Do you extrude your food?

Okay, here's where I am today. This afternoon, we are scheduled for the feedback session following several intensive psycho-educational tests on my younger daughter, whose current label is PDD-NOS. I've learned to loathe and dread these sessions. Assessments are rarely geared toward strengths; they exist to justify funding, so I'm going to be spending half an hour or so being told what's wrong with my daughter. What I need is a distraction. But I have to ask myself, how desperate am I?

A few weeks back, when we'd just returned to Hades and the humid air flopped over my nose like a cloth soaked with chloroform, I was meditating on the Proust Questionnaire. At that time, I was considering my least favourite noise. Today, I'm thinking of my least favourite word. That word, my friends, is extrude. The very visions that word evokes makes my fingers curl convulsively, my gorge rise, and my nostrils constrict in self-defense. It is a disgusting word. I first encountered it during a First Aid course in relation to eyeballs. Ugh.

Now imagine my consternation in reading Jaywalker's latest post in her otherwise beguiling blog. Apparently Google thoughtfully supplies different advertisements with each correspondent who contacts Jaywalker through her gmail, presumably computer-generated to match our myriad interests and obsessions. The ads accompanying my love-notes to JW are about "food extrusion consultants".

What the *&%#@ is a food extrusion consultant? I "googled" it (of course), and got exactly two results: one is Jaywalker's latest post and the other is this, which informs me that food extrusion is: " A type of food processing in which a food product is exposed to intense pressure and heat within an extruder and cooked in order to give the product a particular shape or greater uniformity." Mmmmn. Yummy. This, of course, forced me to look up extruder and the first hit I got was: "device used to melt-mix plastics and powder coatings". So, I'm guessing we're not talking Jamie Oliver here.

Another question in the Proust Questionnaire is: "What profession would you not like to attempt?" Up until now, my answer has always been "anything in sales". My new answer is...