Multiple factors, some within my control, some without, went into making last night so terrible. But the thing you should know is that the cat does not care if I slept poorly and really, really need the extra nine minutes of rest my snooze button promises. No. He leapt out of his warm snuggly position under my arm and galloped off the edge of the bed. And then he tried – key word is tried – to jump onto my dresser for reasons known only to him, failed, and landed on the floor with a thud loud enough to wake my deep sleeping husband.
Anyway. I’m up. The cat’s needs have been tended to (for now). Let’s think about dinner.
In fact, I got to thinking about dinner yesterday after I read Julie’s Dinners Last Week post. I started drooling over her description of the Diwali meals she and her family ate, and wondered if I could make my own aloo gobi. YES, apparently I can.
Dinners for the Week of October 27-November (!!!!) 2
Aloo Gobi: I found this post about aloo gobi, which has recipes for both semi-dry and gravy versions. Since I like-ah the sauce, I think I am more interested in the aloo gobi masala option. My husband was mildly enthused about this idea, but he did express his feeling that aloo gobi is a side dish, not an entrée, and he would be requiring a protein. Oh look, this same website has a recipe for tandoori style chicken! Maybe that would work for my husband?
Salmon and Farro Bowl with Honey Mustard Dressing: Julie also posted a recipe for salmon and farro, and that sounded delicious. I am a little wary of the honey mustard dressing, as my husband dislikes mustard (and salmon for that matter, hmm, perhaps I should rethink this one?) and I dislike honey mustard. But I read through the recipe and it seems like it might be okay. We’ll see. This will be the recipe that drops off the list if I am too tired to deal with dinner.
Tacos: We haven’t had proper ground beef tacos for awhile. Let’s do it.
Lentil Stuffed Sweet Potatoes: We did not get around to making these last week, but Julie did, and she gives them a thumbs up. Back on the meal plan they go!
Green Curry: This is kind of a cheat, because I made this last night. But I’m counting it because it was a lot of work. I was actually in the mood for red curry, but my grocery store didn’t have my preferred curry paste (Maesri) and then the South Asian grocery store didn’t have red curry paste. FYI: green curry paste is much spicier than red. I ended up adding a second can of coconut milk to help cut some of the heat.
All right, the cat has just come into my office to remind me that we need to go wake up Carla. I did not know when I acquired a cat that he would be such a rigid manager. I guess someone needs to be in charge.
Taking a break in the middle of his rigorous 5:30 am workout routine.
What time does your alarm clock go off on weekdays? And does your alarm clock purr?
It seems like I have a bunch of things to write about – I have a whole list of post titles in the document above this one – but my brain is insisting on instead perseverating on some grumbles and frets. Sometimes it helps to write those out; clears some space in the garage of the mind.
Speaking of the garage, this is what my garage door currently looks like. We don’t know what happened to the garage door. What we do know is that my husband came home from work yesterday, tried to open his garage door, and it wouldn’t open. After some examination, we discovered that a pin had been pushed through a bracket (these are totally the right words) when it wasn’t supposed to be, preventing the garage door from opening properly. We pulled the pin, the garage door resumed normal function.
The only thing that happened between when my husband left for work – via a working garage door – and returned, is that Carla and a neighborhood friend did some rollerblading in the garage. Carla insists she did not touch the garage door, or anything on it. Okay, fine.
But then when I left the house, my garage door also wouldn’t open. I checked, and sure enough, the pin was pushed through the bracket. When I removed the pin, the door still wouldn’t open, so I did some jiggling and finally got it to go up enough that I could back out onto the driveway. But it wouldn’t close. The motor was working – I could see the little track that maneuvers the door moving – but the door wouldn’t budge. So I pulled the thing that you pull when your electricity is out, so I could manually close the door. And it moved just fine… for a few feet. Until ANOTHER pin, this one with a wheel on it, for maneuvering the door down the outer tracks of the housing (so many terms that are so definitely accurate), popped out and bopped me on the head.
The garage door is ASKEW, as you can see. My husband and I tried to fix it, but we made it much, much worse. At least it’s CLOSED, now. Time to call the garage door guy, probably. But it is a holiday weekend here in the US so who’s to know if garage door guys are even working right now. Plus, the last time I called a garage door guy, one of them tried to tell me I needed a brand new garage door when the other guy said my door was fixable, and then fixed it, and it has remained operable for nearly two years. Is this newest issue related to the one we dealt with back in 2023? Should I have listened to the first guy all along? No one knows. No one knows, either, why the pins were pushed in the first place. Least of all Carla.
It has been Quite A Week for stuff like that. There’s the air conditioner leak, which I am monitoring per my dad’s instructions. He thinks we just need to get a new threaded fitting for the pipe. All my fingers are crossed, of course, and perhaps I am just being hyper-aware, but it feels like our air conditioner is really struggling to keep the house cool. Is this because it is a million degrees outside? Or because the air conditioner is failing? Okay, okay – let’s not fret too intensely about the air conditioner. I want to tell you about my ATM mishap.
Picture this: It is a million degrees outside, I am picking up my child from camp and then picking up her friend so we can have a sleepover. I have a ten minute window in which I can grab some food for dinner and get some cash to tip the furniture delivery people who are due at my house first thing the next morning. Carla and I swing through the grocery store in record time and there’s only one car ahead of me at the ATM. The car takes forever. I always wonder if people behind me think I am taking forever, too. Or are there some people who save up fifty-eight transactions for a single visit to the ATM. Hard to say. When I finally pull up, the machine takes my card, takes my pin, but then there is no “withdraw cash” option. Sigh.
There is a walk-up ATM on the other side of the bank, so I park and go through the whole thing again. This time, the machine takes my card, takes my pin, and there IS a “withdraw cash” option. I click it and a screen pops up that says “validating pin.” I wait. And wait. And wait. The sun helpfully spotlights me against the building. A woman pulls up and asks if this machine has cash, because the drive-up one doesn’t. I told her it ate my card. She suggests that I see if anyone inside can help, which I reluctantly do (I don’t want to leave my card in the machine), but the bank is closed.
I try to call the bank – first the branch, which is closed to callers as well as customers, and then the customer service hotline, which has eight million prompts that I dutifully type in but can’t get it to understand – and then start pounding on the doors. I can see people inside; maybe they will take pity on me? I am not a bank robber, just a damp, flustered, middle-aged woman. Bless them: someone tries to communicate with me via mouthing and sign language (very ineffective), and then eventually a man comes into the lobby and talks to me through the doors. I explain what happened, he explains he’s not allowed to open the doors to the bank after hours, and we discuss options. I am near tears at this point. The frozen screen still says “validating pin” and my main concern is that the computer will eventually start working again and then my card, with validated pin, will be available for anyone to use. I don’t know if I look plaintive enough, or harmless enough, or annoying enough, but the man finally gets a colleague to unlock the doors for him so he can come check on the situation himself.
I am apparently switching verb tenses now. The solution turned out to be: he reset the machine from inside the building. This, he told me, could result in my card being spit back out at me – so I needed to wait until it completely reset – or it could result in my card disappearing forever into the ether. So I called customer service again to see if I could get to a human. Meanwhile, Carla was sitting in the air-conditioned car, fretting about all the other people (total: 3) who were also trying to withdraw money from this bank and were stuck in the same pointless loop we were. She was particularly worried about one elderly man in a convertible who went through the drive-up ATM twice and pulled up to the walk-up ATM also twice, only to be turned away because I was still there.
HALF AN HOUR LATER – drenched in sweat, but unwilling to leave the machine in case my card popped out – the machine reset and my card was nowhere in sight. I’d finally gotten through to a real person via the customer service hotline and was asking him to send me a new card when the banker appeared out of nowhere and asked if I had my ID. I handed it over and he returned it WITH MY CARD.
I was so very grateful. I know he broke all sorts of rules by leaving the bank, even though he took precautions to make sure that even if I was going to threaten him with a weapon, I still couldn’t access the bank. Sometimes people are so bound by rules that they are unable to exercise any sort of judgment call. How fortunate that this man was able to judge that my situation required some rule bending. I did not even get his name, but he is my hero.
The Balloons. This is just pure complaining now, but something else I despise right up there with “unable to exercise judgment calls” is people who gate-keep rules/information. I went to a local business that sells balloons to get a few for Carla’s birthday. (She still adores balloons.) I took my balloons to the register, where two young people were inflating balloons and tying on ribbon. One of the people came to take my order. “When is your event?” Tomorrow morning, I told her. She looked with dismay at the balloons I’d chosen. “Those won’t last that long,” she said, pointing to the latex balloons. I’ve had twelve years of experience with balloons, and I think they’d be fine, but whatever. I told her I would exchange them for mylar balloons. “Would you like to take the balloons with you now?” Sure, that would prevent me from making a second trip, why not? “We can’t, we have a bunch of orders we’re working on right now.” Okay, that’s fine; I had been prepared to come back anyway. I asked her what time they closed that night. “Eight.” Okay, great. I will pick up the balloons at eight. “We don’t fulfill balloon orders that late. The latest we fulfill balloon orders is seven-thirty.” Oh-kay. Seven-thirty, is fine, I will pick them up at seven-thirty. “Well, probably not seven-thirty. Maybe six-thirty, or seven.” Great, I will pick them up at seven. The other person filling balloons piped up: “We have another order to fulfill at seven.” The person who I was dealing with said, “We’re fulfilling another order at seven so I can’t do seven.” Okay, fine. Six-thirty, I do not care. “Do you want your ribbon floor length?” I had no experience with this unit of measurement, or how it could possibly be a standard length, so I said something like, I want the ribbon long because we have tall ceilings. The person filling balloons said, “We do floor length or table length.” My pleasant smile was beginning to feel more like a grimace. Floor length is fine. “What color ribbon do you want?” I started to answer and then asked what colors they haveand chose the first option she gave me.
If there are very specific parameters, TELL ME THEM. Don’t make me guess.
Update on the sleep situation. One of my top health concerns over the past couple of years has been my increasingly, enduringly terrible sleep and resulting fatigue. I did two at-home sleep studies that were inconclusive. The sleep specialist recommended an in-lab sleep study, which I finally did last week (would anyone be interested in a post about what that was like?) and got my results. Basically, I have very mild obstructive sleep apnea. So mild that usually they don’t treat it (and if it’s so mild they don’t typically treat it, is the sleep apnea what’s causing my sleep problems?). (I also have restless limbs, for which I already take copious supplements and have a prescription to use on really bad nights.) My sleep specialist said that I could try a CPAP machine if I wanted, I could get a dental appliance that is not covered by insurance, or I could – wait for it – lose weight. Sigh. Okay, the last one is free and worth doing anyway, so I guess I’ll try that first.
Possibly I am so easily annoyed right now because I have some un-displaceable worry and regret that’s just… percolating. I just heard some news about a friend that was very troubling. It didn’t come from her; it came, in fact, third hand, but you’ll have to trust me that the source is inarguably trustworthy. I suppose there is still room for some blurring of details, so I’m keeping that in mind. Anyway: I learned that she was going through something horrific some years ago and I had no idea. If I had known, I would have tried to help her. But I didn’t know, and she went through this horrific experience and she went through it alone. Because the revelation about her circumstances didn’t come from her, and because we are the type of friends who now keep in touch via text two or three times a year, and who see each other every decade or so if we happen to be in the same state at the same time, I don’t feel comfortable reaching out to her. Not that I’d even know what to say. “I’m sorry you went through that?” “I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you?” I don’t know any details, just broad strokes. I have every reason to believe she is okay now, and that the horrific ordeal is in the past. But it still hurts my heart to know this thing was happening right in front of me and I was so totally oblivious.
DRASTIC TONE AND SUBJECT CHANGE. Even though it required turning on my oven, I did some medicinal baking yesterday. I made my favorite summer treat, a purple plum torte. Typically, I make it in a nine-inch pan but this time I made it in a six-inch pan and it was so good. Because it’s taller, the cake had to cook a little longer for the middle to set, and the edges caramelized into a delicious cookie-like crust, and the plums settled in the middle into a gorgeous jam. A plus, would make again.
Comeuppance. Do you remember, lo these many weeks ago, when I was complaining about the neighbors’ kids being outside late at night playing basketball? Well, we had a friend sleep over on a weeknight and due to manyfactors, including my ATM experience, everything took place much later than I planned. The kids got in the pool at… nine. It was dark, which was not ideal, and resulted in some spooked screeching. But a night swim is a novelty and it was the only time they had to swim and I knew they weren’t going to sleep anyway. I shushed them anytime they spoke above normal conversation volume, and they ended up playing a very nice quiet game until about eleven.
The next day, Carla ran into one of her dog friends and its human companion, and she ended up mentioning that she’d been swimming the previous night. The human said, “Oh yes, I heard.”
GULP. I am a noisy inconsiderate neighbor too, it seems.
Don’t worry. I got my comeuppance. My next-door neighbors – not the basketball family – hosted a party the night before Independence Day and released three hours’ worth of massive fireworks into the night, terrifying the cat and stressing my child out with fears of fire. They stopped at about eleven. The next day, we had spent fireworks cartridges all over our driveway, backyard, and even the top of my car. I picked them all up without complaint.
Are we seriously doing this? Last week, when it was still June, I went to Michael’s to buy birthday candles and what did I see? Halloween décor. Why. Just. Why???????? (Also, I really want the tall ghost with the jack-o-lantern candy dish.)
Introvert vs. extrovert. Carla rejected the idea of day camp this summer. I did sign her up for a bunch of short camps – short in terms of duration (2-3 hours) as well as length (weeklong) – but for a lot of the summer so far, she’s been at home with me. This has been exactly as difficult as I imagined it would be. She’s bored. She’s lonely. She’s unwilling to do the things I want her to do in order to make me feel like she’s Doing Things instead of sitting in front of a screen all day. The weather has been too rainy to spend much time outside or in the pool. The kids in the neighborhood have all been at camp. And because I refuse to let her sit in front of a screen all day, she has been by my side pretty much all day long.
This should be fun! It’s a gift, in fact, to spend unstructured time with my kid. We’ve played a bunch of board games, we had a girls’ day during which we went shopping and went out to lunch, we’ve run errands together, we’ve taken the kitten to the vet. We’ve also done a lot of screen time (which I am only now realizing is a loophole in my No Screens Until You’ve Done X Ruling), watching cat videos, having Modern Family and Brooklyn 99 marathons, watching movies.
I have also arranged playdates and mini golf and invited neighbors over to swim and made dates to go visit our old neighbors.
And yet there are so many hours to fill and so many of them seem to be filled with Carla – and the kitten – needing my attention. Which, again, is precious, and also I would just like some time alone for the love. My battery drains very quickly when I don’t get time to myself, even when those people are my beloved child, and I am at my limit. (Yes, I have tried waking up early but the cat is always already awake and ready to eat and then play, and then the playing wakes Carla up, and there’s never any time alone.)
Poor Carla, born an only child to introverted parents, is a social creature who LOVES people and loves chaos and excitement and busyness. I know she is bored and lonely, and I’m trying to secure additional time with her friends, and I’m trying to remind myself that I am the grownup here, and this is my responsibility as her parent as well as a person who loves her. I am also trying to remind myself that being bored is GOOD for kids. Although I think the reason it’s good for kids is that it supposedly inspires them to be creative, while my child is creatively velcroing herself to my side. I am trying to remind myself that she won’t always want to spend time with me, and that, in fact, any moment now she could decide she never wants to speak to me again, and I should treasure this time. I am TRYING; this summer is TRYING as well, but in a different way.
Okay. Now that I’ve whined all over the internet, I’m going on a hunt for outdoor throw pillows with my husband and child. At a store, not, like, in the yard, in case that wasn’t clear.
What complaints and frets are cluttering up your mental garage?
For some reason, I woke up at 1:27 this morning and could NOT fall asleep. I don’t recall dwelling on anything specific, or being worried or anxious about anything, I just couldn’t sleep.
This was good (????) because I heard Carla get up at 4:00 and then I heard her sweet little voice call out, “Hello?” (Does she do this on nights when I’m not awake? Breaks my heart a little to think of that.) I went into her room and she was in tears because her leg was hurting so! much! I rubbed her leg for awhile and then she tearfully informed me that it wasn’t helping, so I gave her Tylenol and offered an ice pack. She declined the ice pack because the pain was in her entire leg, not in one specific spot.
Poor kiddo. My diagnosis is growing pains (after shooing some very unpleasant frets about blood clots – why does my brain hate me?). Did you ever have growing pains? I remember getting them, that awful deep ache in both legs. The medical sites say that the pain is largely muscular, and that doctors don’t think growing hurts – despite the fact that the pains occur largely in growing children and tend to stop when the children stop growing. But whatever, nameless heartless overly literal doctors.
Carla agreed to try some stretches, so I led her through a few knee bends and some downward dog. She had to show me child’s pose and cobra as well, even though I doubt those did anything for her pain and she ran through her “flow” at such lightning speed I don’t see how it could have been at all relaxing. At 4:37 she was still Wide Awake. I suggested she try one of my getting-to-sleep strategies (I have taught her getting-to-sleep strategies multiple times, but she never remembers them and has, until last night, mainly refused to try them), which was retracing the steps of a favorite walk. I suggested she think about going over to our neighbor-with-a-puppy’s house, and think about each step she takes to get there in as great detail as possible. She closed her eyes and was quite still for awhile. At 4:52 I whispered that I was going back to bed, and she told me that she was at the point in the walk where she was putting on her shoes. Great.
“If I’m not asleep by 5:30, can I come get you?” she asked. She was so pathetic, and her leg still hurt. Against my better judgment, I said, “Do you want to come sleep in my room?”
Surprisingly, she declined. (Actually, what she said was, “I don’t think that would have any effect” which was a very surprising sentence to hear from a sleepy nine-year-old.)
I went back to bed and lay there, awake, waiting for her to come get me. (She never did!) I finally fell asleep shortly after my husband’s alarm went off at 6:00, only to have a nightmare that my mother-in-law, who is supposed to arrive next weekend, had instead arrived today. It was extremely stressful, as though the worst possible thing would be for my mother-in-law to show up when I had some clutter in the kitchen or had not yet washed her bed linens. She would be fine and cheerful about the whole thing, honestly. But in the dream, it was A HORROR.
Somehow Carla and I made it out the door to school, and then I went for a four-mile walk with a friend I haven’t seen in weeks, which was a very good second start to the day. Then I went to Trader Joe’s and then to the library, where I picked up my copy of The Accomplice, on hold after Birchie spoke so highly of it. (I know literally nothing about it, except that Birchie recommended it. It’s quite fun to dive into a book that you know nothing about, except when your husband asks you what it’s about and then screws his face up into perplexed concern when you say you don’t know.)
But when I got home, things took A Turn: I had six emails from my bank, all saying in their typical panicked way, “You recently made a large transaction” followed immediately by “Card Alert – Review This Transaction.” The bank does this – sends two apprehensive emails – for every transaction, and I have learned not to get terribly stressed. But this time, I had NOT made any transactions, especially not with the M*** Store in Washington State.
The thing is, I had also not made any transactions with the M*** Store in the first week of November, when two charges of $.99 each hit my account. After scrutinizing both my memory and my account at the M*** Store (from which I cannot recall ever having purchased anything, although perhaps I did once a million years ago since I do have an account), I called my bank and they cancelled my card and sent me a new one.
So the card that was charged today was a BRAND NEW CARD. And I know for a fact that I have only used it at two places, one that rhymes with GayGal and the other that rhymes with Glamazon.
I have cancelled this brand new card – and disputed the three charges of $.99, $.99, and $9.99 respectively – and I guess now I wait for the new card. Hopefully the holiday gifts that I charged to it this weekend will go through. SIGH AND ARGH. And also, HOW? How is someone accessing my card? How did they get it so soon after I cancelled the previous one? Why are they so hell bent on buying things from the M*** Store?!? My husband suggested that the fraudster had put some sort of recurring charge on my previous card, and that the card company automatically updated the number once I got the new one. So I have talked with my bank about THAT. I hope we communicated clearly about the possibility, but honestly I’m not sure. Fortunately, it is my personal account and has only a little bit of money in there, and fortunately I check my email way too frequently, so I caught the unauthorized charges early both times. But it sure is ANNOYING.
On to dinners.
December starts this week, people! It’s happening!
We have three measly weeks left of school until a two-week winter break. Three weeks of all the activities. One week of my mother-in-law visiting. One call week. We’re going to POWER THROUGH.
Dinners for the Week of November 28-December 4
Mulligatawny Soup: Per my mother’s suggestion, I am going to make this with leftover turkey instead of chicken. Even if I don’t like the result (I hate turkey), my husband will eat it.
Spicy Chickpea Bowls: I have some chicken breasts I can chop up for my husband. I do need to whip up a batch of the ginger garlic sauce that this recipe calls for, which is a pain. But it is SO NICE to have a bag full of ginger-garlic sauce cubes in my freezer, and they last quite a while.
Slow Cooker Lemon Garlic Chicken with Steamed Broccoli: We haven’t had this in a very long time and it’s good and it’s a slow cooker meal. Enough said.
I am also going to make another batch of butternut squash soup because it is easy and delicious and I am in a Soup Mood. Plus, Trader Joe’s had a lot of very nice looking, pre-cubed butternut squash at a very good price.
Trader Joe’s also had a big container of cubed sweet potatoes, which I bought on a whim… but now I don’t know what to do with them! Roast them? But then… do what with them? I have tried roasted sweet potatoes on salad before and I do not care for it. What would YOU do with a huge container of cubed sweet potatoes? (I am not adding them to my butternut squash soup – I prefer my soup to be pure.)
Also: I forgot to buy iceberg lettuce until the last possible second. (This was at the other grocery store I went to, specifically to buy bell peppers for the chickpea bowls. I cannot eat the chickpea bowls without bell peppers. And Trader Joe’s peppers were all soft and wrinkly. Ew. I need a nice crisp, unwrinkled pepper.) All my stuff (more than just bell peppers, I’M SORRY I HAVE A PROBLEM) was already on the belt; there was a woman behind me in line. I did the thing where I speed-walked over to the produce section and grabbed the first head of lettuce I saw so I could get back without anyone feeling like I was abusing the checkout section. But then I put the lettuce down, because it was very light, and grabbed another. ALSO very light, but now I was panicking, imagining the woman in line behind me tapping her foot and sighing in my general direction. I should have just put it down and survived ONE SINGLE WEEK without iceberg lettuce (I have baby spinach! I have green leaf lettuce!) but I didn’t; I ran back to the checkout line and paid for my groceries and only then did I discover that my very small head of iceberg, which will probably turn out to be three or four outer leaves and nothing else, was THREE DOLLARS AND FIFTY CENTS. That is ridiculous. That is a ridiculous price for a giant heavy head of iceberg! That is a ridiculous price for a plastic clamshell of pre-washed, pre-cut gourmet lettuces! Ridiculous! And yet I paid it! Maybe this is why I am a target of fraud; clearly I am not all that careful with my money. SIGH.
This is my present and my future, folks. Screeching in disbelief about the absurd pricing of lettuce.
Okay. That was a much complainy-er post than I intended, but there you have it. It’s a post-holiday Monday, after all.
It seems as though I am doing NaBloPoMothis month, which is 30 blog posts in 30 days. (Will I make it??? Only time will tell.) Details at San’s blog here.
