Mild Amusement

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...

As I've mentioned once or twice, the Mild Wife are being pretty conservative about social distancing and our risk tolerance for going outside. The rule of thumb has basically become, "don't." There are still a few items here and there that require braving the outdoors, but unless it's strictly required, we either don't do it or find a way to do it from the comfort of our home. That list of items we don't do outdoors anymore includes, as we've discovered, grocery shopping. We were fortunate that we had just gone grocery shopping a week or so before the quarantine orders started to come down, so we didn't run out of any of the essentials. Still, we knew we had to refill our pantry eventually, since we didn't exactly buy six months of supplies when we went grocery shopping. So, we started trying to get items in bulk where we could. Rice and beans were among the first items that we managed to find, so we were able to provide the staples for our ...

The Mild Wife likes to bake, and she's branched out into various different types of bread and pastries. I've seen her make bread, pizza, and panettonne , among others. Incidentally, if you don't know what panettonne is, it's not exactly the simplest recipe. You have to take some care in order to get it right, but the Mild Wife has knocked out some fairly good ones. Now, I mention this so that you get an idea of how much the Mild Wife appreciates the activity. We haven't been able to do it as much lately (flour has been a little harder to come by), but it is something that comes up around our home. In fact, it's a common enough activity that for a while, we had a sour dough starter that we'd use to bake loaves of bread. The basic idea is that you let the starter grow, and once it's grown large enough, you take a chunk of it to make into dough. The starter continues to grow, and you repeat the process a bunch of times. Now, technically, the starter is...

I have mentioned it on a few occasions, but I watch some Star Trek every now and again. I've actually stopped to think about why I've picked that particular show to watch, and it comes down to the fact that it's episodic and that there's a little nostalgia tied up in it. That's it, really. I can watch it in small chunks if I need to, and I don't miss out on a key detail if I turn my head away for a few seconds. That makes it a good companion if I'm washing dishes or if I'm concentrating on something else . These days, I have a bit more free time since the Mild Wife and I are staying home. So, I've been filling that free time with a bit more hobby time. Inevitably, this has led to an increase in crocheting, among other things. As you can probably guess, this has also meant an increase in Star Trek viewing. I am currently watching Voyager as I work on my latest project. Like I said before, part of me does get a kick out of reliving some of the st...

Now that we've been doing the social distancing thing for a while, we're starting to settle into a new routine. It's still fairly obvious that we're adjusting to the conditions, but we've done a few things enough times that they don't feel out of the ordinary. These things aren't quite automatic at this point, but they are familiar enough that we can do some of them from muscle memory (incidentally, the "21 days to build a habit" thing seems to be a misinterpretation of research) . We're settling into a bit of a groove, basically. The place where that's the most obvious is with meals. We need to eat three times a day, so we get lots and lots of practice cooking and prepping our food. As a result, cooking was probably the one place where we found an equilibrium sooner rather than later. In a nutshell, we found some staples that we liked, ordered them in bulk where possible, and just kept cooking that over and over again. Oatmeal, rice, be...