Guess who’s cranky

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Five for Friday

It’s Friday! We are chugging right along through November. Here are five things I’m thinking about today. 

  1. Falling Back: Changing the clocks has messed me up. I hate it so much. I mean, I guess I don’t mind driving to school in the daylight again. But give it a few weeks and we’ll be back to driving in the darkness. In the meantime, I am going to bed at a NEW normal time and waking up at the OLD normal time, which means I am getting less sleep than I was before. Plus I am still waking up each morning at three or four, full of existential dread. GOOD TIMES. My poor kid is so far on the exact same page. Why could she not have inherited her father’s ability to sleep anytime, anywhere? We are both wandering around, exhausted and cranky. She keeps draping herself over furniture and moaning about how tiiiiiiirrrrred she is. I cannot stop yawning. People keep talking about how maybe this will be the last year of Daylight Savings Time! And I keep thinking, yeah, sure, whatever. But I also think it’s kind of amazing that we all collectively (except Arizona and Hawaii, I think?) agreed to just move everything back or forth an hour twice a year. That’s BONKERS. I feel like there’s no agreement on ANYTHING AT ALL, and yet we all do this???? No thank you. I would like to abstain. 
  2. Flu Shot: I finally got my flu shot. I was at the pharmacy and thought to ask if they administer flu shots; this is a newish-to-me pharmacy, and I’d always gotten my flu shot at Walgreens. We no longer live within walking distance of a Walgreens, so I’ve been putting off the flu shot until I had a reason to be near one. Anyway, I realize this is a very long and circuitous way to the point that yes, the current pharmacy DOES offer flu shots. The pharmacist came around the counter which was the first difference between it and Walgreens; there, you wait until the pharmacist calls you back, and you go into a little room with a door. This pharmacist was a cheery woman who seemed impossibly young. She was much friendlier than the old pharmacist, whose entire body seemed weighted down with regret and drudgery. And then she gave me the shot right there in the middle of the pharmacy! There was another client, sitting behind me, while I stood at the checkout counter. It was a tiny bit alarming. She was very sweet, but then asked me what I did for work. I told her I work from home and she gasped and said, “Well why are you even getting a flu shot?!” That threw me, I’ll admit. My answer in the moment was that I have a young child, but also… shouldn’t everyone get a flu shot? You can get the flu at the grocery store. She then chatted with me for a few minutes about having kids (she has a baby). It was a very pleasant interaction but also kind of weird. 
  3. Flannel Time: We have reached the flannel sheets portion of the year. I don’t normally love flannel sheets, because I sleep hot. But our regular sheets are feeling a little chilly lately. I’m a little apprehensive though because our house heats very unevenly. The house will get colder and colder until you’re shivering even under the covers – I have been wearing sweatpants and a sweatshirt to bed, when I much prefer a T-shirt – and then the furnace will decide it’s time to take action and it will WHOOSH to life and churn out an intense fog of heat so that you’re kicking off the covers and stripping off layers – and then it will turn off, exhausted by its efforts, and the cycle begins again. Will flannel sheets be pleasant or unbearable? Time will tell.
  4. Forwarding: We continue to receive mail for the previous owners. It’s not quite at the level it was – at first, we got boxes and season tickets to sports games and multiple cases of wine in addition to catalogs and letters and paychecks and things. But we still get some mail. We have been here since September 1. Is it time to start writing “return to sender” on the mail we receive? Obviously the nice thing to do is to keep holding the mail for the previous owners, and texting them occasionally, and asking them what they’d like us to do with it. (They always come to pick it up, and have ignored my suggestion that we could drop it at their new house.) I keep thinking about how mortified I was to learn, from the people who bought our old house, that they’d been receiving mail for us. My husband had been so diligent about setting up mail forwarding and systematically going through all of our bills and regular mailings to make sure our address was changed. And yet some things slipped past the gate. I also keep thinking about how, at our old house, we continued to get mail for the previous owners even though we’d lived there for twelve years. Not a lot of mail, but one or two pieces a year even at the end. Is mail forwarding really that tough? Are we all really that unclear about ALL the places that have our address?
  5. Fear of Friendliness: I saw one of our new neighbors outside and said hello and asked if she worked from home. When she said she was home most days, I said I was too and would she want to get a coffee sometime? She said sure. But now that I’ve made the overture, I don’t know what to do! Do I… have her over for coffee? I don’t actually know how to make coffee (although my husband could probably teach me). And if she comes for coffee, do I need to offer food as well? What do people eat? Do I live on this planet because I don’t feel like it. Do I suggest going for a walk? What if we have nothing to talk about? What’s a normal thing for people to do when they are trying to get to know other people? While I really, truly would love to get to know my new neighbors, I am kind of berating myself for suggesting anything. I know it wasn’t, like, set in stone or anything, and we could probably just never follow up. But… I want to follow up. Even if I also vehemently do NOT want to follow up. 

That’s it for today, Internet. What are you thinking about on this fall Friday?

I am kinda sorta attempting to complete NaBloPoMo, with the full expectation that life will make it impossible any day now. If you want to follow along, or join the fun, check out San’s blog here. 

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Souvenir

Well, we are back from our Road Trip!, which was fabulous. Ten days of driving that paused for a five-day stopover with my parents in the middle. My husband planned the trip in such a way that we didn’t get tired of being in the car until the very end. And then we arrived home, and it was wonderful to be back in our own beds, with a weekend to recover before getting back to normal.

And then I woke up with cold symptoms and rapid tests confirmed that I have Covid. The worst souvenir. 

So far, I am feeling crummy. But mainly CRANKY. 

Cranky at myself. I always anticipated getting Covid at some point; it’s long seemed inevitable. I thought that when I finally got it, I would feel resignation mixed with relief. But I don’t. I am MAD. I got Covid because I took unnecessary risks, and that’s just a fact. Did I expect that * I * was somehow invincible? That Covid would look at the fact that I’ve been pretty measured and cautious over the past two-ish years and say, “Let’s skip her”? That residents of the rural western United States are all roaming around unmasked because Covid doesn’t exist in those areas? Apparently I did expect those things because we relaxed our typical restrictions on our trip and I got Covid. We ate out in restaurants A LOT. We went into museums and gas stations and gift shops and sometimes we just left our masks in the car. We attended events with lots of other people and pretended that the outdoor venues would protect us. I was uncareful and I KNEW I wasn’t being careful and I got Covid. So I feel cranky and mad and a little ashamed and my head feels like a stress ball that’s being squeezed so intensely you can see the little beads inside it through the membrane. PLUS I somehow forgot to do the Wordle yesterday and it RESET my winning streak.

For posterity’s sake, my symptoms: It started with a scratchy throat. So lightly scratchy that it was easy enough to write it off as irritation from staying in so many hotels (I was getting irritated with being on the road, those last couple of days; why not my throat, too?), or the change in atmosphere/climate as we drove eastward toward home. Then a day of an even sorer throat, with an irresistible tickle that could only be soothed by chain-lozenging menthol cough drops. Then a day where the throat felt better and the cough was less persistent. Now, Day 4, I am in the Head in a Vise stage. I am isolating in my bedroom, which fortunately has its own bathroom, but I am resentful and grumpy and have to get up to staunch my runny nose every few minutes. 

Covid. Ugh.

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Dinners This Week; You Will Be Very Surprised That Crab Sandwiches Are Not on the Meal Plan

Despite a) truly glorious, early spring weather, complete with sunshine and birdsong and blooming forsythia, and b) a brisk morning walk with a friend in said beautiful weather, I am cranky. For no substantial reason!

(I DO have to go to Target, and go inside no less, to procure some Easter candy. And I am dreading filling the plastic eggs with… whatever it is I normally fill them with. Candy? Maybe the Easter Bunny will upgrade to some dollar bills. The prospect of a Target trip is not super cheering.)

(Yesterday I had to make multiple phone calls, AND I deep cleaned the bathrooms, so perhaps I have some residual grouchiness from that?)

(We ARE supposed to go from low-seventies to low-thirties in the next day or two, so there’s that. Plus, it is QUITE WINDY and you know my feelings about THAT.) (Grump grump grump.)

Well, crabby mood or not, we must eat. I skipped my Dinners This Week post last week because I just couldn’t BEAR to think about food or plan any meals or cook. My husband is very agreeable in times like these, so he put up with leftovers, scrounging around, and takeout for several nights. And then HE planned this week’s meals (except for tonight’s tacos, which were a Carla Request). By “planned” I mean that he suggested things for me to cook, but that is indeed helpful because planning the meals – thinking of things that we haven’t eaten too recently, that don’t take a million years to cook, that will make at least some use of food we have in the house already, that two-thirds of us will eat and not hate – can be just awful.

Armed with my husband’s meal plan, I went to the grocery store after my lovely, not-de-grouchifying-in-the-least walk. (I am sure my friend found me RULL PLEASANT.) I did not want to go to the grocery store. Yet I really needed to go to the grocery store. We had run out of half and half, people. HALF AND HALF. I have been putting MILK in my tea like an Agatha Christie character.

Probably it was good that I was able to go to the grocery store on a cranky day. Grocery shopping puts me on edge as it is, so I’m putting the crankiness to good use, at least. And then I could really glower at the frozen foods case where the pancakes are once again MISSING and sigh dramatically over the dearth of regular-old large eggs (I do not need extra large eggs or jumbo eggs or super jumbo eggs, thank you very much) and stare in a pointedly Very Patient Way at the woman who was ambling – AMBLING – in a zig-zag fashion down the aisle, making it next to impossible to pass her on either side. 

I did buy myself some flowers, which helps. 

And I bought ingredients to make cinnamon rolls, which I DO NOT NEED to make, but which sounds like a very festive Easter morning breakfast. Because if there’s one thing a home visited by the Easter Bunny needs, it’s more sugar. Well. If my husband talks me down from the cinnamon rolls, at least bread flour and cream cheese keep for a good long while.

I stood in front of the beef selection for a Very Long Time because my recipe calls for chuck roast and my choices were chuck EYE roast or chuck SHOULDER roast or some other things that had the word CHUCK in them but not the word ROAST. I wanted to CHUCK a ROAST right at my husband for choosing the recipe, I’ll tell you that much. Google did not help. I did not have the recipe on me, because it is in a PHYSICAL BOOK, not on a website, like it’s 1953. I see I am getting a little shouty. At least I did not shout at the beef selection. I finally asked the meat monger – a young woman, which pleased me – and she very decisively told me that the chuck EYE roast would be best for my stew purposes, so I went on my way. (I was very glad she’d said chuck EYE roast, because the recipe called for 3 to 3.5 pounds of chuck roast and not a single roast in the entire case was 3.5 pounds. They were all 2.25 to 2.75. But! I did find ONE ROAST that was just a squeak under 3 pounds and it was the chuck EYE roast.)

Carla and I – after much deliberation – are planning to make macarons this weekend, as our Easter baking project. They will be filled with lemon curd and buttercream as per this recipe (although I bought the lemon curd in a jar), but will have speckles per this recipe. I am very, very exhausted by even the prospect of Holiday Baking Projects. But perhaps by the weekend I will feel more chipper about the idea. Anyway, I had to buy a huge giant container of cream of tartar, even though we only need a pinch, because I had failed to check on our cream of tartar situation at home. Let me tell you, my face fell when I saw a little container of cream of tartar in the spice cupboard. Fortunately for all involved (me and the cream of tartar), it had expired in 2014. 

For some reason, I have had a craving for cinnamon gummy bears. I don’t think I have had a cinnamon bear for… thirty years? And I am fairly sure that I would eat a total of three of them and then be satisfied for another three decades. But the craving is strong. So of course I cannot find cinnamon bears anywhere. Grouse grouse grouse.

This isn’t so much a grocery store report as it is a catalog of things that irritated me whilst at the grocery store. 

Grocery availability has gotten so reliable (aside from pancakes) that I didn’t even LOOK for some of the things that I normally bought in duplicate just in case – was there any pepperoni? Who knows! My preferred taco seasoning in my preferred little jar is still out of stock, but I can buy it in the envelopes so it’s not a BIG deal. And the taco shell shelves seemed a little patchy, but I still only purchased a single box of taco shells. What did that meme say last year? “The earth is healing”? (Is “the earth” in this scenario me or the grocery store supply chain?) Now we just sit and wait for Suez-Canal-blockage-related shortages to start. 

Dinners for the Week of March 30-April 5

  • Tacos
  • Mulligatawny Soup – This was my lone suggestion for the week, simply because we have mire poix pre-cut in the freezer AND because I picked up another loaf of sourdough bread at the grocery store. Sour toast will pair very nicely with some Mulligatawny.
  • Slow Cooker Balsamic Pork Tenderloin – I got my husband some feta and he already has some sundried tomatoes. I will make rice and caramelize some onions to serve with the pork. Easy peasy.
  • Guinness Stew with Side Salad – I bought some Guinness for St. Patrick’s Day, because I had never tried it before. Turns out I do not care for it. But my husband pointed out we could use it for stew, and indeed we will. I found a recipe in The Best International Recipe cookbook, from the editor’s of Cook’s Illustrated (which is different from America’s Test Kitchen in some way but I do not understand what it is). Why is it “recipe” instead of “recipes”? Just to tug my toehairs, I guess. Also, holy Slovenian sausage, this cookbook is PRICEY. I sure as sugar did not pay $66 for this cookbook and neither should you. 

What are you eating and/or baking this week? Or, if you feel like joining me in a Celebration of Crabbiness, what is getting all up in your grump today?