Less is more, they often say.
Then why should margins work this way?
For photos grow from side to side,
To make this webpage extra wide.

The edges once were neatly tight,
As pictures held but narrow sight,
But now our minds are running wild,
And senses roused are always riled.

The content once was naught but food,
But topics soon became more crude.
So bankers, Belgians, Olympians too,
Have carried out their vicious coup.

Alas, the times are changing now,
But do not fret: we still know how
To take the trivial, make it stick,
And make you miss the subtle trick.

Food is timeless, as we all know,
For when it leaves, we, too, will go.
It is our lifeline, spice, and soul,
And now — and ever — makes us whole.

“If I had shares, I’d short myself.”

It doesn’t matter how well you know your new roommates when you all sign the lease — if your move-in is anything like ours was, you know all too much as you wrap up your first week together.

Who’s obsessively clean? Who chronically forgets to do their dishes or lock the doors? Who’s careless with money? Who’s a complete packrat? Who’s got a few deep-seated stringent ideas of just what has to be just how? (Answer, at least to the last question: everyone, of course.)

We settled down to cope with all our internal and external apartment problems, and naturally we did so with food: lasagna, good quality comfort food, rich and filling and hearty. We hit the grocery store and returned to our new kitchen, and our different quirks and upbringings promptly manifested here too. My New England heritage says you follow the cookbook and you’re careful to brown the meat beforehand and there’s nothing wrong with the precooked noodles and the layers have to be just right; my Southern-raised roommate does it like her mom always did, mixing the different cheeses and cooking everything together and flipping the whole pile upside down at the end of the process — all foreign concepts to me. Our token male made salad and (wisely?) stayed out of it.

We wound up with a pile of compromises, of course — choices ranging across the traditional and the modern, the spontaneous and the measured, the written and the remembered. Our final product wound up nothing like I was expecting, but it was certainly delicious.
It takes a village to bake a lasagna. People mercifully cropped from this photo, because we are all making stupid faces.