Guess who’s cranky

by

Dinners This Week Plus Some Call Week Grousing

Well, we are somehow in the middle of a Call Week again. (They don’t normally happen so close together – it’s just the way the schedule worked out. Womp womp.)

I hate Call Weeks. Carla and I miss her dad/my husband (why did I never choose a Blog Name for my husband? It would really cut down on the awkward sentence constructions around here) and he is exhausted and stressed out when he IS home and everything – EVERYTHING – falls to me, which is FINE, but still tiring. I know, I know – there are so many people who Have It Worse: single parents and people whose spouses are deployed or are on out-of-town business trips, parents who have more than just the one child, parents who have more than just the one child AND are single parents/have MIA spouses. Yes, I know. I know. I am counting my blessings and I have many, truly. But Call Weeks are still stressful.

One of the very dumb things I dislike about them – which is very small in the Grand Scheme – is that my husband doesn’t unload the dishwasher on the weekends. (Because he is at the hospital.) We typically run the dishes every night, so I unload the dishwasher every weekday morning, and having my husband unload the dishwasher for me is seriously the only thing that differentiates my week from my weekends, and is seriously the only break I get from my day-to-day job of parenting Carla/running the household, and so I get very grim about doing this very small, very menial, literally takes FIVE MINUTES EACH DAY task all by myself for two extra days during Call Weeks. Very grim.

All this grousing about dishes does remind me of something cheering, which is that I have taught Carla – now seven – how to wash the dishes and put them in the dishwasher. Previously, she would clear the dishes but just put them next to the sink. But NOW, now she is tall enough to reach the kitchen faucet and so I have slapped her with Dinner Dish Duty. Well, and she is also responsible for washing her own breakfast and lunch dishes. This helps immensely with the Cleaning Dishes portion of my Sisyphean housewifely duties. Sure, it is a work in progress – we have had to discuss, many times, that my preference is for a dish to be visibly clean before it goes into the dishwasher. (Yes, I know that dishwashers can technically perform this task for me.) We have had to discuss, many times, that when I say, “Please clear the table” that means, also, rinse the dishes and put them in the dishwasher, a duty that does not change from day to day, despite my phrasing. (She is debilitatingly literal, a gift she gets from her father.) (Okay, maybe it’s not debilitating, per se.) And I think I need to have another chat with her about the garbage disposal, and how food can be scraped from plates into only one side of the sink. Overall, though, it’s pretty great. And she sings while she washes dishes, or pretends that the faucet is a princess or an evil queen and the bits of food are various other characters while she’s scrubbing the dishes, which is delightful. Having her wash the dishes is not FAST, by any means, and sometimes there is a perplexing and disturbing amount of water on the floor afterward, but it’s helpful. And it has the added benefit of me feeling smug about teaching her Life Skills when really I am just sitting on the couch.

Okay! For dinners this week, I am focusing on comfort foods. And also on using up the fresh veggies I got at the grocery store.

Dinners for the Week of August 17-23

I am also going to make the Lazy Genius Collective’s Chickpea Bowl for lunches this week. I am going to make a new batch of the ginger garlic sauce and freeze a bunch of it in icecube trays for easy recipe usage later.

Cocktail of the Week

  • Blackberry Champagne Mule (I got some beautiful blackberries on sale at the grocery store and may sample this recipe tonight because it sounds AWESOME. If I wait for the weekend, the blackberries will be bad, so making it tonight is really the RESPONSIBLE thing to do.)
by

Disapproving Arm Cross, Grim Thin Line of Lips

Indignant Update: IT IS NOW SNOWING.

We had actual honest-to-goodness sunshine yesterday, and temperatures around 70 degrees, and Carla and I played outside for THREE HOURS and I got a horrific sunburn and now I’m really grouchy. The grouchiness has to do with my being so careless as to forget to wear appropriate sunscreen and also with my inability to sleep due to the fact that my chest, back, shoulders, and arms are so sunburned that I could NOT find a comfortable sleeping position. Plus, I am irritable that I am in such discomfort – and, not to mention, I look RIDICULOUS because the sunburn is all streaky and uneven and the same shade as my red T-shirt – purely because of MY OWN IDIOCY.

Anyway, I am in a very cranky and judgmental mood, so I thought you might join me in being extremely disapproving and critical this morning. Surely there is SOMETHING that fills you with disapprobation, no? Perhaps it is my overzealous use of capitalization, perhaps any of a million other things you could rightly judge me for.

  • Carla likes to go bike riding in a nearby school parking lot. It is just down the block and, obviously, there is no one at school these days. So it’s the perfect big, empty space for her to ride around in. But increasingly often, we are finding TEENS gathering there. Now, I expect that the Stay at Home Order is especially tough on teens. And that they should probably get props (are we still giving props? is that too 1900s a term?) for being creative about socializing. But zooming into a school parking lot and then setting up a sort of tailgating-esque situation that doesn’t appear to separate its participants by more than three feet MAX… well, that just makes me feel crabby. Some of the teens have been better than others about maintaining distance. But I definitely witnessed one person exit a car and enter another car and I can’t imagine that two people quarantining together would drive to a parking lot, separately, only to then get together in a single car. I am watching you, teens. Not in a creepy way. Just in a very impotently condemnatory way.
  • And SPEAKING OF the school parking lot, which I know we have no actual claim over: People have been using it as a cut-through. If you think of the school as being on a corner, with a busy road as the northern border and a busy road bordering the east, and our street lying on the school’s southern border, people are using the parking lot to cut off the corner intersection. There’s a stop sign between the school parking lot and my street, but people are ZOOMing through the parking lot and then ZOOMing straight through the stop sign and I am getting Very Peeved. People live here! And drive past! And ride their bikes! This is not your own personal shortcut!
  • When I went to pick up pizza for dinner last Friday, there was one customer inside the store already (two-customer limit, for the interior of the store), and two customers in line after me (outside). Of the four of us, I was the ONLY person wearing a mask. Then I had to go INTO Target to pick up an online order, due to some sort of oversight on my part (I was NOT PLEASED), and so! many! people! were just wandering around without masks! A man and his THREE tween/teenage daughters walked into Target without masks on! The staff inside had masks “on,” but not covering their noses, or hanging loosely around their chins. I am trying not to be TOO judgey about mask wearing; I ordered my mask online and it took a couple of weeks to arrive. My husband ordered a mask several weeks ago and it just now is “being prepared to ship,” whatever that means, website. So I get that not everyone has easy access to masks, and that even if you are trying to be a good mask-wearing member of society that you might not have one on hand. (I had to turn around halfway to Target — when I discovered that I had somehow not ordered the curbside pickup, but instead the inside pickup; what is going ON with my brain? — and go home for my mask; now I have my second mask in my car, waiting for just such an occasion.) But also you can make a mask out of ANYTHING; my husband made me a makeshift mask out of a dishrag and two hairties before I had my real masks in hand. So please. WEAR A MASK.
  • And ALSO, why are people SO OPPOSED to wearing masks? Listen, I acknowledge that there are probably cases where wearing a mask is not possible. But probably, for those people who CANNOT wear a mask for some reason, masks for the REST of us are extra important. I have seen horrifying news stories about mask-related violence and I don’t get it at all! If you don’t have a medical reason for not wearing a mask, JUST WEAR A MASK. Yes, they are uncomfortable. Yes, they look odd/ridiculous/scary. And yes, they make me feel claustrophobic and trapped and damp around the mouth area. But if they can help slow the spread of this disease or even just make people feel a teeny bit more comfortable, WEAR A FREAKING MASK.
  • Going back to being critical of people at the pizza place: I’d placed my order in advance online. You can specify a pickup time, and I’d said 6:00. I arrived at about 5:50, and waited until 6:00 on the button to go into the store. The very kind but harried staff person who took my name said, “Okay, just a second.” And maybe all of four minutes later, he handed me my pizza, and apologized for taking so long, they’d been so inundated with orders, and he appreciated my patience… And… It was probably 6:04 at the latest. Which makes me think that OTHER PEOPLE had been rude to him which makes me feel so angry I could cry. This poor guy, working in a hot restaurant for probably not very much money, providing a very helpful service to all of us in this time of need, putting himself and his family/roommates in potential danger, and having to keep up with what I imagine is a lot of business. And for someone to be RUDE to him? Obviously this is all conjecture and I have no idea what, if anything, happened at all. But I am ready to LEAP FORTH with indignation at the slightest non-provocation!
  • There was a centipede on our kitchen floor the other day. As I approached it, I informed my family – with solemnity and sorrow – that I was going to squish it and flush it down the toilet. They protested. Yes, yes, I am also of the mind that we should return a creepy crawly to the great outdoors if we can, if we can being the operative phrase and also containing multitudes of unspoken caveats, including but not limited to if we can without being crawled upon. I told my family that they were welcome to intervene, and transport the centipede to the outdoors themselves, but that I wasn’t going to risk it. They valiantly recommended ways that I could capture and transport the centipede. Again, I demurred. Again, they protested. Finally, my brave daughter leapt up and said she would extricate the centipede from certain-death-by-squishing and put it safely outside. But she took too long trying to find an appropriately stiff piece of paper and the centipede started to run away. I tried to waylay it and it crawled on my hand and then fell to the floor and made for the no-mans-land beneath the refrigerator so I squished it. I am very irritated indeed about the way the whole thing went.
  • In addition to the centipede, we had a silverfish sighting. READ THE ROOM, CRITTERS. Perhaps they are well aware that I can’t exactly call the exterminators at this moment, and so are taking advantage of the situation. To which I say, in a tone of utmost withering disdain, I expect opportunistic behavior of humans but not of YOU.

 

What or who’s behavior has you putting on your prissy pants these days?