weirdness

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Five Weird Things for Friday

Listen, we are all super weird in our own way. Here are five weird things about me.

  • I cannot stand smelling cold food, if that food is supposed to be served hot. A cold peach, fine. Cold milk, fine. Ice cream, well, I’m not sure ice cream has a scent? But cold spaghetti sauce? Cold soup? Cold hamburger? No thank you. Sometimes my husband will ask me to give a container of leftovers a sniff, to make sure it’s still good to eat. In which case I say, you’re on your own, buddy. It should not surprise you that I will not eat supposed-to-be-hot-food when it is cold, either. 
    • Getting into an unmade bed squicks me out. Once upon a time, I did not make my bed every day. But that time is now in my distant past. And I cannot fathom how I got into rumpled sheets every night. No. I need my sheets to be smooth and tight. The only exception to this if I get out of bed in the middle of the night to pee. 

      • Relatedly: I refuse to turn on the lights after I’ve gone to sleep. As you are well aware, sleep is already not my friend. Why would I increase my chances of staying awake by turning on the light? No. If I need the bathroom or to check on my kid or to get a glass of water or to deter the cat from doing whatever it is that is making that noise, I leave the lights off. We do have plentiful nightlights throughout our house, which helps. If I’m in an unfamiliar place, I may be pressed to turn on a light out of necessity, but then I use the pirate trick of keeping one eye tightly closed so that I can return to darkness as swiftly as possible. 

        • The inside of a kitchen sink is a No Touch Zone. Some people will swipe, say, vegetable scraps into the drain with their hands. I know someone who will wash her hands, and then tap her clean hands against the wall of the sink closest to her. I do not understand this. The sink is where all the yuck goes. That’s where I scrape all the dishes, that’s where I rinse off forks that have touched raw chicken, or where I wash bowls that have contained raw eggs. I clean the inside of my sink every night, but I don’t necessarily scour it every time I rinse a dish, you know? There are particles of countless foods and meals and cat food in there. WHY would I ever touch it with my hands? Especially if I do not then wash my hands? 
          • After I’ve finished a good book, I don’t like to put it away. We have lots of bookshelves in our house, and they are organized by a few rough categories (fiction, non-fiction, poetry, travel, language), so it would be super easy to simply file a finished book in its spot. But when I’ve really enjoyed a book, I like to keep it near me. My husband even bought me a special bookshelf to keep in our bedroom so that I can keep a selection of books – both to-be-read and already-read – nearby. Some books stay on my nightstand or in this special bookshelf for months or years until I feel ready to part with them. 

            Now tell me something weird about you. 

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            Spoons (this is a post about silverware)

            Where are all the spoons?

            We have a spoon thief in our midst. Or a spoon exodus. Spoon seepage. 

            I don’t know where they are going, or why. We don’t eat food anywhere in the house that’s not the kitchen, so I can’t imagine they are scattered throughout the house like some sad scavenger hunt. My husband brings a spoon with him to work every day, but he’s meticulous (I almost typed maniacal which is probably also accurate) about swapping out the old spoon for a new one each morning, so I am certain he isn’t hoarding spoons at the office. 

            And yet, the spoons are evaporating as if into thin air! Six small spoons remain. SIX. By contrast, I have 16 large spoons, which makes me think we are down TEN WHOLE SPOONS. How? Why? Where? This seems to be a recent development – my husband estimates he started noticing the spoon sloughage in August. What happened in our lives in August that would result in mass spoon flight?

            This is not ALL of our silverware, but it is a good idea of how alarming the spoon situation has become. Also, if you look closely, you will see that one of the small spoons is really a spork. There is no reasonable explanation for this.

            Six spoons is barely enough for the three of us. But when we have guests, it’s most definitely not enough. Four family members joined us last week for dinner, and I stupidly served crème brûlée for dessert. A dessert that requires spoons. To ensure we had enough spoons for dessert, I was strict about making sure we didn’t use ANY small spoons for anything else, even though we had all sorts of little dishes that required spoons: sour cream, salsa, guacamole, onions. I have a couple of tiny silicone-tipped spoons leftover from Carla’s babyhood that I used as condiment spoons. We also have a couple of random spoons that we added to our collection in various ways; I think one came with a lunchbox set? Another I may have had since college? And Carla somehow acquired a spork somewhere, so that was set into service as well. Still, despite my vigilance, I ended up eating my crème brûlée with a fork. 

            (I realize some readers may be wondering: why not just use the spoons for dinner, then handwash them before dessert? But that is not how I roll.)

            Here’s another consideration: my husband and I kind of hate our flatware. I mean, we chose it, back when we got engaged. We both liked the style, we both liked the solidity and weight of each piece. But once we had all the sets of silverware in our possession, we quickly grew to despise them. 

            They are made by Nambe, and the metal quickly developed brownish spots. The website, if I recall correctly, said this was normal and we could get rid of them by doing… something. But the spots kept appearing and eventually I just gave up. They aren’t DIRT spots. As with many things you ignore, they have become invisible to me with time.

            Worse is that the rounded sides of the handles make it impossible to balance/lean a fork/knife/spoon against a plate or bowl. They just… slide right off whatever edge you’ve balanced them on and into your food. Super annoying.

            Worst of all is that each piece – whose heft we originally loved – is so heavy, things constantly unbalance and flip off the edge of plates or bowls and onto the floor, flecking everything in the vicinity with food. SO ANNOYING. 

            We have talked (grumbled) for YEARS about replacing our silverware. We’ve perused silverware sets in all sorts of retail establishments. But we always come back to: this silverware is perfectly serviceable and perfectly nice, we can’t just get rid of it and buy all new stuff. So we’ve soldiered on.

            But now that the spoons have dwindled so severely… I’m wondering: is the spoon migration a good excuse for us to finally find new flatware? And if so, what would we choose? And if not, can I just buy more small spoons???? I suppose I should look into that, first. Hold, please. Nope, it seems that Nambe is no longer producing our nearing-twenty-year-old flatware. What would you do? 

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            Attack Robins, Dinners This Week

            We have been plunged back into winter. I don’t mind winter – in fact, I adore winter, and we had far too little of it this year. What I do mind is the vacillations between winter and spring. Turns out I prefer the seasons to progress as intended, rather than swinging back and forth willy nilly. Well. Perhaps “seasons” no longer exist, in this iteration of the world, and I should enjoy the beautiful snow falling all around the house while I can. 

            The robins, however, have decided It Is Spring. One of the new delightful (no) quirks of our new house is that we seem to be neighbors with a bunch of attack robins. As of this weekend, we are constantly startled by the unpleasant sound of a robin flinging himself bodily into our windows. All. Day. Long.

            Robins are not, as I originally assumed, getting distracted mid-flight by daydreams and blundering into the glass. No. I have seen them perch on the lintel outside the window and then flap violently at their reflections. There is also belligerent pecking. A small robin can manufacture quite a lot of racket and I no longer need an alarm clock.

            My understanding from a very cursory google search is that the robins are not trying to systematically deprive me of my home and sanity. Instead, they perceive their reflections as rival male robins and attack them. Seems to me like this would be a fairly easy trial and error sort of experience. You see a male robin on your home turf, you flap in his face, but instead of scaring the intruder robin away, you are rebuffed by something smooth and hard between you. I mean, maybe it takes a couple of times to realize that the other robin is in some alternate dimension that in no way intersects with your own. But no. The robin returns and returns. And then when I shake the window blinds at it, it flies away for a few minutes and either returns to that window or a different window. Maybe future iterations of robins could benefit from additional brainpower and a smidge less territorial rage hmm????

            My daughter’s brilliant idea of setting up a giant stuffed Pikachu in the window has not been the deterrent she hoped it would be. It seems that our options are a) stick a reflective decal/tape on the window, b) get an owl sculpture to police the windows, or c) close the blinds, although closing the blinds doesn’t seem to work. I am hoping this frenzy of possessive bluster is tied to mating season and ends soon. My husband and I both wonder why this was never an issue at our old house. I guess the new neighborhood’s robins are fiercer/dumber than the old ones.

            Robin attack team aside, we must eat. 

            Dinners for the Week of March 18-24

            • Guinness Beef Stew with Homemade Egg Noodles: To be fair, we made this meal on a whim yesterday; such was the extent of our St. Patrick’s Day observance. But the recipe made such an enormous amount of stew that we have plenty for upcoming meals, so I’m counting it. The egg noodles were my husband’s idea, and much easier than I anticipated. I think of stew as soup, with bigger chunks of things in it. But he was anticipating something thicker, like maybe a beef stroganoff or a chicken paprikash type of texture. This stew is closer to soup, despite a couple of cornstarch slurries. I followed the instructions for making it on the stove, but once the beef was seared and the onions/garlic were deglazed with the beer, I put everything in the crockpot for six hours. I also added about 10 ounces of mushrooms, a tablespoon of balsamic vinegar, and quite a lot of salt. Delicious. 
            • Spiced Chicken Kebabs with Salad and Yogurt Dressing: I cannot abide ground chicken, so I will use chicken breast, cut into chunks, and roasted in the air fryer. So not kebabs at all; I know, I am one of Those People. The marinade sounds delicious, though (I am very intrigued by sumac) and the rest of the salad and yogurt sauce are highly appealing.

            That’s all I have on the meal plan for this week, Internet.

            Has winter returned to your neck of the woods? What are you eating to cope with the ongoing Kate Middleton drama?