Mild Amusement

Recently, I had to make a trip to the office . It was an unplanned excursion, but I still had to physically go in to the building. It was a bit of a comedy of errors, so I can laugh about it now. However, all of that just involved the reasons for why I had to leave the house. There were still a few bits of hilarity once I arrived in the office. As you can imagine, there are far fewer people who go into the office these days. That part wasn't surprising to me; in fact, I wasn't sure if I'd run into anyone at all. However, I wasn't prepared for the other residents who seem to have set up shop in those buildings. You see, with fewer people around, the animals don't have to worry quite as much about running into something that scares them. Specifically, the geese don't have nearly as much competition, so they're free to wander the grounds. I was reminded of this when I saw a sign that actually said to watch out for them. As a reminder, geese are very, very terri...

I have been working from home for something like eighteen months now. It's long past a novelty at this point; it's just how I get stuff done for work. Sure, I get to have my own snacks and do push ups without any funny looks, but at the end of the day, I'm trying to get work done. Now, as it so happens, I have a work laptop that requires company-issued credentials in order to log in. This isn't super uncommon, so I don't really think much about it most of the time. However, if you have to renew those credentials, things start to get a little bit more interesting. I remember a long time ago, I used to have to get a new badge that was encoded with new credentials. It was very much a process where I had to rely on others in order to complete. These days, there is a self-service portal that lets me go through the motions on my own. That's much better than the bad old days, but since I'm not working from the office lately, that means having to do this remotely....

There are a bunch of everyday tasks around the Mild Home that require waiting some amount of time. Say I put want to put something in the oven, I need to make sure that I take it out after a set amount of time. I mean, bad things happen if you leave food in the oven for a long time. If you're lucky, it's just inedible; if you're unlucky, then the smoke alarm is involved. Quite a few of them involve food (steep the tea for X minutes, uncover the pot after Y minutes, etc.), so that should come as no surprise. However, I recently had to use baking soda and vinegar to help unclog a sink. As I discovered, you don't just dump those things down the sink. You wait 5-10 minutes after mixing those ingredients in the sink, to let them do their thing. Otherwise, it just fizzes for a bit, and nothing really happens. In either case, I needed to wait for a set amount of time. Now, when it comes to setting a timer, I have a few options. There are timers on the stove and on my cell phon...

A few months ago, I tried my hand at making home-made dumplings . It came out all right, and it was definitely passable for a first attempt, but we always said that we should have another go at it. After all, if we liked it all right when we made it with no first-hand experience, it should come out even better after having at least one rep under our belt, right? We found out this weekend. First of all, the Mild Wife helped with the dough preparation this time around. I knew to be wary of making the dough too sticky this time around, but because she has more experience with baking, she was able to guide us through the pitfalls. What really surprised me was just how little water you can/should add at a time. We're talking about a tablespoon at a time when you're trying to make a ball of dough. I mean, I knew not to overwater it from previous experience, but it still surprised me to add in that little water at a time. Still, there was a method to this ( including the trusty sanduk...