• Healthy Lentil Chili

    Photo and recipe courtesy of Food Network. While cleaning out my kitchen cupboards last weekend, I came across a lot of lentils. Brown lentils, green lentils, black lentils, and red lentils. I make a couple of dishes with green lentils, like my lentil and tuna salad, and vegetable lentil soup. I have a yummy red lentil soup recipe with warm spices. This time, I thought I might make something with some of the brown lentils, and I wanted to make something that wasn’t soup. So I went to google and came up with this recipe for Lentil Chili. Looks delicious, and bonus, it’s vegetarian and no bread or noodles, so…

  • Meme Monday – Omicron

    Stupid Omicron sure seems to be making the rounds. I know so many people who have COVID right now, so many more than at any time earlier in the Pandemic. Of course, we have tests (theoretically, since they are hard to find) now, so people have a better chance of knowing that they are infected. Everyone I know who currently has it (OK, not everyone, but 9/10) have been extremely careful and are fully vaccinated, though not all have had a chance to get the booster yet. Early on in the pandemic, when we were all staying home and everything was closed, I thought we were all going to get…

  • New Year’s Resolutions

    Most years, I don’t make New Year’s Resolutions. I feel like we can be as intractable or changeable as we desire any day of the year, no real need to focus it all at the beginning of a New Year. Sometimes I go for it, though, because it can be easier to track a change and when it started if it started at the beginning of a week, month, year, etc. One year, my resolution was to floss more. Actually, that was my resolution for several years, but one year it finally stuck. Later that year, I was pleasantly surprised in what a difference it made in the amount of…

  • Meme Monday – Rain in the forecast

    I know I’ve posted this meme before, way back in 2015 when it was dry dry summer and I was sick of it all. Today I am writing in a much better mood, having watched the weather report on the evening news, which said that we are predicted to get rain starting Tuesday, and then on and off (meaning some every day) for the next week. More importantly for California, we recently got about 8 feet of snow in the mountains, and can expect about that much again in this upcoming week. Thank God. That takes a combination of storms and cold. Too warm, and we don’t get the snowpack…

  • Meme Monday

    This one rang especially true the other day when my daughter asked me if I had seen her vaccination card. She needed it for work. The last time I remember seeing it was when we were in Maui, though I know she brought it home with her. But where beyond that. Did she carelessly set it down? Or did she deliberately set it down somewhere safe, and forget? The problem with living with other people is that often we don’t know WHO might have set something aside for safe keeping. I assume it was her, it’s her card. But who knows. Maybe I put it somewhere, or my husband did.…

  • NaBloPoMo – Day 30

    Here we are, my 30th post in 30 days. I’m pretty much out of ideas, so I am posting this meme that I saw somewhere. We can talk about that. We can talk about avocados and whether we love them or not. We can talk about other foods that are like this. We can talk about memes and how stupid and funny they can be sometimes. Whatever. I’ll start. I adore avocados. I don’t actually find them to be as persnickety as this meme suggests, and I often find myself in possession of perfectly ripe avocados. We had quesadillas for dinner last night, and I diced a lovely avocado, and…

  • Meme Monday – Ready for Christmas?

    I hope you had a lovely Thanksgiving. Ours was very nice, delicious food, good company, lots of laughs. Overall a winner. After Thanksgiving, we had a little friends and family time. Ted had lunch with his best friend on Friday, and Maya went into San Francisco with a friend to visit another friend of theirs, who recently had an appendectomy. I had to do a bit of work, but not too much. Working from home is a blessing and a curse. I didn’t have to go in to the office, which was the blessing. I did have to work, which maybe I might have avoided if I weren’t so available.…

  • Sunday Morning Walk

    Our walk on a recent Sunday morning brought us to a local park, which has a large pond. We mostly see birds at this pond…geese and ducks and coots. But we sometimes see a heron of some sort, and if we are lucky, a turtle. Generally the turtles are in the water swimming, and the pictures I get of them are not very good. But if you look at this picture, in the lower right corner, there is a little turtle sitting on a rock or something. Perhaps, like Yertle the Turtle, he is the king of all he surveys. Or perhaps the queen. Or perhaps it is just enjoying…

  • Z is for Zany

    I had trouble with this one. What to write about? I dislike zebras, they are brutal murderous wild animals. I did a search for zany questions, and came up with this list. I will take it as is, and try to answer. Seems like a good way to wrap up my A-Z. I intend to write posts through the end of the month, so maybe I’ll be here a few more days before slowing down again. Who knows. My search has 70 questions, and I gave up way before that. Sorry. I felt like the last question I answered was pretty much the last straw. Here goes: 1. Is cereal…

  • Y is for Yes Please

    My N post was about items that I will say ‘No, thank you’ if they are offered to me. Being that it is a holiday Friday, and I am lazy, here are a few items that I enjoy, and if they are offered to me, I will say, ‘Yes please’. In no particular order… Potatoes. French fries, potato chips, latkes (Happy Hanukkah tonight!), hashed browns, baked potatoes, whatever. I love them. Salads. So many different salads are delicious. Green salad, pasta salad, tuna salad, chicken salad, arugula salad, Caesar salad… Pasta. So many pastas that I love, but my personal favorite is the mushroom pasta at a restaurant in Oakland,…

  • X is for Gen X

    Generation X, a term typically used to describe the generation of Americans born between 1965 and 1980, although some sources used slightly different ranges. It has sometimes been called the “middle child” generation, as it follows the well-known baby boomer generation and precedes the millennial generation. It has fewer members than either of those groups, which is one of the reasons that Generation X is considered to be forgotten or overlooked when the generations are discussed. Members of Generation X, or Gen Xers, grew up in a time when there were more dual-income families, single-parent households, and children of divorce than when boomers were growing up. Consequently, many Gen Xers…

  • V is for Victory

    Last week, as I was putting together my Smokey post, WordPress went wonky on me. I was trying to post a picture of Smokey on the bed with Rags and a few other items, and it would not load. But there was a button that said, ‘retry’, so I kept retrying. Eventually everything went south, and I could not see my plugins or post anything. Very frustrating. Enter Ted, my handy tech support. Ted self hosts our blogs, so he contacted the company that we work with, and walked through the errors we were getting. It wasn’t just my blog, but all of the sites we have. Sometimes we could…