Mild Amusement

With Christmas recently past us, a lot of the chatter and mental energy has recently been directed towards Christmas in the last couple of weeks. That naturally means that my stories and blog posts are going to be Christmas-themed for a bit, so strap in, boys and girls. It's time for a few Christmas tales of amusement. The first anecdote I'll start with has to do with movies. There are a few movies that are traditional around this time of year, but businesses in the movie industry also try to cash in on that trend by pumping out their own Christms movies. I will admit that the Mild Wife and I have watched our fair share of Christmas movies, including a rom-com or two. It's not even so much that we expected them to be a ton of fun or great literary works, but we just got into the spirit of Christmas, and we felt like watching something Christmas-related. However, some of these movies are Christmas traditions. For a bunch of people, that list includes " The Sound of Musi...

It's been forever since we've seen some of our family, because of all of this pandemic business. It sucks, but it's how this year has gone. As much as I'd love to see some of them, we're trying to play it safe and do our part to keep the virus under control. Still, we're thinking of them, so we try to do little things here and there to show them that we love them. In this particular case, we sent some chocolates to our family that lives out of state. It's the holiday season, and we figured some nice treats might be fun for everyone. And since two of those folks are munchkins, we figured that they would especially enjoy the chocolate. Now, we don't have any control over when the shipment arrives. We did pay for shipping to arrive by a certain day, but whether it shows up in the morning, afternoon, or night is up to the delivery company. As it turns out, this particular shipment showed up in the evening, almost near bedtime. So, my sister did the responsib...

Today's story, much like many of the recent ones, is about groceries during a pandemic. There have been a few amusing stories along those lines already, including a fun way to describe items that we are craving at a particular point in time. As I've mentioned before, we do prefer to have groceries delivered where possible, since it minimizes our contact with others. It involves a little bit more planning and sometimes we have to adjust due to availability, but it's mostly worked out so far. For this particular order, there were two items of note: bok choy and oat milk. Let's start with the oat milk, shall we? I don't remember at what point we started to drink oat milk, but it's been a reasonable substitution for other kinds of milk (we actually sampled a few of them before settling on that). So, I added it to our order, and allowed substitutions. Generally speaking, we prefer getting some version of that item to not getting it at all. Sure enough, we got a noti...

Whenever the Mild Wife or I feel like having a snack, there are a few go-to's that we tend to have often. I've mentioned at least one of them before: the peanut butter and nut/fruit mix . In fact, I still have that one fairly regularly. Now, I don't think I can quite explain how these particular items were the ones that became such staples, but over time, we have noticed that we fall back on them. We certainly appreciate the taste of them, or we wouldn't keep eating them. Still, there are a bunch of things that we like eating that we don't have as regularly as some of these snacks. I don't eat mango all the time, for example, even though that's probably one of my favorite fruits. I mention all of this because quesadillas are part of that snack rotation. It's a fairly simple snack to make, and it can be quite filling. All we really need to do is heat the tortilla and cheese on the stove for a little bit, and we're set. In terms of simplicity, it's...

 As I've mentioned a few times lately, we've adjusted the way we cook during the pandemic. To a certain degree, this feels inevitable. After all, lots of things have changed for us during this time, from the way we interact with family members to how long I exercise on work days. In that context, it's not really surprising that we've also had to adjust something that we have to do three times per day. The biggest adjustment has been the ingredients that we get. For a while, we couldn't rely on getting fresh ingredients from the store, so we cooked a lot of canned and non-perishable items. This was basically the period of time that the Mild Wife and I refer back to as " struggle meals " because we ate a lot more rice and beans during that time. We know full well things could have gone a lot worse so we're very grateful to have gotten through that okay, but it still denoted a noticeable change in our cooking and meals. At this point, though, many of th...

Every now and then, the Mild Wife and I like to have food delivered to the Mild Home. It's not a very frequent occurrence, but every now and then, we decide to order something instead of cooking. That's how, and why, I embarked on a quest to become a topping whisperer , for example (long story short, I have resolved to find new pizza topping combinations that taste good). Now, this post isn't so much about the actual as it is about something else that usually comes with the order. Basically, whenever you order food from a restaurant, they usually include napkins in the bag. For some reason, we almost never use those napkins with the meal that is provided. I think part of it is that we usually put the food on a plate of some sort, so we end up setting down our usual place setting with the food. After all, it's still a meal, it was just cooked by someone else. So, we end up using our own napkins, and we usually just stash the to-go napkins in a drawer. Recently, however, ...

Thanks to the pandemic, I no longer have to commute to work. I am fortunate enough that I can work remotely, so my commute is effectively thirty seconds these days. I live far enough from the office that it used to take me a noticeable amount of time to get there, so I'm saving a bunch of time as a result. That's a great thing, but it brings up an interesting question: what should I do with that extra time? In my case, I decided to use my commute time to exercise instead. At this point, I've been waking up early for years, so I've gotten used to it. I'm not even sure I really need my alarm most mornings, my body would probably get up at that time on its own. So, I chose to get up at the same time as before, but instead of sitting in a car or a bus, to hop on an exercise bike for a period of time. Once I'd made that decision to use that time for exercise, though, the next question became how long I should exercise. The most obvious answer was to replace an equal ...

The Mild Wife and I don't usually order out take-out food, especially not during the pandemic. Since we don't really go out to eat or get lunch at the office any more, we basically have to cook our own meals. Mind you, we tend to enjoy this process quite a bit, so it's not exactly a hardship. Still, the point is that we tend to cook our own meals most of the time. That implies two things, though. One, we do actually order out on rare occasions. Two, it is a treat whenever we do so, precisely because it happens so infrequently. I'm sure others have seen this phenomenon, as well, but it's the same basic reason why our weekly drive  feels like a fun outing these days. There's a bit of novelty attached to an activity when you don't do it all that often. One of our favorites when we do order take-out is pizza. It's a quick, simple order, and it's a hearty meal (the two main staples on any pizza slice are bread and cheese). It's not quite a pizza part...

I mentioned once before that I got a new headset for my home office setup, but now this tale has a second part. In case you didn't bother to click on the previous link, I basically decided to get a budget headset, since I didn't really think that I needed the absolute top quality. As it turned out, that meant that I chose an inexpensive gaming headset that very obviously looked like a gaming headset. Since it is obviously a gaming headset, I have had a few people comment on it on occasion. Usually the person who says something is a bit younger, since they will recognize its intended purpose. I end up telling them the same story that I wrote about the first time, and everyone has a good laugh about it. I mean, they recognize the desire to keep costs down, and I recognize why they might raise an eyebrow for my hardware choices. Recently, I was asked the question one more time, and I responded with my usual comment about cost and functionality. However, this time, the reply inclu...

As the pandemic has worn on, life has adjusted to what is effectively our new normal. I've mentioned a few of these things on this very blog, as my diet , my pastimes , and even my driving habits have changed as we've all had to adjust to circumstances. We are very fortunate so I'm not complaining, but every now and then, I am reminded that life looks different than it did nine months ago. And every now and then, one of those changes makes me laugh. You see, the Mild Wife and I have focused a lot more time on stuff around the house. Like I said, the pandemic has forced some changes in our routine. It hasn't felt burdensome or anything, but it's just different. We cook more because we can't exactly go out to eat all the time. We spend more time at home, so we try to keep our living space tidy and organized. Heck, I started brewing kombucha because we wanted that particular creature comfort at home. As our attention has shifted, though, the Mild Wife and I have ...

Recently, a friend I haven't heard from in a while mentioned that he's found a new pastime during the Coronavirus pandemic. I can't exactly fault him, since I've taken up brewing kombucha during my time. We're all doing things a little bit differently these days, you know? So, what was this new hobby? A virtual version of the Telestrations game, played among a group of folks he knew. Now, if you're like me and you've never heard of this game before, it's based on the Telephone game that people often played as kids. If you're unfamiliar with that  game as well, the basic premise is that no one can repeat a phrase with 100% accuracy. So, you get a string of people, and you have each of them whisper a phrase to the person next to them. More often than not, the phrase will be transformed in unexpected ways because someone in the chain will have added a slight tweak, and those tweaks add up over the length of the chain. Eventually, the phrase becomes s...

Over the years, I have mentioned once or twice that I speak more than one language . That's just a circumstance of who my parents are, but it's one of those things that I am quite grateful for. There have been times when I have been able to switch languages in order to communicate with folks, and even times when my use of words in other languages has led to much laughter . All in all, it's a good thing. Now, there are certain things about switching between languages or being bilingual that bring up unique bits of fun. There's a reason why "Spanglish" is a common enough word that you can find all search of articles and Google hits for it (seriously, try Googling "Spanglish"). Heck, it even has its own Wikipedia page . You know it's a real thing if it's managed to make its way onto Wikipedia and stay there. This also means that when one of us bilingual folks finds another one, it leads to all sorts of extra hilarity that we can talk about. It...

As the Mild Wife and I have found ourselves with more time in the house on our hands, one of the simplest ways to solve this problem has been to watch some Netflix together. To a certain extent, this has already been part of our lives, since I will pick code words to describe movies to the Mild Wife. Still, with the advent of more time on our hands, we have found ourselves picking a long-running show and watching an episode or two every day. Now, it sometimes takes a little bit of time to settle on a show that we like, since we prefer to watch it for weeks and months at a time. So, not only does it have to grab our attention and hold it for the majority of a season, it has to have some staying power. Plenty of shows are entertaining for a little while and then sort of trail off, so it takes a bit of futzing sometimes to settle on a show. That means that we value staying power and good storylines over how recent the show is, so it's not uncommon for us to pick "new to us"...

I've mentioned before that coffee and I are relatively new friends , so there are still little things that I am a newbie about. The names of the various styles and flavors is chief among those lists, but there's quite a bit about the drink that still manages to bring a chuckle. As it turns out, the preparation of this beverage also brings about quite the chuckle. First of all, let's start with the terminology for making the coffee. On an intellectual level, I know that one should "brew" coffee, especially given that I have occasionally seen marketing material for slow brewed, cold brewed, and even nitro cold brewed coffee. Yeah, there are lots of ways of brewing coffee. However, given my lack of familiarity, I have occasionally talked about "steeping" coffee. I know that it's not the usual word that is used to describe this process, but the word isn't ingrained in my consciousness yet, so I sometimes swap in a different one. The end result is tha...

 Sometimes, the weekends get a little busy. We don't really go anywhere these days, but we still have obligations that pop up on Saturdays and Sundays. It's not really an aberration, it's just that we have some responsibilities that we have to deal with outside of the traditional Monday through Friday schedule. It's not really a huge deal, but it does have one very interesting side effect. You see, this occasionally means that the Mild Wife don't eat our meals at the same time. Let's say the Mild Wife has a meeting at 11AM on a weekend. We do tend to have a hearty breakfast or even a brunch together that morning, but we will get hungry after that. If the Mild Wife's meeting goes long, I have to make a decision between having a snack to hold me over, having a full blown lunch, or waiting longer to have a late lunch. Depending on the situation, the Mild Wife and I will choose one of the three options. In fact, we have chosen all three of those under different ...

 Every now and then, the Mild Wife and I will crave a particular thing for dinner. Sometimes that's something that we make and sometimes that's take-out from a particular place. Basically, it's just a matter of feeling having a particular something for a meal. It can be as simple as making some quesadillas because we felt like having it as a snack, so we're really not talking anything extravagant here. Really, it just boils down to preferences for food popping up occasionally. I don't think that's particularly noteworthy, as that basically boils down to, "what do you want for dinner?" Since it's just the two of us, it's not a huge deal, and we tend to stock up on enough of the basics that we can make a good chunk of our craving foods at home. However, there is a bit of a twist here. I've noticed that the Mild Wife will have a craving for a dish several days in a row. It doesn't happen all the time, but it has happened enough times that ...

I like to write. It's more of a hobby than anything else, but I enjoy doing it. I get to create worlds and characters, so it's like a workout for my imagination. And if this blog is any indication, my writing isn't going away any time soon. Basically, it's something that gives me a little bit of joy. Now, I don't just write here, I also respond to Reddit writing prompts on occasion. I have to admit that I don't write there as much as I would like to, but it's more fun with an audience. Sure, I can still come up with interesting ideas or a clever turn of phrase when I write on my own, but that forum is nice because it has a built-in reader base. So I can see what works, what doesn't, or even if someone has constructive feedback. Basically, it's more fun when people read my stuff. However, not all feedback is created equal. I definitely appreciate the congratulatory "well done" and I find the constructive criticism helpful. After all, that...

 Continuing on with the general theme of amusement during quarantine, today's post involves a microcosm of life during COVID-19. It's not so much that I'm trying to focus on that as the topic, as it's a daily part of our lives, like it or not. Many of the things that happen, laughs and all, happen with that as a backdrop, and many of these anecdotes are actually precipitated by the quarantine itself. For example, today's post involves masks. We try very hard not to leave the house unless it's absolutely necessary, but every now and then, something comes up that requires us to leave the house. For those occasions, we want to take every precaution to keep ourselves safe, so we needed masks of some sort. My first instinct was to buy some, but as you can probably imagine, lots of people thought the same thing. The end result was that finding a mask, at least initially, was not particularly easy. So, we figured we'd try to make our own. The Mild Wife and I don...

I can't remember where I saw it, but there was a funny graph about the relative importance of socks and sweatpants in 2020. It looked sort of like this: With credit to  https://accidentalfire.com/2020/04/03/relative-importance-2020/ The general gist of the graph is that as people have quarantined, the need for comfortable, "at home" clothing has gone up, and other things have become less important. I definitely chuckled when I saw this. In that vein, I recently got myself a new pair of shorts. Much like the sweatpants line in the graph above, my desire for comfortable clothing during the summer heat has gone up quite a bit. I actually don't own tons of pairs of shorts for everyday wear, so it was nice to pick up a new pair. Now, we ordered the shorts online, much like every other purchase we've made in recent times. That meant that I didn't get a chance to try them on first, or to see how they fit. I wasn't particularly worried about this because men's...

 Today's post is going to be short and sweet. It took place over the span of about two seconds, but it was too perfect a quip not to write about it. So, let's start with the setup: I was on a call with a bunch of other people from an organization. That's a pretty common thing these days, since the pandemic has forced remote work for a lot of people. However, this was the first time that many of us had met, virtually or otherwise. So, we were doing a round of introductions. When it came to this one lady, she gave her name, and said that her goal was to "stay employed so I can continue to do this." We could all tell by the tone of her voice that she was joking, and many of us erupted in laughter. Like I said, it was a good one-liner. However, the next bit was the part that prompted me to write this post. I asked her if it was possible to win a meeting, because, if so, she had just won. That drew even more laughter, and I suddenly imagined a scoreboard or people prac...

 Recently, the Mild Wife and I decided to give the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA, for short) thing a try again. If you've never heard of the concept, it's basically a delivery of produce to your door, only the providers are local farms or providers. It's sort of like supporting your local farm instead of the supermarket chain down the block. As you can probably imagine, the notion of having stuff delivered to us rated highly on our list, and the fact that we could support local agriculture seemed like a pretty good idea, too. In this case, we decided to give  Imperfect Foods a try (I could've sworn they started out as "Imperfect Produce," but their website seems to say otherwise). The idea is that there is produce that won't make it to a grocery store shelf because it looks, well, ugly. The carrots might be gnarled, the fruit can be small, or a bruise might appear on a vegetable. So, you're not guaranteed to get pretty-looking food, but, as yo...

It's a bit of a broken record at this point, but the Mild Wife and I are doing everything in our power to do the social distancing thing. I'm a numbers guy, and both the number of deaths and the rate of infection are trending in the wrong direction. It's just not worth it to mess around at this point. Still, we have family and friends, and the days keep coming. So, people's birthdays and special events pop up on the calendar, regardless of where we happen to be that day. This has already created at least one amusing instance where a balloon delivery for our niece caused a bunch of confusion. Considering how common deliveries have become, I'm not entirely surprised that some of these interactions are causing some chuckles. In this case, however, the anecdote wasn't funny because of the delivery itself, but because of the reaction to it. You see, Peruvian independence day happened recently, so we sent some flowers to my folks. In years past, we have all gathered...

Lately, I've been on something of a salsa kick when I listen to music. I don't know what started it exactly, but I suspect it was one of those YouTube recommendations that led me to discover a video/song that I didn't know before. As is wont to happen to me , I ended up listening to one of those songs a few times, but the novelty never quite wore off. So, YouTube did what YouTube does, and it recommended more songs along those lines to me. Next thing I knew, I was knee-deep in salsa music. Now, it's interesting that I happened to land on some Peruvian salsa artists. I didn't exactly go looking for them, but I think Tony Succar happens to be Peruvian and happens to be pretty well-known, so I inevitably came across one of his songs. In fact, one of the remixes that he and Tito Nieves did of a Michael Jackson song still regularly makes its way into my rotation. Like I said, one recommendation followed another, and soon I had a few new fun songs that made their way int...

I have another story to add to the continuing saga of brewing kombucha at home. It's a much shorter story, but it's still a fun one. This time around, the flavor and carbonation of the kombucha come into play. This is not a repeat of the kombucha geyser story , I promise. I should probably mention that we're on our fifth or sixth batch of kombucha at this point, so the home brewing is definitely going full force. By that point in our brewing, though, we've more or less gotten comfortable with the process. To me, that means that seems like a good time to start experimenting and tinkering. Sure, I could keep making the exact same thing over and over again, but it's fun to try new flavors, new teas, or new sources of secondary fermentation. Basically, you never quite know if there's some new process that will make things taste that much better, so it's worth the tinkering. In this case, the Mild Wife and I decided to make our own ginger tea. I don't mean th...

When the pandemic started in our area, the Mild Wife had no idea how things would change. At the time, it seemed like the quarantine might last a few weeks, possibly a month. Now that the quarantine measures have been going for several months, however, it's easier to look back and spot some of the changes that have popped up in our lives. One of the most obvious places to spot the changes is in our meals. In a previous post, I mentioned that the Mild Wife quipped that some of our early adjustments were " struggle meals " because we ended up eating large quantities of basic staples. However, this also started bleeding over into the rest of my day, not just the three main meals. As you can probably guess from the title of the post, I'm talking about the fact that I have been eating a lot more peanut butter lately. Once we'd found a way to make sure we had basic nutrition covered, we started to add on a few more embellishments here and there. It started out as a simp...

Today's story starts with something that has become very common these days: a delivery. Since the Mild Wife and I are trying to limit contact with other people as much as possible, we're often having things delivered to the house. We've found a way to do most of our grocery shopping online, so we stick to what works. It's not quite the same as going to the store, but in some ways it's simpler because we have pared down the providers and we can change our minds about items without having to trek across a store. In this particular case, we put in an order from Costco to get a few items delivered. We do generally prefer buying items in bulk from Costco, because that's largely what their business model revolves around. There's probably a bit of inertia, too, since we used to shop at Costco before the social distancing and quarantining started to become a thing. Regardless, we ordered a few items from them, including a set of tuna cans. We like putting tuna into ...

As the days of COVID-19 are dragging on, we are having to make more adjustments to our usual routines. Some of these changes are so mundane that I haven't mentioned them at all in this blog, while others have lead to some pretty funny anecdotes . That's probably par for the course, since you wouldn't expect a global pandemic to be all giggles. As it turns out, however, not all of the anecdotes happen to us directly. Having to socially distance and remotely do things has actually led to at least one goofy episode that we found out from afar. You see, it was our niece's birthday recently, but we couldn't visit her because of the aforementioned social distancing. So, we figured we'd ship her a present and call her on her birthday. We couldn't be there in person, but we could still wish her well and try to make her feel special on her birthday. Given that shipping times have been erratic the last few months, we ordered the present with plenty of time, and it arr...

I mentioned a while ago that a few of us had started doing push ups as a bit of a game . It was mostly just a way to add a bit of fun and poke fun at each other as a team-building thing, but at some point, it sort of ran its course. It wasn't going to be novel forever, and at some point, we realized that for some people it might actually impede their work day. So, we switched it up. Instead, the members of push up club changed the format: we had to do push ups every hour during the work day. Not everyone works the same schedule, so we stuck to the hours when we knew that everyone was in the office. That worked out to 8 hours during the day, so that meant 8 sets of push ups. The actual number of reps changed over time, and we also adjusted it for each person to account for different levels of strength. So, every now and then, you would hear someone say, "okay, it's almost 9AM. Push up time!" as a few people dropped down to do their hourly push ups. That format actually...

Now that the Mild Wife and I have started making our own kombucha , the whole process has led to a steady stream of laughs. We mostly started it as a way to try to save some money, but it has led to a whole mess of chuckles throughout the whole process. It has been quite the pleasant surprise, I have to say. First of all, I should point out that I generally don't like getting my hands dirty. I don't know why, but this has been one of those things that's always been part of my personality. You know how some kids would play in mud or get stains on stuff throughout the house? Generally speaking, I stopped doing that by the time I hit elementary school. I can deal with it if my hands are sticky or greasy, but it's not my favorite feeling in the world. I usually end up washing my hands shortly thereafter. I mention this because when you brew kombucha, you have to scoop out the SCOBY from your brew jar at some point. The SCOBY is the culture that ultimately turns sweet tea in...

As I've mentioned a couple of times now, grocery shopping has gotten a lot more creative lately. We are being very conservative about going outdoors during the pandemic, so we try to get many of our groceries delivered to us where we can. As we have discovered, though, there are times when that means that we end up with surprises about what the actual item in question consists of. It's not a huge deal, but it does lead to some confusion and some laughs when it happens. This time around, we had a slight variation on that general theme. You see, we decided to buy groceries from Whole Foods because they deliver and because Amazon is still a thing in our household. Specifically, we chose to purchase a frozen berries pack. It had a mix of strawberries, blueberries, and raspberries, so we figured it'd provide a little variety. Now, we do tend to favor fresh produce when we can find it, but we are not above buying frozen fruit or frozen vegetables. At the end of the day, they sti...

I said a long time ago  that once I decided to stick to a blogging schedule, it meant that I was worried that some weeks might make it harder to write than others. At the time, I worried about being super busy at work and cooped up in the office. I have to admit that I did not have pandemic, police brutality, and riots on my bingo card. This week has been harder than all the ones that came before it to write something amusing. I've come close to missing my deadline a few times, but I've usually managed to come through with an amusing anecdote for the week. It helps to regulate my outlook on life, in a way. If I can point to at least one thing, even one small, insignificant thing that made me laugh, then I'll at least have that one thing to provide a little bit of light. This week, though, has felt different. I can't explain why, because I am, unfortunately, old enough and aware enough to have lived through events like this before. I remember the names of Rodney King and...