silly things

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Plunging Into Spring Slash Summer Shemozzle; Dinners This Week; Are We Still Doing Easter Baskets

Yesterday, I forced my cranky self to go for a walk in the spring air with my husband. As we were chatting, I mentioned that I felt like my head was SWIRLING with all the to-dos I have ahead of me, and he sagely suggested that I write them down. Well. Writing them down helps, but it does not STOP the swirling.

What also helps is to squawk and flap at you. I know you are either going through something similar, or you know exactly what it feels like, or you have kind and/or wise and/or distracting words.

Because I have a fondness for alliteration, especially in post titles, I was looking for a synonym for “chaos / pandemonium / overwhelm” that began with an S, and I came across the word “shemozzle.” The word itself is a little sillier than how I feel; there’s something about the “ozzle” that makes me want to giggle. Say “shemozzle” out loud, it’s delightful. That very silliness is what makes it perfect. I may feel on the knife’s edge of a panic attack, but I’m panicking about silly inconsequential stuff when the world at large is full of so many massive, significant events, and “shemozzle” helps me remember that.

The first and most uncomfortable shemozzle / source of shemozzle / I have no real idea how to use this word: SUMMER.

I have finally gotten my ass into gear and started thinking about summer camp, and summer feels really, really close, and I have next to zero things planned, and the whole thing stresses me right out. Also, I spent – no exaggeration – SIX HOURS this weekend trying to research camps and fit them into the calendar and talk through them with Carla. Which is all to say that I acknowledge the many privileges and a blessings of a life in which a) I have six hours to devote to summer camp research and b) the wealth of options available to me is so extensive and c) summer camp is neither a necessity nor a hardship.

Summer camp, of course, is all tangled up in summer travel plans. (Shemozzle Two.) My husband and I are apparently inhabiting one of those logic puzzles: Suzanne wants to be in X place for Y days, her husband wants to be in X place for Z days, their daughter needs to be picked up from camp on Day Z, and they have to cross a river in a leaky boat with a hungry shark. How can Suzanne be two places at once without losing a limb?

Plus, summer has a bunch of Unknown Factors that could influence things like Which Camp Is Best and Will Our Travel Plans Work for People Besides Us, and I don’t know when the Factors will become Known and airline tickets continue to climb and also Carla’s birthday is in there somewhere and she’s been through nearly a school year’s worth of bar and bat mitzvahs that have conveyed the idea that Thirteen Is a Seriously Important Birthday but I’m not sure what besides “getting a phone” (no) or “elaborate party and religious ceremony” (also no) meets her expectations of what a Seriously Important Birthday might involve. [Edited to add: NOTE OF CLARITY – I am not opposed to phones for people’s children. A phone is not right for my particular child at this particular time, but there are many excellent and valid reasons for kids to have phones at age thirteen or even younger.]

Listen, I am well accustomed to the turmoil of Pell-Mell May, but it is still March, if only for another day, and I AM NOT READY FOR THIS LEVEL OF SHEMOZZLE.

Shall we turn to another, more pressing issue? Which is that this is a holiday week, and I am hosting one of the week’s holidays and yet I somehow still have to also feed my family on the non-holiday days.

Dinners for the Week of March 30-April 5

  • Fire Fry: My husband requested this, and if someone else is going to suggest a meal, I’m going to make it. Doesn’t hurt that fire fry is delicious.
  • Ground Beef Tacos: It’s been a minute since we’ve had tacos around here, and I’m in the mood for a Taco Tuesday.
  • Sesame Ginger Stir Fry: I think I’m feeling brave enough to try making tofu again, and this recipe sounds like the perfect incentive to attempt it.

We’ve been invited to join family friends for a Passover Seder, so that’s another night I don’t have to think about. And then I’m hosting Easter dinner. I think I’ll make a pork loin with a warm farro and veggie salad on the side. My husband has requested a cake for dessert, and has narrowed down his cake desires to a coconut cake or a carrot cake. I have never made either, and I’m always up for a cake challenge. Do you have a preference? And, if so, do you have a favorite recipe for either?

Speaking of Easter… my kid is twelve… do I still need to do the whole Easter bunny/Easter basket thing? Just the idea of thinking about it is making me weary. Are we still hiding plastic eggs all over the house? Do we need to dye eggs? Surely we should have at least a small Easter basket, right? My husband has always insisted that Easter is not a gift-giving holiday, and yet… I’ve always striven to fill my kid’s Easter basket with as many non-candy items as I can, while still trying to make it fun and exciting.

I wonder if I could get away with filling up an Easter basket with practical things, like these cute jeans Carla wants, or a new skort, or a duffel bag. I bet she would love a variety pack of spring-ish earrings. She’s been more interested in cooking for herself lately, and I’ve been stressing about SPORTS SNACKS, so perhaps a cookbook would be both fun and useful? Books are always a good gift compromise – if only Rosanne Perry’s newest novel had already come out! Carla loved attending Jeopardy! as an audience member over spring break; maybe she would enjoy a book of Jeopardy! games, or a book of trivia, or maybe even this inside peek at the show? Of course, I am also eyeing fun and silly things for Carla’s Easter basket, like these hand-holding socks or these fingernail markers or a stuffed ostrich. My child does NOT need any more stuffed animals, but the ostrich is adorable… and you know what is MORE ADORABLE is this stuffed Pallas cat OMG I want it so much. Carla also loves the latest fidget toys – she was eyeballing this squishy stick of butter at a friend’s house. Oh my goodness, she would get such a kick out of this tic-tac-toe wall hanging. Okay, now I am getting carried away. Let’s save it for her birthday, Suzanne.

I suppose I can at the very least buy some candy the next time I go to the grocery store. And maybe I will consider buying a bag of bunny farts. Carla does love both cotton candy and fart jokes, so it seems like a guaranteed win.

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Friday Photo Array

I’m plum out of ideas for blog posts lately. So let’s look through the photos on my phone and see if we can find anything remotely interesting.

(Why yes, I do realize it’s Saturday now. Shhhh. I’m in a very Late To Everything phase right now and it has apparently seeped over into blogging as well. As Carla kindly but firmly told me yesterday, as I was apologizing for dropping her off to an event more than 15 minutes late, I really need to “get it together.”)

This was Proof that I went for a walk on October 1. It has been so warm lately, and I’m so glad I loaded up on athletic shorts this summer. These are my favorite: they are so comfortable, and I like how they have the tight shorts with a pocket for my phone, but the floaty top layer so I don’t feel like I’m wearing a bathing suit. Strangely, though, I also really love these biker shorts. They are long enough that my thighs don’t chafe and they also have a pocket for my phone and they are very comfy. Anyway, I have been taking a page from Engie’s book and walking without listening to anything. I do still take my phone, though, and end up taking lots of pictures of the things I pass. I love these grasses; they are so fancy. Probably there’s some evolutionary/reproductive reason for their fanciness, but I enjoy them purely for the aesthetics.

I cannot resist photographing a pile of pumpkins. They are so pleasing! This particular pile was at the farmer’s market my family and I visited when my out-of-town friend was staying with us. Why don’t we ever go to the farmer’s market on our own? It was super charming and there were so many dogs. The only thing I bought was a bunch of icicle lettuce. It was so beautiful I couldn’t resist it.

Ah yes. I tried to take an artsy photo of the chicken soup I made as a post-surgery comfort offering. I do not like chicken noodle soup, and I did not enjoy making it as it involved dealing with bone-in, skin-on chicken. Ew. But the recipient seemed pleased, which is the important thing.

Cat in a box.

Carla loves to take random photographs with my phone. Someday I should do an entire post of the photos Carla takes. I’m guessing it will be an array of Leo shots, snaps of toys she wanted me to buy that I said “put that on your Christmas / birthday list,” and pictures of things she wants my mother to paint. This sky photo is one of the latter; she doesn’t 100% understand what makes a photograph paintable yet. But the cloud pattern was quite delicate and lovely, I’ll give her that.

This is one of the planters in my backyard. I quite like how it turned out and I took a picture of it so I can remember which plants to buy next year. I packed the planters so full of flowers and plants, and so many of them got swallowed up by the more showy plants. So next year I am sticking with Coleus, whatever this vine-y plant is, and the white and pink flowers. (Are they impatiens? I should probably figure out what they are.) The petunias just don’t do well. Those little blue flowers on the left weren’t a good fix next to the more voluminous foliage. I got some wonderful balloon flowers for some of the other planters, and they were too small to show up. Maybe I need to try to propagate some to keep inside my house; I think they are shade-loving flowers. I like this combo, and it seemed to thrive in both shade and sun.

Allison and I had a few exchanges about pork chops and how small the ones we can buy are compared to the ones the recipe wants us to cook. Like, no way is this pork chop an inch thick. (Confidential to Allison: I will never eat another pork chop without giggling like a twelve-year-old boy. Thank you for this gift.)

This cartoon showed up in my Instagram feed the day after I’d been awakened something like three times by the cat, and then a fourth time by my child who had similarly been awakened by the cat and was bringing him to me to complain that she couldn’t go back to sleep.

Leo’s main personality trait is that he is curious about everything. Obviously, he had to examine all the groceries as I unloaded them. (He is NOT ALLOWED on the counter.) (He does not recognize any of my arbitrary and stupid rules. He is The Cat and this is his house and there is no place he will not go.)

Another in-car Carla photograph. It took me a minute to understand why she took this picture. Ah yes. The temperature. She is very, very deep into Gen Alpha slang these days. At an appointment recently, her doctor said something about “16 or 17” and Carla looked at me and whispered “six seven” and of course her doctor overheard so I had to explain what “six seven” means and, since it doesn’t mean anything, and since neither the doctor nor I listen to Skrilla or do Tik Tok, the doctor only got more and more confused and I felt like an idiot.

I made sandwiches for Carla’s sports team and this was the photo I took when I ran out of bread and needed to text my friend to bring me another loaf. Am not so good with the maths.

Carla and my husband and I went for a walk and Carla wanted to pose on this bench near the pond.

Leo is working on his strength training.

My dad taught me how to change the oil in my car this week! It’s something he’s been trying to teach me for decades, but I’ve only recently understood how useful a skill it would be to have… and how nice of a bonding experience with my dad it would be. It was much simpler a process than I anticipated. I also made a HUGE mess the first time I released the drain plug, and dropped the drain plug in that tub of oil. Fortunately, my dad had a cool magnetic tool that I could use to fish the plug out. I feel very Let Me Change All the Oil now, while the information is fresh in my mind. Of course, since it’s not a weekly project, I will probably have forgotten everything by the time I need to do it again. (Need me to change your oil?)

One of the hiking trails I frequent with a friend is in full fall bloom. The profusion of flowers is spectacular and we stopped frequently to take pictures and look up the names of the blossoms.

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Cat Report, Sports Snacks, Dinners This Week

I am assuming that you want an update on the cat, who, when last we spoke, was at the vet getting neutered. 

He is fine. A little depressed, in my estimation, and possibly a little bit embarrassed and/or miffed by the state of his testicles, but fine. Also, if you’d rather not read several tedious paragraphs about my cat’s post-surgical experience, I urge you to skip right on down to the list of dinners below.

I am FINE.

The recovery period after the neutering procedure is supposedly two weeks. The instruction sheet the vet sent home with me says that under no circumstances are we allowed to remove the cone they sent home with us. (The vet doesn’t call it a cone; they call it an Elizabethan collar, and it cost $20, by the way. For $20, I would think that it wouldn’t rotate so that the Velcro/opaque segment of the cone is directly in front of his sight line, but apparently I’m wrong.) With the cone on, the cat cannot eat well or drink water easily, he cannot clean himself, he keeps running into things, his balance is off so he can’t successful jump onto something even as short as a step, he cannot rest his head comfortably, his neck is constantly itchy, and he adopts various mournful positions that make him look very pitiful indeed. His fur is greasy and he lies around a lot more than is typical. I do not see how this is sustainable for two weeks. 

So: We have been removing the cone as frequently as possible and simply supervising the cat so he doesn’t lick anything. He does wear the cone – excuse me, Elizabethan collar – at night, when he sleeps in a bathroom we’ve converted into a temporary cat cave. 

Image from OldWorldPetPortraits.com where you can buy a print of this fabulous painting or many other works of pet-themed art, and at a 20% discount with email signup.

The vet and the internet insisted that I buy special litter for him, post-surgery. It’s pellets made up of newspaper and it’s probably much better in many ways than the litter we’ve been using since we got him, but he refuses to use it. He has taken to meowing at us when he has to go to the bathroom, and one of us has to escort him to his regular litter box. (The litter box is in a part of the basement we don’t want him in when he’s not in a cone; too many niches for him to hide in and commence furtive licking.) 

One of the other admonitions in the vet’s instructions is to keep him calm. For two weeks. He’s actually been pretty good, so far. We have a shoe box he likes to play in, and he’s been batting springs and fuzzy worms around inside the box, and that seems to occupy him pretty well without requiring a ton of athletic movement. Carla made him a special water toy that we learned about online but he wasn’t super into it. Maybe we’ll have to try it again. He’s also spending a lot of time in the sunroom or at the window in my office, monitoring the bug and squirrel activity outside.

Okay, okay. Here is a photo of him in his Elizabethan collar. Please don’t tell him I shared this with the entire internet. 

Revisiting all his life choices, trying to figure out which one led him here.

Okay! Enough about the cat! Let’s discuss my other favorite topic: FOOD.

Now. It is September, and school is back in session, and I need to get back into the dinner planning groove. Let’s see: we’re visiting friends for dinner tonight. Carla is trying a new sport this fall, and she has games every week. That means I need at least one meal each week that produces enough leftovers for us to eat after her game. We’ve been pretty consistently doing at least one night of Search the House for Your Own Meal, and one night of takeout. So that leaves me with three meals to make. 

Oh – that reminds me: I keep trying to figure out snacks I can send to school with Carla that she can eat before sports practice or before a game. The snacks can’t have nuts, and I would prefer that they have some nourishment in them, rather than just calories. I’m not opposed to “just calories,” and in fact have been sending her with Cheez-Its and cheese ballsand granola bites and fruit snacks because she will eat those things… but I would love ideas for things that have other benefits besides calories. I’m not sure those things exist, though, especially nut-free things that do not require refrigeration. I am happy to BAKE things, as well. And, even though my “she will eat this” expectations are low for most new/nourishing foods, I am willing to TRY things, even if Carla ends up refusing to eat them. If you have any ideas, let me have ’em. 

Okay, back to the dinners. 

Dinners for the Week of September 1-7

  • Greek Salad with Grilled Chicken: My parents return to our part of the country this week, and I want to have them over for dinner and to meet the kitten. Greek salad has kind of become my go-to for guests – it’s so easy to prep in advance, and it’s so tasty. 
  • Beef Birria: You know what else I have in the freezer? Beef birria! And we have enough for at least two meals. I plan to make the tacos in the oven (as in this recipe) rather than on the stove. And then maybe I’ll turn the ingredients into enchiladas (a la these chicken enchiladas) the second night.

What are you eating this first week in September?