I just finished another semester of grad school in counseling psychology. I’m happy to say that I will soon be doing my internships and will be finished by this time next year. I’m very excited about that. It’s been a long road with Joe in medical school then residency and myself in [...]

It’s always gratifying to read about the spread of the chilehead obsession throughout the world. Now we knew that the U.K. had some chileheads of note, but this article from the Daily Mail Online spells it out in graphic detail, and we loved every word of it:
Some like it mind-blowingly hot: Meet the ‘chilli [...]

Now we finally have a “Caption This!” picture worthy of all the creativity, crassness, and hilarity that our beloved readers can come up with at the drop of a hat. To give you some background, the Blogger’s booth at the Weekend of Fire was the epicenter of the salsa contest engineered by everyone’s fave [...]

Now that all of us were recovering from the Weekend of Fire, it was time for CaJohn’s annual open house. I really do enjoy this part of the trip.
I arrived around 9:45 AM (first one there) so I went into shipping and talked with Mark as he labeled a last minute order before the festivities [...]

Got a little extra sleep in this day (I was getting used to the motorboat next to me) because the WOF started an hour later. Rolling out of bed, showering, and eating breakfast helped alleviate the hangover. I then found myself shopping at JJ’s with Marco from Marco’s Sauces. He was flabbergasted at the shear [...]

I have been reading the reviews of Jungle Jim’s Weekend of Fire, here at the Hot Zone as well as on Facebook (you know who you are) and sorely wishing I could have been there for the festivities.
As you may or may not know these odd little trade/retail shows thrown to celebrate the eating of [...]

A calm rolled over the participants and audience. Rain clouds blocked out the sun and small droplets started to fall from the sky. The elders of the chilli-head community all knew what these signs meant. They had seen it before in many other cities. The Defcon Deathmatch had arrived.
The participants signed the weaver stating that [...]

Every year chili-heads gather in the end all be all of pepper conventions for the Midwest. This year was the 3rd year for Jungle Jim’s Weekend of Fire and show organizer Jim Beckett (with the help of Debbie Artinger) were out to make it the best one yet.
I started my trek from Cleveland, Ohio to [...]

There were SO many good photo ops from this past weekend, but sadly our camera mucked up most of them. Luckily for you, the hot & spicy blog-loving internet public, we have at least one that requires your participation. Suffice to say, pictured above is our very own Passow putting to the test [...]

Here we were, after the first day of the 2009 Jungle Jim’s show, thinking we would have lots of pictures and stories to tell about the goings on from the day.
Well, we do. However, the logistics of reporting them have been a little bit off from what we expected. Between our efforts at [...]