Mild Amusement

My job requires me to sit a lot. It's not a huge inconvenience or anything, but it's a well-known risk of my profession that it can lead to back pain and carpal tunnel. It's just one of those things that I have to watch out for. For the most part, it's not a huge deal, especially since I do push ups every hour during the work day . Getting up at least once per hour helps to break up the long periods of sitting in the same position, so the longest amount of time that I'm seated in the same position is about an hour. I hadn't intended those push ups to be a posture and ergonomic thing, but I'll happily take the side effects. Still, there's only so much that a quick break from sitting can do, so I started looking into ways to tweak my posture. I mean, why not be proactive about stretches and exercises to try to prevent harm? What's the worst that can happen? I have a stronger back? As it just so happens, I found a YouTuber that seems to have some good s...

I mentioned it in passing once before, but the Mild Wife and I have been  cooking things that provide food for several days at once. I'm not entirely sure that it was a conscious decision with tons of discussion in advance, but that's the routine we have settled in. So when we roast a chicken on the weekends, we eat some of it that day, and then use the rest of it throughout the week. We make broth out of the bones, and we shred the remaining meat to use throughout the week. But how, exactly, do we consume that shredded chicken? Well, we do all sorts of things with it. Sometimes we'll make fried rice with the chicken, sometimes we'll make tacos, and sometimes we make salads with it. There are a bunch of options. It's never quite the same thing, but cooking is much easier when your ingredients are pre-prepped and pre-chopped. Lately, though, we've been making sandwiches with the shredded chicken. Specifically, we've been making something like a chicken salad...

The Mild Wife generally likes to do her research when she buys things that are going to last a while. I mean, it makes sense: you're going to have this thing around for months, if not years, so you might as well make sure you make a good investment. No one is going to raise an eyebrow if you do your homework before buying a car, for example. It's an investment, so you want to make sure you know as much as possible before you buy it. As I've pointed out before, though, this habit also extends to makeup . Now, it's not as big an investment from a pure financial standpoint, but as I've discovered, many of these products are meant to last many, many months. What's more, you are literally putting this product on your face. I don't know about you, but I wouldn't want to slap on something that made me look terrible. So, she does her homework. Like I said, this makes sense to me. However, skin tones are not an exact science. It's not like there's a hex c...

The Mild Wife is fond of saying that people have "preferences." Like if you were to look in my closet, you'd probably notice that a fair number of my clothes follow a pattern. I don't wear tons of bright colors, for example. Sure, I've got some yellow and red shirts, but there are a lot more items in dark blues and blacks. I don't duplicate shirts or clothing items, but some colors definitely show up more than others. Like she says, people have preferences. Now, this also extends to habits in general. Heck, I've been known to say "habits die hard" on more than one occasion ( like this blog post ). It's the same basic principle as having preferences, only with muscle memory and repetition added to the mix. If you've done something for weeks or months, it's very likely that you'll naturally default to that again. In this particular case, the habit has to do with wrapping and unwrapping presents. To be completely frank, I tend to be ...