strong feelings

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Pandemic Randomosity: Eating/Feeeeeeeeelings/Eating Feelings Edition

My brain is doing that thing where it won’t settle on one thing for more than about 6 seconds before it leaps, hiccuping-jack-rabbit style to the next topic. So let’s have some randomosity, shall we?

  • I was supposed to post a Dinners This Week post yesterday and I DIDN’T because arbitrary blog-scheduling needs don’t rule my life. And also because I have nothing new on my meal plan for the week. Not that a) anyone cares or b) anyone but me would even notice that I am once again scheduling us for tacos and chicken fajitas.
  • We are, however, having ribs this weekend. I bought a three-pack of racks – a three-rack-pack, a rack three-pack – at Costco, and, if I could only organize my freezer, I plan to freeze two racks and make/serve one as a Labor Day treat this coming weekend. Do I have a recipe for this weekend’s ribs? Not yet.
  • Speaking of ribs, have I sung the praises of Pig of the Month yet? If not, I am severely in the wrong. I ordered a rack a billion years ago (May?) and they were heavenly. I got the sriracha BBQ flavor (they have a bunch of options) and the ribs were SO GOOD. They came in a package with dry ice and included re-heating instructions and they were everything I want ribs to be. Tender, not fatty. Substantial and meaty. Great sauce. Easy to re-heat. Free shipping. Plus, they cost about the same for what you’d pay at a restaurant. I promptly ordered some for my father for Father’s Day, and have another rack coming our way for a September surprise and ordered ANOTHER three-pack for my mother-in-law’s birthday present. They are so good. I don’t know why I didn’t order some to eat on Labor Day, instead of making my own like CHUMP, but here we are.
  • Labor Day usually marks our neighborhood block party. We got the typical block party flyer over the weekend with a big CANCELLED on it. But also, the fine print read, maybe some enterprising neighbors will be serving treats and booze beverages, to be enjoyed SAFELY, just in case you want to check it out. My main question is: Does anyone really think this can be managed safely? Because I sure as hell don’t. AND my neighbors are all, as far as I can tell after more than a decade of living here, super nice and consicientious and respectful of other people. But anytime you mix alcohol beverages and a bunch of people who either a) have been cooped up with their college-age children for five months or b) are college-age children once again living at home with their parents, probably involuntarily, I think safety is going to go right out the window in favor of getting lit having fun.
  • Because our house is down at the boring end of the block, I have been toying with the idea of making cupcakes and putting them, bake-sale-style, in individual containers, just so we can take part in the block party. I could put them on a card table at the end of our driveway and wave at people from my front porch. We’ll see. Carla, of course, would be the rate-limiting factor because I don’t think she’d be able to keep herself from visiting the neighbors’ dogs. So we will probably watch a movie inside our house, in the dark, so it doesn’t look like we are avoiding our neighbors.
  • School starts soon and I am having ALL the feelings. Any feeling you can imagine, I am having it in relation to school starting. Terror? Check. Guilt? Yes. Delight? Absolutely. Relief? In spades. Fatigue? All the time. Sad that I won’t be with Carla as often? Shocked by how sad I am. Excitement about all the alone time I will suddenly have? Yeppers. Certainty about how I will fill all those hours? Sure thing. Anxiety about whether Carla will be sad/stressed/anxious/able to wear a mask all day/able to interact normally with other humans? Of course. Nerves about potentially seeing other parents? Totes. Irritation that I will have to wear a Real Bra and Hard Pants in the car twice a day? You bet. Concern about whether I’m making the right choice in sending her to school? UH HUH. Pre-cranky at the parents who don’t think this is A Big Deal? Yessir. Deep, soul-shaking gratitude for the teachers and administrative staff at Carla’s school? Oh, yeah. Resignation about the eventual and possibly quick return to remote learning? Yup. Hunger for foods that will fill the aching hole all these warring emotions have eaten in my heart? Obviously.
  • Is hunger an emotion? Hmmm. These are the real, important questions we should be asking.
  • I had a pre-school meeting with Carla’s teacher on Monday. She is pretty much the loveliest person in the universe. She was so kind and attentive and reassuring. I feel deep, all-encompassing gratitude for her — and for the school that Carla attends. The kids don’t need to bring anything to school besides masks and a water bottle this year. Not even a backpack. (My backpack angst was completely unfounded.) I am glad they have a plan and they have everything Carla needs at school, but I am also sad that they won’t have even these completely frivolous trappings of normalcy. The teacher wanted to be clear that the first few weeks of school would really be focused on safety and community, and that academics might take a backseat for awhile. The kids have been out of school for so long, and their sense of normalcy is by now so warped, and their ability to interact with their peers has been so stunted/different, and the school itself has been so drastically reconfigured and adapted to our current circumstances, they will all need a – probably lengthy – period of adjustment. I didn’t cry during our conversation, but that is only because I was holding back my tears by gripping my chair arms so hard it left indentations in my wrists.
  • Let’s immediately move on to less emotionally roller-coastering topics. You know my go-to topic is food. Or shopping for food.
  • There should be a long-German-noun type word to describe the bone-deep exhaustion one feels after doing the grocery shopping during a pandemic. Saturday, I went to both the grocery store AND Costco, which was a mistake on all levels. But it had been two weeks, and we had eaten the very last morsel of vegetable matter for dinner Friday night (zucchini). We had two grape tomatoes to our name, procured earlier this week from the other store that does curbside pickup. We had half a plum leftover from Carla’s lunch. Surprisingly, we also had two heads of iceberg lettuce, because apparently I overbought at some point. (Yes, I recognize that iceberg lettuce technically counts as “vegetable matter” so we had not technically consumed ALL of it. But I put iceberg lettuce and zucchini in two very different food categories.)
  • When I was at the grocery store, I tried valiantly to buy only enough food for one week. Despite having done every-other-week shopping since March, I have never gotten very good at buying the correct amount of produce. Last week was the worst. I had to throw away an entire head of perfectly good broccoli, two zucchinis, and half a bag of sugar snap peas. I mean, they were no longer perfectly good; the broccoli was moldy and the zucchini had developed deep, soft pockmarks, and the ends of most of the snap peas were brown and liquified. Gross. It made me really sad and frustrated. Money and food, right in the garbage. I think what has happened is that I plan the meals two weeks in advance, and then, by the time I get to the day on which I need to eat the planned meal, I (or my husband, or Carla) no longer want to eat it. I am feeling more comfortable with going to the grocery store during a pandemic, and I feel, overall, pretty good about our grocery store’s safety practices. And the people who also shop at my grocery store seem to be pretty good about wearing masks and keeping their distance. (Well, they are not GREAT at the latter, but what can you do.) So I think I am ready to resume once-per-week shopping. And I can always go back to every-other-week if I feel less comfortable, or if our county’s infection rate begins to rise again.
  • This is all to say that I TRIED to shop for just a week’s worth of food. It was hard; I have now developed a pretty serious feast-or-famine perspective on shopping, so it was really hard to not buy zucchini for the first time all summer, even though I have planned nothing with zucchini as an ingredient for this week’s meals. I lingered over the grapes for awhile, even though I already had peaches AND plums AND apples AND blueberries in my cart. And I… well, I did buy another head of iceberg, just in case the two (2) icebergs we have at home go bad before I can use them. And THEN pork was on sale, in many forms. My husband has recently decided he is no longer a fan of chicken. I know Very Well what that’s like, so I am cutting back on meals that feature chicken. But since we are meat eaters in this household, I need to buy SOME sort of meat to fill in for all the chicken we used to eat. Instead of buying enough for what we are going to eat this week, I bought… more. Well. Pork freezes very well and we will eat it. It was a relief to see the final bill, which was much less than what I have been spending of a typical shopping trip. It was a bit more than half, though, but we shall blame that on the pork sale.
  • A friend and I are doing a Burpee Challenge together. That makes it sound like my friend had a choice; what really happened is that I told her, “I’m doing this, please please please do it with me” and then just expected her to agree. We completed an Ab Challenge together earlier this summer (which took me two tries, because I suffered from excruciating back pain after Week 1 of the first try and had to take a three-week hiatus), and when I came across a PopSugar article about someone who did 50 burpees for 30 days, I knew that was the next thing to try. Sometimes I like to torture myself with physical challenges I am in no way fit enough to complete, just to see how much pain I can inflict on myself. Or endure. I don’t know. Let’s not delve too deeply into the psychology of the thing. I don’t know if my friend is, in fact, doing 50 burpees a day or if she is just going about her normal life, enjoying walking around without searing shoulder and wrist pain, but even the prospect that she might be doing 50 burpees a day is enough to keep me accountable. Well, except that I have already skipped a day. Whatever. I will make it up on the other end.
  • It is safe to say that my forties are LOOMING in front of me and I am dealing with it by being Very Concerned about my physical fitness level. (Not good.) I am achey ALL the time. Just sitting here typing, I have a headache (from neck/shoulder tension), my hand hurts (too much Toy Blast on my phone), my wrists ache (burpees), and my left knee aches (walking). I know that aches and pains are associated with age, but… this can’t just be How It Is from now on, can it? CAN IT? (If the answer is yes, then… can it. I don’t need the truth, I need HOPE.)
  • Speaking of forties: My husband is turning 40 in a few weeks and I want to do something special for him. Any ideas????? Based on knowing nothing about my husband aside from the fact he is a doctor and can apparently put up with my shenanigans for at least 19 years???? He wants a new desk for his home office, so we will get that for him – but it’s more than I can afford myself, so it doesn’t really feel like it’s coming from me. But he is notoriously difficult to buy presents for and I am also a TERRIBLE gift giver, so I am FLOUNDERING. He doesn’t want any sort of party and we aren’t going to restaurants and as much as I’d love to have an actual date with him, we have no family in the area and are not ready to try having a babysitter come into our home. I feel like I can’t just buy him another puzzle for his FORTIETH BIRTHDAY. Right? HELP?
  • STILL speaking of forties, I think I am finally nearing the point at which I want to try coloring my hair at home. My hair is now the color Streaked With Grey and I am not loving it. Instagram keeps serving me ads for Madison Reed, and a friend of mine just used that very company to color her own hair and it looks GREAT, so I am edging closer and closer to the DIY dye cliff.
  • Here is a satisfying follow-up to my satisfying shoe project: I had called my local DSW last week, to see if they did, in fact, accept donations. The very lovely woman I spoke to said that I could donate one pair of shoes per week for 50 (I think???) points (for what????) and was very confused when I asked if I could donate multiple shoes, and then, as a follow up, if I didn’t actually care about the points, could I then donate multiple pairs of shoes? She had warmed to me considerably by then, and told me that sure, I could donate a big bag of shoes! And yes, the donation center was right inside the door. So on Saturday, I drove to DSW, hauled my bag of shoes out of my car, pulled on my mask, and marched inside. The donation box WAS right inside the door. I was a little leery because the other donations were single shoe boxes with nearly-perfect-condition shoes in them. My shoes are in good condition, but they have been WORN. Well. I did not let it deter me. I put my giant bag of eight pairs of shoes into the donation bin and LEFT.

Should we end on that very random but surprisingly positive note? Yes, I think we shall.

What’s going on with you, Internet?

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Cake Plans and Why I Am (Currently) Mad at the Bubble Guppies

It is hard to believe that, four years ago today, I was officially 42 weeks pregnant with Carla… 14 days past my due date… and yet I wouldn’t meet her for another two days.

My Dealing with Birthday Feelings therapy is, apparently, making an elaborate homemade birthday cake for my child. I don’t know how, exactly, panicking over measurements whilst being covered in flour is therapeutic, but it is my thing.

Carla has requested a rainbow cake this year. Which is an improvement over what she asked for previous to settling on rainbow cake, which was a purple cake with black frosting. I am not opposed to that combination, but no way am I cleaning black frosting out of a fancy birthday dress. I doubt there is enough OxiClean in all the lands for that task.

My model rainbow cake looks like this:

I am going to follow The Little Kitchen’s strategic plans to the tee. But I am going to kick the crazy up a notch by not using boxed cake mix and instead making my own cake, using the recipe I used last year: Very Vanilla Cupcakes from Sally’s Baking Addiction

Since the cake has many layers (SIX), and since I have proved to be terrible at making straight cuts to the top of a cake, I got myself a little helper. It is a Wilton cake leveler, and I bought it at JoAnn Fabric for $7.99, although NOW I see that I could have bought it (as an add-on item) from Amazon for $4.98. Ooh! I also see it is now on sale at JoAnn Fabric for $5.59. I have not used it, so I have no idea if it will work or if it is destined to become one of those things that languishes at the back of the bottommost cupboard, only to be glared at disdainfully the three times a year you spot it behind the food processor. I will report back.

Speaking of disdainful glares, we have now come to the Bubble Guppies portion of this post.

Listen, I have a lot of problems with the Bubble Guppies as it is. But my current problem is rainbow-related.

Bubble Guppies Venn

I don’t know why this image is so huge, nor why the circles themselves are so THICK, but we do the best we can with the tools available.

My daughter has been singing a little song regularly for the past few months. It’s very catchy, so you can imagine that sometimes I awaken at half past three in the morning with it running in maniacal loops through my brain. It basically goes, “Red orange yellow green purple blue white! Something something something just right!”

That can’t be right, I thought. So I kept correcting her. “It’s not red orange yellow green purple blue white,” I would say, secure in my knowledge that of the few things I can truly accept as fact in the world, Roy G. Biv is one of them. “It’s probably red orange yellow green blue purple white.” Even though I don’t know why they’d tack the white on there, I guess I could ALLOW for it, because of rhythm. And yes, “blue purple” has a different rhythm than “purple blue,” but so what? Children’s songs have made more with less.

But Carla would become quite adamant. She would screw up her face and stomp her foot if she was in foot stomping position, and she would say, “NO Mommy, it IS red orange yellow green purple blue white!”

And I would calmly explain to her about Roy G. Biv and the rainbow and blah blah she’s not yet four so you may already know how well those conversations went.

We did end up seeking out the song on YouTube. And my dear Carla was finally vindicated! The song DOES say “purple blue white” and so now I am furious with the Bubble Guppies for passing on misinformation in such an ear-wormy way. WHY, Bubble Guppies? WHY? (Also, “orange like an orange”? You couldn’t think of ANYTHING ELSE that’s orange? Um, pumpkins? Tangerines? Velveeta?)

I would like to publically acknowledge that the song is not about rainbows per se. But it has insinuated itself into Carla’s brain as Fact. Color Order Fact. So she looked at the picture of the rainbow cake and told me that it was in the wrong order. And that her cake needed to go purple blue, NOT blue purple.

I don’t know if I will be able to misorder the layers of the cake. It will look so horribly WRONG, you know? (Although it will look horribly wrong to Carla if I do it the Roy G. Biv way…) And, more importantly, it will BE wrong. Plus, I don’t want her to go through life thinking that this is the way the rainbow goes! I can envision her failing all sorts of rainbow-related tests in future years, and her teachers shaking their heads and recommending rainbow remediation and our dreams of an Ivy League education disappearing into a bank of cumulous clouds.

We watched a YouTube video of Bill Nye, explaining rainbows. We looked at an actual rainbow. We discussed how mommy is a bit older than Carla and knows a few more things.

Nope. Bubble Guppies are apparently the Final Word on color order.

Basketballs are also orange, BUBBLE GUPPIES.