I hate making phone calls

by

Dinners This Week

It’s a new week, which means that another 21 meals stretch before us, waiting to be planned and created. That both sounds like A LOT and not that many, although it feels endless and insurmountable. It’s also an appointment-heavy week, which I am not looking forward to. So much driving. So much trying to squeeze in Normal Life around these holes in the schedule. Why do I do this to myself? I think what happens is that, as I’m scheduling the appointments (which is usually months in advance of the actual appointment), I either think, “Oh, it will be so nice to just get everything over with at once!” when in fact I do not find that “nice” at all, but overwhelming and disruptive. Or I get all flustered on the phone and feel like I am being A Pain if I continue to request different dates/times. Probably it is a combination of the two. Either way, Past Suzanne is a jerk. 

Dinners for the Week of January 23-29

Lemon Chile White Fish with Chickpeas: I think I have shared my rule of thumb with you before, which is, if my husband suggests a meal, I make it. I hope that this encourages him to suggest more meals because coming up with meals is so tedious. (Once again, I fervently wish that I had A Mostly-Fixed Weekly Rotation, like Nicole… or a handful of tried-and-true recipes that we eat regularly, like NGS. Alas.) We do not own “Aleppo pepper,” but my husband is confident we can use chipotle powder and no one will know the difference. Probably we will have something green on the side – steamed broccoli, maybe?

Greek Chicken with a Big Salad: I am going to use this marinade as the dressing. Alert alert: I do not use a mortar and pestle with the marinade/dressing ingredients: I blend everything up in the blender. My Greek salad will have feta, Kalamata olives, red bell peppers, red onions, and cucumbers. My husband will have tomatoes instead of olives. I may also make some pita bread, just because it’s not too hard and it’s so fun to see the little pitas puff up. 

Japchae (inspired by this post from Birchwood Pie Project): Birchie eats this meal with gyoza, but says steak would probably be a good accompaniment. I may make steak for my husband and shrimp for myself, or just load it up with veggies and eat it without meat.

Farro with Garlic and Roasted Vegetables (inspired by this post from The In Between Is Mine): This sounds so wholesome and wintery and versatile. I will not be using tomatoes (quelle surprise), and I don’t have any potatoes on hand. I think I am just going to throw in whatever I can find rolling around in the house: mushrooms, red onion, zucchini, maybe a sweet potato although I’m trying to decide if that would taste weird with the other ingredients or not. I don’t really like sweet potatoes, but they are supposedly pretty healthful and my husband likes them and I have one languishing in the pantry. Hmmm. It will be a game-time decision.

Black Bean Burritos: I have been in a burrito sort of mood, so I’m putting this on the list. My favorite kind of burrito is a simple one. On the inside: black beans, a little cheese, a lot of hot sauce, a sprinkling of cilantro if I have some on hand. On the outside: copious amounts of cheddar – no, more than that, maybe just a little more – heated in the oven until it’s all bubbly and melty, lettuce, onions, sour cream, and so much hot sauce the whole thing looks more like an enchilada than a burrito.

What are you looking forward to this week?  Or not looking forward to, as the case may be?

by

Five for Friday

I rarely do “five for Friday” because usually I have too many words and thoughts burbling around in my head to limit it to five. But I’m having a hard time with posting lately, so I’m hoping the Five Things Only structure will be useful instead of restrictive. 

  • My daughter’s new alarm clock has had some unintended consequences. First of all, it has proven to be both an excellent purchase and a terrible purchase. Terrible because it does not work in the way it is intended to work. Its purpose is to wake up my child; it does not do that. She sleeps right through the sunshine and the birdsong. (You can set it to wake you up with different sounds, and Carla chose birds chirping.) It is excellent, however, because it gently wakes ME up, even though I am in the other room. I greatly prefer it to the blaring of her old alarm clock. The bird noises are cheerful and pleasant, and when I go in to awaken Carla, the room is already light enough that I can easily navigate the inevitable dinosaurs or stack of drawings or tangle of yesterday’s clothing on the floor. My only complaint is that the birdsong is a short snippet that repeats on an endless loop. I do wish that the manufacturers had recorded a longer excerpt. Maybe that’s what you get when you buy one of the more expensive versions. The other thing is that now I feel like I hear birdsong at odd moments of the day. Has the alarm lodged itself inside my brain, only to go off each day in the late afternoon? Are there birds outside our window that sound identical to the alarm clock, perhaps hoping that by mimicking the sounds of the birds trapped inside the house we will release them? Am I experiencing avian auditory hallucinations? I swear that I hear birds chirping merrily on a three-second loop, but then when I go still and silent to try to pinpoint where it is, I can’t find the source. 
  • Did you know that you can substitute wheat germ for flour? A friend taught me this wonderful secret a few months ago when she handed over her grandmother’s recipe for chocolate chip banana bread. Supposedly, wheat germ has a bunch of good things in it: thiamin, folate, magnesium, phosphorus, zinc. I think it also has a bit more protein than regular flour. What I really like about it is that it adds a different texture to baked goods. Over the long weekend, I made chocolate chip cookies and threw in some wheat germ (I think you can use 1/3 cup of wheat germ per cup of flour) and it gave the cookies a slightly nuttier flavor and a nubbly texture a bit like that of an oatmeal cookie. Yesterday, I made a second batch of banana muffins for Carla and I have been using wheat germ in those, too. I don’t know how much healthier a cookie or a muffin is, just because I’ve added wheat germ. But I like the phrase “wheat germ” and it gives me a very wholesome Laura Ingalls Wilder sort of feeling when I scoop it into the mixing bowl. 
I am sure it is the wheat germ that makes these so appealing and not all the sugar sprinkled on top.
  • I have had to make too many phone calls lately. Several of these calls are for work. Part of what I do as a freelance writer is interview subject matter experts. Technically, I quite LOVE this part of my work, because there is nothing cooler than chatting with someone who is an expert about something, or passionate about a subject, or loves what they do. It is inspiring and exhilarating. But I get so worked up in advance of our phone calls, and I get all tongue-tied (at least at first) and sweaty, and afterward I am completely spent. I made FOUR PHONE CALLS IN ONE MORNING this week, and it was awful. I mean, I got to chat with awesome people, but I also had to leave a couple of voicemails (HATE. Even if I carefully prepare what I’m going to say ahead of time, I bumble over my words and take WAY too long to leave a message and yet inevitably forget some important piece of information. Like I had to leave a message about a prescription recently and forgot to leave my phone number. Voicemail is almost worse than having someone ANSWER the phone! Although worse even than leaving a message is the long Schrödingerian moment when the phone is ringing and you have no idea whether someone will pick up or not.) And now I have two more phone calls to make: one to the gutter cleaning service that was supposed to clean our gutters in December and one to my dentist. I have to reschedule a dental appointment. I have known I needed to reschedule the appointment since I made the appointment, and didn’t call at all last week, so I put a reminder on my phone to call the dentist this past Tuesday. Instead of just calling, I have found very real and pressing reasons NOT to call the dentist every day this week. It’s so dumb and it will take five minutes, but I hate appointment-scheduling phone calls. Again, there’s the anxiety of being on the phone. But then you add that to trying to look at your stupid calendar at the same time, and going back and forth about possible days and times, and then – as I did last time, hence the need to reschedule – idiotically making your appointment at a time when you were already committed to something else. UGH. It is all the worst. But I guess I should just GO MAKE THE PHONE CALL ALREADY.
My husband surely has nothing better to do at work than respond to my complaints about making phone calls.
  • I am doing a new thing where I (try to) soak my feet every morning. The recommendation comes from my acupuncturist, whom I am seeing for my plantar fasciitis. (Would anyone be interested in a Swistle-style report about my acupuncture experience? With the understanding that I realize I am not, nor will I ever be, Swistle.) She gave me a specific list of things to include in the foot soak: Epsom salt, rosemary oil, and eucalyptus oil. She specified that the water should not be boiling, but should be more than warm. While I do find it difficult to set aside twenty minutes every morning to soak my feet, it is quite luxurious. (“Go soak your head” is a dismissive expression of annoyance; “Go soak your feet” is a gentle suggestion for self-care.) It gives me a chance to listen to my audiobook and sip my tea and feel like I am following doctors’ orders rather than wasting time. After I’m done, I slather my feet in lotion (I think Nicole – HI NICOLE – recommended this specific lotion awhile ago and I love it.) and put on some warm socks. The whole thing is rather lovely. Except for the part where the water is too hot and I overcompensate and make it too cold and then I have to heat it again.
  • Do you know about LibraryThing? I am sure the website is full of excellent resources for book lovers, but I have used it specifically to help me identify a book I cannot remember. I guess I’ve only used it successfully one time, but I recently posted a new query. The first time, I was looking for a book I remembered reading in fourth grade. It was a mystery, and the only things I could remember about it were as follows: The protagonist was a middle-school aged girl. The story took place at a ski resort. There was a tertiary character named Eunice (I remember this specifically because I can hear my fourth grade teacher saying, “Usually, this name is pronounced ‘yoo-NEESE,’ but in this book it is pronounced ‘YOO-niss.’” and I thought at the time, how could she possibly know that? and to this day I wonder. Did she have an in with the author? This was in the eighties, so there were no podcasts. Mysterious.). (Still, to this day, I have never encountered a real-life person named Eunice. So I still have no idea how to pronounce it. For all I know, it could be Gaelic and sound like “Chelsea” or “Bruce.”) The protagonist couldn’t ski well, and the climax of the book saw her being tricked into going down a black diamond run in a snowstorm. That was all I could dredge up from the depths of my memory. And yet I could not get the book out of my head – for YEARS – and was desperate to know what it was. So I posted my question in the Name That Book group and someone figured it out!!!! The book is called Mystery at Snowshoe Mountain Lodge by Lisa Eisenberg and I keep dithering on whether I need to buy it and read it again. Anyway, it is so amazing to have the answer, finally, to a question that’s been nagging you for years! I am hopeful that my most recent question will find similar success, although my memory of the book series in question is even fuzzier. (A middle grade/young adult series from the 1980s or early 1990s about kids solving mysteries, but maybe there’s a werewolf? Maybe the word “shadows” in the title? It’s really bugging me, but my brain isn’t helping.)
Extremely blurry image from LibraryThing.com

Well, that’s the long and the short it, my dear Internet. I hope you are having a lovely Friday. 

by

Friday Randomosity: Life Lately Edition

A bunch of random little things have been collecting in my brain, so let’s get them out of my head and into some bullets. 

  • Inspired by NGS, I am wearing a scarf today. It’s one of my favorites – and something I “inherited” from my husband’s grandmother, who was stylish until her final day. I don’t know that I am quite pulling it off the way NGS does, but sometimes you have to fake it til you make it.
  • I just spent… well, far too long trying to photograph myself in the scarf without getting my face in there. That leads to some very unappealing angles, so you’ll just have to picture whatever it is you think I look like with a royal blue scarf tied untidily around my neck.
Here it is, on my bed and not on my person.
  • Carla has begun keeping a list of license plate numbers when we drive around. I do not know why, except that I think she finds them interesting? I didn’t know she was doing this until the other day when she asked to read them to me. “Sure,” I said, figuring that she’d copied down interesting personalized plates, like U R L8 or GZUS LRD. No. She read me off a series of letters and numbers. RDP 7791. SST 9494. JTI 0138. You get the idea. Then last night she asked me if she could read them to me again, and – not wanting to express any less enthusiasm than her newfound interest deserves – I said, “Why don’t you read me the ones you’ve written down since last time?” She was amenable to this plan, and read each series of letters and numbers off with gravitas. I am not quite sure how to respond, or how she expects me to respond, so I tried to say things like, “Oh wow, that’s a good one.” or “Nice! You don’t see X very often!” 
  • If it is not clear, I find Carla’s license plate obsession as adorable as I do perplexing. 
  • We are (maybe?) getting the dinner situation under control. It works like this: I make a “real” dinner Tuesdays and Thursdays. Maybe Saturdays and Sundays, too, who knows. But Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, we all kind of fend for ourselves. For me, this means making a big batch of soup on Sunday or Monday and eating it all week. Or a pot of black beans, and then making tacos for myself. My husband asked me to buy him ham and bread, for sandwiches. We’ll see if this works better than me trying to cram a crockpot meal in every other day. 
I may make this enchilada soup next week. It’s such a perfect fall soup.
  • (Things have been different since we have visitors. I have been making more Real Dinners for us to eat together, although our guests seem a little flummoxed by how varied our eating schedule is.)
  • Speaking of food (which I always am), the Guinness beef stew I made this week was SO GOOD. First of all the recipe includes instructions for how to make it in the slow cooker, so I did that. But… those instructions basically say throw all the ingredients together in the slow cook and I did not do that. I seared the meat and cooked the onions/garlic as well, before adding those things to my crockpot. I don’t know if the flavors would be the same without, but maybe I’ll try it next time because I really hate searing meat. It takes forever and my arms, stove, and floor get speckled with hot oil. The recipe calls for carrots and potatoes. I used baby potatoes and I didn’t chop ANY of them (which may have been a mistake, but oh well). My husband also requested parsnips, so I added a couple of those. And since he was getting parsnips, I also added a container of quartered mushrooms, for me. Then I think I panic-poured a cup or two of chicken stock into the crockpot, in addition to the quart of beef stock, because I was afraid I had over-veggied. My only complaint was that it lacked salt: I poured in a big glug of soy sauce toward the end, and then I had to salt and pepper my bowl of stew. But no one else felt it was under-salted, so maybe it was a Me Thing. The leftovers were better than the initial night. This is a keeper.
  • Also, I made a green bean dish to go with tacos one night, for our family member who is pre-diabetic. It was a HUGE hit. Not with me; there is an entire tomato in it. Not Carla; the veggies were cooked, and she is a raw veggie purist. But everyone else loved it. Bonus: it was extremely easy to make. So it will definitely be something I make again.
  • Our guests are staying until next Friday, when their local airport reopens, which is conveniently the day that our next set of guests arrives. (So far, it seems like the hurricane spared their home, which is extremely fortunate. They were so smart to leave when they did.)
  • Carla just walked into the kitchen and said, “WHAT are you doing?” Um, making breakfast? “No, I mean, WHY are you wearing a SCARF?” I can wear a scarf. It’s a perfectly normal accessory. “But it’s so BLUE. And it doesn’t go with the navy.” (I am wearing dark jeans.) Oh, who knew the critical eye would develop so early! 
  • Do you want to see the cute little challah Carla made? She did all the work – rolling out the separate strands, braiding the strands together, figuring out how to stuff it into a six-inch cheesecake pan I have. It was light and delicious and super adorable, even though we clearly used a much-too-small pan for it.
  • Despite the fact that I have lost my list, I have been chipping away at it. I’ve even made some of the phone calls on the list, which I hope you know by now is A Feat. But the problem with phone calls is that sometimes that’s not the end of the task. One call I made was to our bank, which is just… the most frustrating bank in the WHOLE WORLD. And I left a measured (I hope) but irritated message on the guy’s voicemail, and then he called me back at the exact moment I was in another call, so I couldn’t answer. He left no message at all, so I guess I have to call him back. ARGH. 
  • Speaking of phone calls: I had a very perplexing set – yes, set – of phone calls with Dairy Queen. My husband wants an ice cream cake this year – or, at least, that was one of two cake options he offered me and it was the one I didn’t have to make, and you know that cake baking is one of my love languages, so I think this is a good indication of the current stress/busyness level around here. So I asked Siri to call Dairy Queen while I was driving from the grocery story to pick up Carla from an activity. The person who answered was unintelligible, so I asked, “Is this is Dairy Queen on street and street?” and she said, “Nah.” So I hung up and looked up the number for the DQ I wanted (when I was parked), and oh look, it is the same number I just called. So I called back. Same person answered, still unintelligibly. Did Google simply have the number wrong? Had the DQ closed without my knowledge? “I am trying to call Dairy Queen?” I said hopefully. “This is Dairy Queen.” Phew. “Oh good, I would like to order an ice cream cake.” The person asked if I could hold on for a moment. Sure. I sat on hold for 56 seconds, and then the call disconnected. I called back. “I am just trying to order an ice cream cake!” Another brief hold, and then finally I was able to place the order. Then the person said, “What time do you want to pick it up?” I said sometime in the morning? Eight o’clock? “Oh, you can’t do that.” Oh, okay. Nine? Ten? What time do you open? “We don’t open until eleven o’clock.” Okay great, eleven o’clock it is. “You can’t do that.” WHAT TIME SHOULD I COME GET THE CAKE. “Well, we open at eleven but the cake won’t be ready until one.” Great. See you at one. 

  • I rarely go to Target these days because it so unpleasant inside (the latest time was no different; they clearly do not have enough staff to fold/tidy the clothing areas or to work more than one register at a time), but there was additional unpleasantness awaiting me in the parking lot! (Confidential to Nicole: LOOK AWAY.)
Someone left their cart not just in a parking space, not just in a parking space RIGHT NEXT TO a cart return, but also touching my car. No damage except to my sense of humanity’s capacity for good.
  • Did I tell you about the bees? We have a nest of bees in/on our chimney. Currently, so far, the nest seems to be on the outside of the chimney, but I can hear them buzzing while I am inside, which is Very Worrisome. Also, they are technically yellowjackets. And also also I want them to GO AWAY.
  • I have been in sort of a fiction lull lately. I am in the middle of a book, but I’m not loving it. I’m not disliking it, either, but it doesn’t pull me. I have been reading some non-fiction lately though. Most recently, I’ve been enjoying The Family Firm by Emily Oster. (Thanks to Lisa for mentioning it in my post about extracurriculars!) Oster just seems so soothing and balanced and her advice seems to great. The book is about making decisions for your family (when to give your kid a cell phone? is this extracurricular worth pursuing? etc.) the way a company would make business decisions, and I really like it. It makes me want to go back ten years and have some of these conversations with my husband BEFORE we had Carla. But I guess sometimes you plan ahead and sometimes you just muddle through, and we’ve really been doing a lot of muddling in the realm of parenting choices. Anyway, I am finding it really eye-opening and I hope I can remember to apply some of her advice to future major decisions. 
Every surface of my bedroom features similar piles of books.

  • Fall is upon us, and the trees around here are very very slowly beginning to don their autumn finery. We’ve had a ton of rain (though no hurricanes, for which I am thankful) but today we have sunshine, and I think we’re supposed to have sun all weekend. I hope we can spend some of it outside! Carla would be happy just sticking around our neighborhood; one of the neighbors has a new puppy! 

  • Related: OCTOBER BEGINS TOMORROW!
  • Have you gotten your flu shot yet? I haven’t, but I want to. Carla has a doctor’s appointment today and I’m going to see if they can sneak a flu shot in as well. She will not be pleased, but it sounds like we’re in for a nasty flu season and I want our family to be as protected as possible.

That’s all I’ve got today, Internet. I need to go make yet another phone call. I hope you and your loved ones are safe and dry, and that you have a happy weekend ahead of you.