tea drinker

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Five for Friday

This has been my kid’s second five-day school week since the beginning of 2026, which seems wrong in all sorts of ways. It has also had the effect of feeling incredibly long. Don’t worry – we don’t have another five-day school week until March.

Five random things on my mind today.

Another Mystery

I have a tea subscription that supposedly arrived Wednesday. I got the confirmation email, complete with a photo of the box in my mailbox. The confirmation email, strangely, said “Your package was left near the front door or porch.” even though my mailbox is near the street and not near my front door. Whatever, the driver must have checked the wrong box, the photo clearly shows it in my mailbox.


I did not check my email or the mail on Wednesday, which feels like a crucial point. But yesterday, when I finally read the confirmation email, I went to the mailbox and retrieved a whole pile of magazines and letters and bills and junk mail. But no box. Neither was the box on our front porch, nor was it near the backdoor. I interrogated my family members, but neither of them had retrieved a box. I looked in the cupboard where I normally keep my tea; nothing. WHERE IS MY TEA? My theory is that the mailman opened the box to put in Thursday’s mail, was unable to fit it securely around the box, and removed the box temporarily to put the rest of the mail in. Then he forgot about the box and drove away with it. I’m hoping he returns the box today, but I suppose we’ll see.

Palm Update

I have been babying my palm trees (which did not adjust well to moving indoors this winter) and they both have some new growth. One of them is still struggling – some of the new growth has already turned brown, and it’s not putting out as many new shoots as the other. But the other one seems almost happy? It would possibly be more happy if the cat didn’t so thoroughly enjoy nibbling on its leaves. I really hope I can keep them alive until it warms up enough for them to move back into the sunroom. They liked it much better out there.

Everything Falls Apart

When it snows, it dumps, right? Well, first the freezer in our garage refrigerator died, taking along with it a ton of food.

Then my oven started acting up, which is something it does periodically, and about which I have complained extensively before. (It doesn’t seem to want to heat to the correct temperature. However, an oven repair guy came out to check it – along with the other, more expensive oven, which somehow has the same problem – and after three hours and $300 told me both ovens are just fine and perhaps it is user error.) I made these cookies (which are just as delicious in February as they are in November) on Wednesday and the oven refused to heat to 350 degrees. It just got stuck at 340. But it was still in preheating mode. I am assuming, with no actual knowledge whatsoever, that the preheating mode injects extra heat into the oven, and that’s why my cookies got quite crisp around the edges before they were supposed to be done. (They were still scrumptious.) I wrote this off to me not allowing the oven enough time to come up to temperature. Then, later that night, I preheated the oven to 400 for dinner, left it alone… and completely forgot about it because the “I’m done preheating” beep never happened. An hour later, I remembered that I hadn’t put anything into the oven, and hurried into the kitchen to find that the oven was still preheating and still at 395. Okay, fine. I will turn it off and try again. Then it got stuck at 370 until I finally gave up and used the air fryer. This morning, however, I set it to 350 to reheat a breakfast sandwich, and it worked exactly as it was supposed to. Either it was having an off day on Wednesday and is back to full strength, or it only heats to 350.

After I dropped off Carla, I went into the basement to walk on the treadmill for awhile. But when I powered it on, it said it was paused. And no amount of pressing the pause button, the stop / start button, powering it off and back on, or unplugging it and plugging it back in made the pause screen go away. Obviously, none of these things is dire. We are fortunate in that we have both a second freezer and a second oven, which allows us to meet our freezing and baking needs. The garage fridge is pretty old – we bought it in 2012. And the oven is probably 10 to 15 years old (and seemed to have never once been cleaned before we moved in, so who knows what kind of maintenance it had). The treadmill is even older. My in-laws bought it when they lived in Europe back in the early aughts. They brought it back to the States with them in 2005ish, and then gave it to us in the early 2010s. It has served long and hard.

To recap, these losses are not dire and were going to happen sometime anyway. But I hadn’t anticipated that they would happen so close together. As we use all three of these appliances daily, we will be replacing them. Good times.

Avocados

I am not particularly interested in the Super Bowl this year, but my husband is excited about making a seven layer dip. I do not care for seven layer dip, but I will make the guacamole and eat plenty of that. Our grocery store had a nice sale on avocados – $1 apiece – so I bought a few. And then I went to Trader Joe’s and they had ENORMOUS avocados for $1.49 apiece. I had to buy two, just to see if they are as good as the normal little guys. I will try to remember to report back.

Cat Curiosity

My cat continues to be the best cat. He exemplifies the whole “cats are curious” personality type, and is constantly investigating everything. The exterminator came the other day to check our mouse bait and he said, of Lenny, “He’s a nosy little guy, isn’t he?” Yes. Lenny has to be where the action is, and he needs to be apprised of anyone entering the house and insists on doing a thorough inspection of their shoes and any bags they might bring.

He is, of course, wildly curious about Outside. Any time a door opens, our security system chimes, and that’s the cue for Lenny to beeline to the door and try to sneak out. We usually keep the laundry room door closed, so that it acts as a sort of airlock between the kitchen and the garage. He knows that we often disappear when we go into the laundry room, and that we appear through that door at the end of the day. As soon as the door chimes, he takes up a spot near the door – usually on the floor just inside the kitchen, but sometimes on the counter right next to the laundry room door. Then he greets us with a deep stretch and some little chirpy meows.

This week, he’s taken to hiding in the laundry room while we’re in there putting our shoes and coats on. He is a very good hider. So good, in fact, that one day he was unable to extricate himself from his hiding place. Can you find him? Slide the photo to the left to reveal his location.

That’s all I have for today. It’s snowing here, once again. I hope you are warm and cozy and that you have a restful weekend.

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Friday Randomosity: Snow Day Shopping and Request for Recommendations Edition

Due to a series of events, some planned and others not, last weekend was a five-day weekend, followed by one day of school, and now we have begun a three-day weekend. Keep in mind that our two-week winter break ended a mere two weeks ago.

I adore my child. And yet. This is not ideal. 

  • Do you have a planner you love? I think I might need to become A Person Who Uses A Planner, and I don’t really know where to start. I have looked through planners on recent trips to Barnes & Noble, Target, and Joann Fabric. There is no dearth of options, which is probably what’s tripping me up. All I have been able to settle on is that I don’t want a bullet journal. I have a feeling the people in our blogging community have Strong Planner Feelings, though, so I am hoping you will direct me to The One True Planner.
  • Speaking of planning, I am floundering when it comes to finding a workable structure to my days and I keep wanting to post about it (and beg you for advice) but I worry it is too boring a topic? 
  • I can now add “dismantling a doorbell” to my list of skills I never thought I’d need. A month or so ago, our doorbell started making a weird buzzing noise. It did this intermittently for a day or two and then stopped. But then it started again on Monday! And continued buzzing every ten or so seconds, directly outside my office. Fortunately, my doorbell was very low wattage, so it was easy to disconnect the wires from the buzz-causing things they were attached to (I added “doorbell dismantling” to my skillset, not “doorbell understanding”), wrap the exposed wires in electrical tape, and close the whole thing up again. I suppose I will soon be adding “replacing a doorbell” to my list of skills.
  • Snow days are kind of boring these days. We used to do a LOT during snow days of yesteryear – probably I whined, then, about not being able to have time to myself; am impossible to please – Carla loved the snow and seemed entirely impervious to the cold. We’d play outside and make snow angels and build things out of snow and she’d climb up the snow mountains formed by the snowplow. Now, she has no interest. And also it is QUITE chilly so I’m not really pushing for outdoor time. She is similarly uninterested in: watching movies, baking things, playing games, reading, doing chores/homework/instrument practice. So. Screens it is, I guess? “More screens,” I should say, since this is – checks notes – Day 6 of being mainly inside. Maybe there’s a craft we could do together? But that requires having the appropriate tools/materials on hand. Or maybe I just need to lean into the screens thing and read some of the blogs I’ve been neglecting???? 
  • To counteract the cold this week, I made a really good lentil soup. It was based on this recipe, with some major modifications. Instead of crushed tomato, I used a 4-ounce can of tomato paste. I didn’t have much paprika, so threw in a half teaspoon of cayenne instead. I tripled the garlic because that’s how I roll. I used an entire bag of lentils, rather than 2 cups (I think it was about 2 ½ cups, but I didn’t measure; I just didn’t want a little useless scrap of lentils lying around). And I used two 4-cup cartons of chicken stock to compensate for the lack of tomatoes and the additional lentils. It is delicious and hearty. 
  • To pair with the soup, I toasted some store-bought sourdough. Except our toaster has joined the throngs of quiet quitters and is now declining to toast, so I broiled the bread in the oven and it got all black and smoky. Clearly I need a new toaster. I am tempted to replace our toaster with the exact same model – this one lasted at least a decade, after all – but maybe you have a toaster you are gaga about?
  • As long as I’m dabbling in some online shopping, I would also love to buy a travel mug for my tea. This has never been a thing I’ve wanted before, as I drink my tea first thing in the morning and I gulp it down so fast it barely has a chance to cool. But for various boring reasons I think I might prefer to drink my tea while driving Carla to school. I’ve borrowed one of my husband’s to-go mugs for this purpose, and it’s fine – it keeps my tea warm, it fits in my car’s cup holder, it holds the enormous volume of tea I drink – but I want my own mug. Perhaps more importantly, I’ve found that unless I’m very careful, the tea will slosh up over my face when I’m lowering the mug after taking a sip. I do not care for that. My main criteria for a travel mug, in addition to the above, is that it is dishwasher safe. And I don’t mean the wishy-washy “well, you can dishwash it, but we don’t recommend it.” I mean, it is MEANT for the dishwasher. This one looks good, and it comes in purple and doesn’t seem to have any tiny parts I have to dismantle before dishwashing. This is the one my husband has used for years – and has repurchased several times when one mug goes missing or gets dropped one too many times. But I don’t like the lid and I can’t explain why. This one is so pretty, and I feel more kindly toward ceramic as a material than I do toward stainless steel… but the dishwashability seems a little suspect. (How can the product care instructions be “machine wash” but also “hand wash only”?) What is your hot drink to-go mug of choice?
  • I am having a frustrating email communication issue with someone. The communication is not optional, but it feels very one-sided, with me reaching out and waiting for days and then sending a nudge and then also getting a third party involved to nudge from a different direction. And now the person I am communicating with has finally responded and said they would attach a document I need in order to move forward, but they did not attach this document and have not responded to my request to resend the attachment. I guess the only next step is a phone call, which I HATE, but it seems like it might be my only recourse. 
  • Trader Joe’s Italian truffle cheese is my new favorite cheese. It’s soft and truffley and pairs so well with a buttery Ritz cracker that I’m thinking of having some for second breakfast. 
  • Twice in the past three weeks I have borked my back doing strength training. The first time, I have no idea what I did to injure my back. I could barely move for the first day and then sitting and driving were agony for three or four consecutive days. I treated the pain with ice and Advil. This time, I think I injured it either doing squats with weights or back rows. My best guess is that I tweaked my back doing the squats and then the back rows exacerbated the injury to the point where I had to quit. I love squats so I feel quite bereft at the thought of not doing them for awhile. I’m guessing something in my form is off? Maybe I need to hold the weights at my chest instead of at my sides during squats? I don’t know. Immediately after my back tweaked out (I was in the middle of this routine, where we were doing 100 reps each of squats, pushups, kettlebell swings, and back rows. Very frustrating to have to quit at 50 of each! Will I ever know if I could have done 100???), I did a series of back stretches, then took Advil and iced my back. It feels much less painful today than it did the last time I hurt it. This is an extremely boring bullet point, but I am including it for Future Me, who is bound to repeat this injury at some point. 
  • Are you watching the newest season of True Detective? There’s only been one episode so far, but I keep thinking about it and eagerly awaiting the next one. It’s got Jodie Foster and Alaska and supernatural elements and mysterious deaths and disappearances. SO GOOD. I haven’t felt this excited about a TV show in a long time. 

That’s all I have for today, Internet. I am going to try to cajole Carla into doing some sort of screen free activity with me. Brownies, maybe? Who can resist brownies?

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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.