Bacon + chocolate = pure evil

I walked home from the doctor's last night (I'm fine), for the sake of a little time to clear my head. Walked by Whole Paycheck Foods and thought, "Well, I'm out of awesome chocolate, I should pick up another bar."

Lo and behold, I came face-to-face with this.

Yes, that is what it looks like. It's a gourmet chocolate bar made with bacon.

I stared at it for a while, and then, because my Hub has often claimed that there is nothing, nothing that cannot be improved by adding bacon, I bought it to bring home to him. (And a bar of Green & Black's Maya Gold, because there was no way I was staking my entire week's chocolate future on something that looks like a photoshopped joke idea.)

He was astonished. And intrigued. And a little scared. He made me take pictures of the entire process of him tasting a piece of the chocolate, and the faces he made were just priceless. I asked him how it was, and he just kind of blinked at me with this blank look on his face and shook his head. "I don't know. The chocolate was good, but it was... I don't know."

About an hour later, he convinced me to try some. This was a mistake. You know how the taste of bacon kind of goes up in your sinuses and lingers? Imagine that, plus salt, plus milk chocolate. If you can imagine that, you're a brave one, and you're also short of the mark because it was SO MUCH WORSE THAN I THOUGHT. On the one hand, there was nothing wrong with any of the ingredients. Good bacon taste, good chocolate taste, but as Xander Harris once said, "THESE ARE UN-MIXY THINGS." It made my brain hurt. It wormed its way into my sinuses and stayed there. I couldn't stop tasting it. I had to drink some hideously dry wine to get some other kind of taste up in that region, because the longer it stayed with me, the worse my brain-pain became.

People: don't do this. Just don't. Vosges does some awesome mixy things, but this is not one of them.

In other news, I kept my equanimity all the way through my doctor's visit, which was good. Then I went home, which was likewise good. Then I called my parents, and that's where things went haywire.

People in my family are under a lot of stress these days. There's a wedding that may or may not happen, and the open-ended question there is dragging all of us through a lot of tension, along with trying to figure out where the line is between "helpful advice" and "pushy busybody". There are several family members-- not immediate family for me, but close enough for my folks-- who are having a lot of health issues, so there's a lot of guilt and exhaustion flying around, along with the worries about care and money. My folks are within a few years of retirement, and of course the stock market promptly started going haywire-- hopefully their financial advisor was following proper procedure and had them in low-risk bonds and whatnot, because otherwise this is going to be bad-- and some serious bad drama is happening at my dad's workplace that is making him seriously consider turning in his keys and never going back. Which, frankly, I'd support, because he'd probably make more money going full-time with his much-beloved side gig, but the idea of such upheaval is making my mom's gray hair even grayer.

In short, these are not soothing conversations, and I never come out of them well. There's something about parents that will push a child's buttons, no matter how little the parents intend to and no matter how old the child is. When my parents are tense, I get tense. It has a lot to do with associating that tone of voice from my father with bad news for Meg, like I've disappointed him, or I've crossed him, or he's just generally pissy and is going to take it out on me. (Ah, childhood.) I ended up in knots by the time I finally prised myself out of that phone call, and it took a lot of deep breathing, a little bit of crying, and some quality cuddling to undo most of those knots.

I'm still kind of tense, and I'm recognizing the particular brand of tension as my "What? What did I do? How am I not good enough now?" tension. It sets me up to overreact to everyone else and feel like the world is out to get me, which is really not the case. Well, not so much "out to get me" as "vastly disapproves of me". So I start withdrawing and avoiding contact with people, which... is not good. Ah, fragile self-esteem, complicating everything. Yeowza.

Also, saw a picture of myself which I did not like. My Hub said, "But, you're gorgeous!" and I said, "Yup, no question about that, but there's a bit more of my gorgeous self than can fit into most of my favorite clothes, and this is photographic evidence which I cannot deny." I'm trying to hash out what to do about that, because I am not down with the idea of going whole-hog on a diet, and to add to the fun my Hub is still on bulking rations and eating hamburgers twice a day. Difficult to live with that. Also bad timing by falling in a budget-tightening time. You'd think that since both budget and diet = belt-tightening of a sort, that this would match up well, but that's... well, it's never been the case for me in practice. Hoping to change that by doing a LOT of deep breathing. A LOT.

Sigh.

Well, on the up side, tests of the Mario Badescu Drying Lotion have been done, since my Hub had a lovely pimple appear over the weekend and I pounced on it immediately (much to his horror). Seems to reduce inflammation and take care of the juicy white center of the whitehead overnight, leaving a lurking red spot in the morning. I could not get my Hub to agree to a second treatment, so I can't speak to whether a second shot of the stuff the next night (or, under makeup, in the morning-- it is pale pink and definitely does not blend with most people's complexions) would eliminate the red spot over the next eight hours. Further tests to come! Onward and upward!