It’s been another week on house arrest … er, uh, full time crutches. But the end is in sight. I didn’t get “poof no crutches ” for my Valentine’s present on Tuesday, but I did get a crutch weaning plan. I’m now in my last week full time on crutches, then starting next week I only have to use them outdoors and can stop using them in the house, then I graduate to short walks outside OK, then finally longer walks OK. I think I’ll be normal by April. So not what I really wanted but I’ll take it.
What with not being able to walk, of course I’ve been worrying about gaining weight. I’m doing OK during the day time, making sure to not eat until I’m really hungry. But looking back on the week I think I’ve been sitting down to dinner and eating because it’s food rather than because I have appetite. On my Sunday weigh-in I was up a bit. Another oh well. I’ll try to be better this week.
Some cooking things worked out. I made the last of the giant cimmy bun into French toast and we had breakfast for dinner on Friday: Cimmy bun French toast, link sausages. With paprika potatoes that came out nice & crispy. And Saturday I made granola and it was also nice & crispy – I’ve started making it without fruit and adding the fruit per serving. I thought Mark might like the no-fruit granola, but he still prefers honey nut cheerios on his yogurt.
Other stuff not so much. I think I’m still getting used to the new oven. I had three packages of pork shoulder from our last pig, one I think is an actual roast, and the other two are cut into steaks. I decided I’d slow roast a couple of the steaks. I thought I’d have enough for some pasta sauce and maybe even some sandwiches. But at 325° for two and a half hours, the bottom one burnt to a crisp. Not nice crust a la Guy Fieri or even BBQ place burnt ends, but really burnt. I composted the really carbonized parts and shredded up what I could for the pasta sauce. Which didn’t come out quite right either. I thawed out some odds & ends: pepperonata, a small carton of diced tomatoes, and a container marked creamy tomato sauce. I fried up some onions and half a green pepper and a handful of grape tomatoes that were an impulse buy on one of my even-though-I’m-on-crutches-I’m-stopping-at-the-co-op trips, and we’d eaten most of them, and added the pepperonata and the diced tomatoes and the meat and simmered it all for about half an hour then dumped in the cream sauce. Which made it quite tasty but maybe a little too rich, plus too much volume. I only used half of it to cover the half pound of rigatoni we had for dinner. I’ll see if Al and Emma want the rest.
What else did I make that was good … I hauled out a fave from the past, green chile stew with hominy from Gourmet, that I used to make the last winter Al lived at home, 2007. I didn’t have jalapeños but I had frozen roasted poblanos that I think I picked at Tipi’s gleaning day last fall, that I didn’t write about. They’re more like the real New Mexico green chile that the recipe is sorta based on anyways. We had it with Oven’s of Bailey’s Corn Oat Muffins.
Some morning in there I had avocado toast for breakfast.
Al and Emma and Jasper came for brunch on Sunday and we had broccoli quiche and bacon and a fancy kale salad with toasted garbanzo beans and garlic breadcrumbs and a tahini dressing and lots of Parmesan cheese and buckwheat date scones, Dorie Greenspan’s recipe and I add dates. I didn’t take pics of anything except Jasper in Emma’s lap, and even those shots are not great – too much digital zoom – they were across the table from me, and backlit. But it was great to hang out with them for a bit.
Mark’s been on a remodel binge upstairs installing new blinds and replacing couches.
This is a couch from my parents’ house – something like 55 years ago when we moved into the city of Pittsburgh from the suburbs my mom got it reupholstered and let me and my brother pick out the fabric. It had kind of lightning-striped velvet on the cushions and black on the back. And it was falling apart and sun damaged before Mark replaced it with this handsome grey blue.
Ikea love seat for under the windows
On Wednesday in the parking garage under HC White, I bumped the bumper of the car into one of the cement support columns, and that really bummed me out the rest of the day, feeling like I was going to have to deal with body shops, plus that I had in mere seconds seriously reduced the value of my low miles leased car that I am set to give back in August. On Thursday Susan fixed it – she knew that if those tabs were showing you could just pop it back on. A real example of a down then up.
Another down up – the garage door – hahaha. I think I told you it’s been not going down unless you hold the button until it hits the ground. I didn’t want to call the company that installed it because I knew a service call would be expensive. Plus Mark thought that it had gotten out of whack due to the cold and it didn’t make sense to me to get it adjusted when it’s still winter. But I looked at manuals online and they all seemed to be saying this is a complicated piece of machinery and you dumb homeowners can’t fix it yourselves. So I called. When I made the appointment the person on the phone asked, “Are the sensors aligned?” and I guess I should’ve said, “I don’t know – how do I tell?” And that would’ve maybe saved me the $99 service call. But I just said we hadn’t touched them, and made the appointment. Last Wednesday they came out. The sensors are just these little plastic boxes with a thumb screw attaching them to a bracket – not high tech at all. The master one has a green light and the other one has amber and the little lights should be steady. When the garage door guy showed he just tightened and straightened the sensors – took less than 5 minutes – and it worked. But then he hung around to clean and lube the door, and of course take my credit card.
I worked early voting on Thursday – in the snow at Madison College where we had three voters. And then on a sunny Friday at the north side community center where there were lots more voters, but also another election official/city employee who basically could’ve run the whole show on their own, so I felt pretty superfluous.
And I can’t get the city’s system to let me login to report my hours – I guess I have to call during business hours. None of the reset emails are arriving, not even in spam or trash folders.
And I put my name in to serve on a search & screen for the new Vice Provost for Libraries, and was super pleased to get asked – I’ve never served on a search & screen at that level in all my time at UW, although I’ve been on a bunch of shared governance committees meeting with candidates. And aw shucks – the email asking me to serve said the work was going to continue through late August and since I am slated to retire June 30, I can’t do it after all. Another up then down.
I submitted a couple of wishes to the wishing tree that Sean Ono Lennon set up for Yoko’s 90th birthday on Saturday – and guess that’s an OK way to end.