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Wordless Wednesday
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Meme Monday – A Saturday Morning Walk
I didn’t ride through the desert, but I did drive to my old hometown last weekend to take my Great Aunt for her second dose of vaccine. I haven’t spent much time with her since COVID began, for obvious reasons, and it was really nice to have some time together. I spent the night with her, since I’m fully vaccinated, and I wanted to spend the night with her just in case she had any side effects. I didn’t like the idea of her having a fever or aches in the middle of the night, and being all alone. Happily, she had zero side effects. No fever, no aches, no…
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Meme Monday – Karma
Many years ago, when Ted and I were dating, we found ourselves with his family, out in the suburbs, playing miniature golf. I don’t remember why. One thing about Ted and his brother is that they love to tease people. His brother especially gets a kick out of pushing people’s buttons. Not really in a cruel way, but also not in an especially kind way. He loves to see people’s reactions. So here’s the scene. I’m trying my best to play miniature golf, but I have very little skill and I’m missing quite often and getting frustrated. It’s not fun to fail. Ted and his brother are pretending that they…
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Wordless Wednesday – Construction next door
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Meme Monday – Golden Birthday
April 6th was Mulder’s ‘Golden Birthday’. Your ‘golden birthday’, also known as your ‘champagne birthday’, is when your age matches the day of the month you were born, so Mulder turned 6 on the 6th. Due to the lifespan of dogs, and poor planning on the part of those creating our calendar, a lot of dogs never reach their golden birthday. Anyway, we decided to celebrate by giving Mulder his own hamburger for dinner. He loves hamburgers, and he loves carrots. Lucky for you, Ted took a video. If you have a dog in your life, do they took treats to their bed to eat? Genevieve used to do this…
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Meme Monday – Working from Home
As I do so often, I brought a cartoon rather than a meme, but I choose to look over that technicality. I’m not new to working from home. I last worked in an office in 2006, when my company moved their headquarters from my California town to a suburb of Chicago. A few years later, the headquarters again moved, this time to Atlanta. Rather than moving California employees, or laying us off, they sent us home. I wasn’t sure I would like it, I like my coworkers and thought I might be lonely being home. I’ve never had to deal with a commute, I have always lived in the same…
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Meme Monday – Happy Birthday Edition!
Today is my daughter Maya’s 25th birthday! That is somewhat shocking to me, I remember 25 very well. Actually, 25 is when my biological clock started ticking, and I started really wanting a baby. Before that, I was more hypothetical about it. But Ted and I were dating still, had just recently gotten engaged, and I was just graduating from college, into a recession. So it was 5 more years before we had Maya. Anyway, this is her 2nd COVID birthday. She went out yesterday with some friends, and sat in the park and had a lovely time while socially distant. It was almost 80 degrees, so pretty perfect weather…
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Wordless Wednesday
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Meme Monday
Today’s meme Monday is a two-for. The silly meme above, and the old school meme below, which is questions asked by AllyBean on her blog. Q1 – What’s your favorite movie? Oh gosh, so many. Maya would say, ‘Out of Africa’, because I sometimes like to watch that movie on my birthday. Such a gorgeous movie. Ted would say, ‘Flashdance’, because gosh, I love that movie, god help me. I just do. I might throw ‘Babette’s Feast’ in there, because it is lovely indeed, and I don’t get tired of ‘Sleepless in Seattle’ for some odd reason. Q2 – When trying to buy shoes, what’s your biggest problem? Arthritis. I have arthritis…
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(Nearly) Wordless Wednesday
My personal barometer on when COVID-19 is largely behind us. This newspaper vending kiosk was last loaded with a new paper a year ago, on March 16, 2020, which is the day that the Bay Area went into lockdown. Since that time, there have not been enough people riding BART (our local mass transit) to justify the labor, I assume, of consistently replacing the papers with new ones. I do see current newspapers in front of the grocery store, so I know it’s not everywhere. What about you? Do you have a small local barometer that you keep track of?
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Meme Monday – Beware the Ides of March
My current job, with which I will celebrate my 5 year anniversary in June, has a bonus program, where we get quarterly bonuses. I love that. They withhold a portion of each bonus for an annual retention bonus, so the March bonus is the best one of the year. We get this bonus on the Ides of March, so I now love this date. I put most of the bonus in savings, but spent some as well. I bought us some new bath towels, which have gotten expensive in the period since I last bought towels, though maybe they were expensive then, too, and I’ve just blacked it out. I…
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Daylight Saving Time
Here we are again, Daylight Saving Time begins tomorrow. Sigh. What that means specifically for me is that I will once again have to wait for the sun to come up in the mornings before Mulder and I go for our walk for a little while, until Earth tilts enough that it gets light earlier again. Of course it also means being confused and discombobulated for a few days, maybe a week, and the dog being confused about meal times, all of that. Mostly I like Daylight Saving, and prefer the lighter evenings. California voters passed a resolution in 2018 to stay on DST all year, but it hasn’t made…
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Cauliflower and Chickpea ‘Vitality Bowls’
New blog friend Martha often posts her weekly menu, and as figuring out WHAT to cook is my biggest cooking challenge, I have found myself going to her posts for inspiration. This week’s menu included a recipe for what Ted calls a ‘vitality bowl’, but the recipe is called Cauliflower Shawarma Grain Bowl. I did a search for the recipe name and came up with a lot of different recipes that look to be pretty similar. I’ll stick with this one as it was delicious. I’m posting here so I don’t lose the recipe, along with my notes, such as they are. There are a lot of steps, but none…
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Meme Monday – Books!
YOU GUYS, guess what we did yesterday? We went to a bookstore! An actual locally owned and operated bookstore! And we browsed around, and bought a couple of books. It was glorious. After that, we went to the hardware store to buy some hardware store type things, which was a little more crowded and not so much to our liking, but we got our things and left. But the bookstore! SO GREAT! Speaking of which, I have more books in my TBR pile than I know what to do with. I have books that I received as Christmas and birthday gifts. I have books that I got through the local…
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Sheet-Pan Cumin Pork Chops and Brussels Sprouts
I saw this recipe on the NY Times website, in an article about sheet-pan recipes. I am not a huge fan of the sheet-pan recipe, as often it tastes to me like things could have come out better had they been cooked differently, or at least separately. On the other hand, when Ted is trying to report traffic on the radio from 10 feet away, a sheet-pan meal is a much quieter way of cooking than using a frying pan. So I decided to give this one a try. The picture above is from the website, and to me it looked like you should cook it all on one pan,…