Friday Randomness

The cartoon above is one I have shared before, first in the summer of 2020 I think, but boy oh boy does it resonate now. HOW ARE WE HERE AGAIN? Onward.

This is the first full week of Elisabeth’s FIG Collective, and I’ve been enjoying keeping track of little joys in my life. Appreciated in the best of times, much needed right now.

Saturday
Wicked – Ted is a member of SAG/Aftra, left over from his days working in radio, and he gets screeners of the films that are nominated for SAG awards. Saturday’s mail included a DVD for Wicked, which we hadn’t bothered to go see in the theater, but wanted to see and were too cheap to stream ($30 last time I checked). It was a fun way to spend a Saturday evening!

Sunday
Whipped Porridge – I read somewhere (sorry to not give credit, likely it was one of you but I’ve forgotten) about whipped oatmeal, where you make your oatmeal with half milk/half water, and stir vigorously while cooking, and it comes out kind of fluffy and creamy. I looked online and found a woman who whips a thinly sliced banana into her oatmeal, and the banana kind of dissolves into the oatmeal. That sounded good to me, so I tried it with my cream of barley cereal. DELICIOUS, and a lovely way to start a cold winter day. I mix in some walnuts and about a tsp of raspberry jam, and I top it with berries. It’s very satisfying and filling.

Monday
This morning on my walk, I listed to the Ezra Klein podcast, which gave me a glimmer of hope. You can watch above, if you haven’t heard it yet. The crux of it is in this one quote: “Trump is acting like a King because he is too weak to govern like a President.” Am I still worried as hell? Absolutely yes. But I’ll take my glimmers where I can get them.

Also Monday I made my first call, to my House Representative. I’ve been feeling helpless and not sure who to call and what to say. Sure, call my Rep and Senators, but we are in California, they agree with me. I saw a couple of people post on Facebook about 5 Calls.org, where they will give you not only the information of who your contacts are, they also give you a script if you want one. I found that really helpful.

Also helpful, I’ve been following the Alt National Park Service on Facebook. They have been working tirelessly to get the word out about Musk and his team, and I have found so much hope in their efforts as well.

Tuesday
This morning, I was grateful for my ujjai breath, which I very much needed to help with the stress of the shitstorm going on with our government right now. Later, I had some quiet time in the middle of my day, and came across an article that my step mom sent me (in the mail!) months ago, from the New York Times magazine. It’s about a horse trainer, who talked about how really learning to work with horses, to figure out how to figure them out, helped him open up himself, become a better listener, deal with childhood trauma, all of it. Animals really are magical.

We finally started getting rain this last weekend, though in our specific area it has been mostly a bit of drizzle. Well, Wednesday afternoon we finally got a storm that came in, with the most beautiful rain. I am happier if it doesn’t start raining hard until everyone in my family is home safe, and this started hours before that, but I enjoyed it anyway.

Wednesday
Today’s FIG was Ruby, the new cat at the rescue I’ve been volunteering for recently. She made me laugh, because she refused to get out of her litter box. You’d think she had a book or her phone in there. Eventually I got her out so I could clean it, but I had to pick her up, I couldn’t coax her. She’s shy, after I took her out of the litter box, she went and hid behind her bed.

After a drenching rain on Tuesday, I was also happy to see a blue sky again today. We’re supposed to get more rain Thursday and Friday, so it was nice to have a break without worrying too much about drought.

On Monday, Sarah posted about food waste, which made me think of our bread situation. We really like Semifreddi’s sourdough, and we often buy a loaf of their Sour Batard. We have a bit, and wrap the rest in foil to keep it from going completely stale quickly. This helps, but still, 1/2 to 1/3 of the loaf ends up getting thrown away when we buy another loaf. I sometimes give food away on our local Buy Nothing Facebook group. For example, we have bought hot dogs and hot dog buns, but those come in packs of 6 or 8 or whatever, and we are just not going to eat that many. So we’ll eat what we’re going to eat, and I’ll give the rest away. Makes me happy. But I doubt anyone wants 1/3 of a loaf of practically stale bread. Inspired by Sarah, I decided to make croutons, and we had salad and roast chicken for dinner. Next I am going to make panko breadcrumbs, via this recipe from The Pioneer Woman.

Thursday
Today’s joys were simple. Rest day on weights (good, because yesterday I did NOT want to do it, but I persevered), a good yoga session, a nice, albeit abbreviated, morning walk. A delicious scramble for breakfast (with tomato, red bell pepper, green onion, arugula, and Parmesan cheese) with the last of the fancy english muffins that I had in the freezer. (One of Oprah’s favorite things years ago.) A quiet afternoon of work on a rainy day, listening to Fleetwood Mac and Sade. I had a moment of quiet, being thankful for my job this morning, as my Facebook memories tells me that it was on this date in 2009 that I was laid off from a prior job. Ted had been laid off in mid 2008, so that was both of us without work, but thankfully he had recently been asked to come back to work for his prior employer, and was only a week or so from starting, so we weren’t both out of work for long. My company eventually asked me to come back too, they had cut too deep. Recessions suck.

OK, not the prettiest picture, but this is our dinner on Thursday. Admire our plates, which are our everyday dishes that we registered for when we got married back in 1993. Some of you were children. Before the election last year, I bought Penzey’s Spices gift cards as Christmas gifts for my family, mostly because they troll Trump, which made me happy. Little did I know that my entire family LOVES Penzey’s (all especially love the Taco seasoning), so yeah, good gift. With the gift cards that I ordered, which were physical gift cards (no electronic even offered) came several spice blends. I don’t do very well with spice blends, I don’t know when and where to use them. Well, tonight I was going to make an old standard (very simple) salmon recipe, which is salmon with salt, pepper, paprika, sliced garlic, and olive oil. So I made that recipe, but substituted one of the spice blends for the paprika. I used the Arizona Dreaming blend. It was DELICIOUS. I paired it with the Whole Foods Kale Caesar blend, recommended by Sarah, very tasty.

Friday
I’m cheating here, because I’m writing this on Thursday to post early on Friday morning, so perhaps some unexpected joys will come along. But the joys that I am expecting are: My Fabulous Friday (though I expect I will have to put in a couple of hours of work today, we have a release going out on Monday and it’s my turn to babysit). I’m planning to talk to my step-mom while I have my morning walk, I haven’t talked to her in a while. I don’t think I’ll be helping with the cat rescue, Ruby was adopted on Wednesday evening (when I was there, one of the employees told me someone had seen her on the website and was VERY interested, so yay!) Friday evening is usually dinner out with Ted, we always look forward to that. I have to decide what to do about my book. I’m loving The Blue Castle, but I’m already ahead for Monday’s discussion over at Engie’s pad, and I don’t really like that, I like to be right at the same place in the book. Maybe I’ll start one of the books I got for Christmas, Ina Garten’s memoir, which seems like just the right kind of soothing reading for times like these.

I know these are trying times. I hope you are hanging in there and finding joy where you can. Don’t let the motherfuckers steal your joy.