This week I’m specializing in eating the stuff that nobody else wants.
Like Thursday, I made open face cheese-y melt-y things and leftover soup for dinner. We had two soups, some cream of turkey with wild rice soup, and some butternut squash chili. Mark and Maja both opted for the turkey-wild rice, so I had the chili. The melts were cheddar on sourdough with sauteed red peppers, two English muffin half pizzas with pepperoni, and Brie on sourdough, with sliced apple to put on top. No one else took the Brie so I ate one of the three I’d made with apple, then when I was putting stuff away after dinner I remembered the yogurt bucket of mincemeat (leftover from the vegan tarts) at the back of the fridge and topped one of the remaining Brie sandwiches with that and ate it. It was so good I had the last one for breakfast on Friday, reheated.
Some other night I finished the pumpkin pie. On insta I said Sunday, but I think it might’ve been Monday, MLK day. Despite requesting pumpkin pie for her sweet sixteen back in October, our student didn’t even taste this pie. More for me I guess.
This is a caramel pumpkin pie, based on a Bon Appetit recipe, I’ve been making since 2018 or so.
I’ve also been eating the regular naval oranges because our student only likes more tangerine-type citrus – too much white membrane on the regular oranges.
Below is from late March 2020 but you get the idea. I have a different desk now that goes up and down easier but my work from home office is in the same spot, same mouse pads hanging out there, too. Commemoration of the now merged into Core, ALA LITA’s 40th anniversary, that would’ve been in (ulp) 2006. Figures though, a mousepad was still good schwag back then. There’s still LITA 40th anniversary stuff on the ALA website, even a picture of me at a conference, and 4-5 of Mark, since he was more involved in the organization than I was. He was on the Board, and then president, and then worked for them for 5 years.
Bunker brekkie, or my Tuesday work at home day started with oranges & black coffee.
Colby Riggs, Me, Thomas Dowling – at some library conference, I suspect in the early 2000s
I haven’t had a very happy week – eating off kilter, not enough exercise, news all bad. Just generally feeling like everything’s falling apart. The house, me, the world. As I’m writing this though, with WPR playing on my computer, Nanci Griffith just started singing her version of Dylan’s Boots of Spanish Leather, from Other Voices Other Rooms, and that’s making it kinda better.
On Saturday night I made the real US Senate navy been soup for dinner, and because it was the playoffs, I made a batch of Chex mix, too. But the Packers lost and I woke up with a terrible headache Sunday morning. The cat got out of bed right before me, and went over to the landing and threw up. Following the unwritten rules of cat puke clean up, since I was the first to pass by, I got to clean it up. Still warm. My headache might’ve been Chex mix hangover; I ate way too much of it. I was going to have a beer with dinner and then make an Old Fashioned, official drink of WI, but I opened one of the Capitol Brewery Winter Skals that somebody brought to the cookie party, and are lurking in the basement fridge, and I didn’t like it any better than the time I tried it at a bar 4-5 years ago. I dumped it out and didn’t drink any more alcohol. Wonder if the Packers would have won if I’d made that drink?
We shoveled snow, and then we walked, and I did start feeling better with exercise and caffeine. I made Mark’s mom’s sour cream waffles for breakfast, but I didn’t take any pictures.
Oh, and Saturday I bought my new oven. It will take 8-12 weeks to arrive. As long as I have it by this year’s cookie season, I’ll be happy. I considered the top three wall oven choices from Consumer Reports and they ranged in price from about $3,3oo to about $1,900. My usual approach is to take the middle priced one – which was a KitchenAid for about $2,400 in this case – but in the end atypically I took the highest priced one, because it had better reliability ratings. And an air fry function. Frankly, I am going to work any oven hard (a.k.a. beat the shit out of it), so reliability seemed important. All told with installation and tax and haul away the old one, it’s going to be about $3800, so I am cautiously excited but also worried that I’m spending too much. Just means I have to live at least 20 more years to work this oven to death as I did my old one, installed in 2001.
I do have a few pictures from the rest of the week.
The sky over the Goodman Center parking lot when I started my Tuesday morning shift. The sad frozen mask in the yard when I left is the overleaf.
Friday we went to the Madison Symphony – where there was a really small crowd – and this is what the lobby looked like at intermission.
The 21st was four years since the 2017 women’s march, when we all wore our pussy hats, as I am being reminded with pictures like this. It’s my iPhone wallpaper now.
Looking up King Street, Saturday morning. I think it can be bad to stay in one place from your 20s to your 60s, because you pass by sites of youthful transgressions way too often.
I guess that’s it – for now. Hanging on …. And I really have to stop listening to the news – the headlines my phone just flashed are that we are considering send troops to Ukraine. More bad news.