check that out, you don't have to buy to window-shop (5,2,3,3) That's about as cryptic as I can get at you lot, you crossword philistines, you.

After all that daily chores and attending to sacred duties comes ego massaging. I do my weekly check of my site's tracker, and get bemused by it. There are people who come across my blog in Poland, Israel and Brazil. They read me in Russia and China apparently. Reports tell me somebody spent more than an hour reading my blog. Perhaps she came to it and was called away and the minutes mounted up.

But when I saw an odd datum for my blog visitor location, I was thrown into a frenzy of speculation. Be still, my pathetic heart, it couldn't have been him. Araucaria won't have the time of the day for me, or my blog to be realistic.

Hello there, my readers from Himachal Pradesh and Kerala! I really appreciate it that you visit and read me so regularly. Do let me know what you think by commenting once in a while. I'd appreciate that, too.

That brings me to the crux of my musings, however alcoholically I may have meandered to the point.

I am getting spam comments now, all posted to earlier posts and mostly to those that have been linked with other blogs. But four spam comments in a week are a bit much. Oh, I have no problem with anonymous comments as such; I have a secret admirer after all. I wish he'd come out of hiding and declare himself. Be that as it may, malicious programs, or spam-bots posting comments asking my readers to click on some link isn't nice.

Should I change my settings to allow comment verification and say I won't allow anonymous comments? While we are at it, should I change my template? Add pictures? Tell me, dear reader. While I await your judgement, let me go sleep the beer off, hic.

Cheers!