Mild Amusement

As I've mentioned before, the Mild Wife and I invested in a sewing machine during the pandemic. It was the most basic model we could find, but it was good enough for what we needed: to make a few masks. And now, over a year later, I still think that it was a good investment. Interestingly, even with restrictions being lifted a bit, we still find that we need masks. Some stores still require them, and neither of us wants to be in a position where we needed a mask and didn't have one. So, we still have to wear and wash them. And even though we've never run out of clean masks to wear, we did notice that we were close a couple of times. So, I recently broke out the sewing machine to make a few more masks. When we initially invested in supplies, we bought a pack of fabric squares. We figured we weren't going to need super high quality, and having a bunch of squares would give us options in case one of us screwed up (read: me). That also gave us the ability to add a little v...

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 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 ...

A couple of years ago, the Mild Wife and I thoroughly enjoyed a trip to Buenos Aires . We have a lot of happy memories about that trip, but one of the more surprising ones was that we had a legitimately good time chowing down on vegetables  at some Asian restaurants. I still somewhat suspect that this may have been a result of the local restaurants near our hotel, but in either case, we genuinely enjoyed those vegetable-heavy meals. One other interesting side effect of this trip was that we also grew to appreciate club soda . I don't quite remember at what point we realized it, but we realized at some point that if we consumed a glass of club soda around meal times, it seemed to help with digestion. I'm sure I can come up with some quasi-logical reason for this, but honestly, I don't know why this is true (it does, however, seem to be true according to WebMd ). All I know is that we felt better if we had more club soda, so we started mixing that in with our meals. Now, it...

The Mild Wife and I have always appreciated a little bit of time to watch something together via a streaming service. We sometimes partake in other activities while watching  (and they're probably not ones you can guess), but there are quite a few posts on here about Netflix-related amusement. Heck, last week's post was inspired by something that we watched on Netflix. Now, all that is fun, but this post isn't about Netflix. You see, we recently ventured into Amazon Prime Videos. We've actually had Amazon Prime for a little while, but we have never really bothered to check what movies or shows were available to us. For one, we already pay for a streaming service, so we didn't really have a huge desire to pay for even more content. Neither of us really minded choosing from Netflix's collection. However, we happened to be browsing through Amazon recently when we realized that there were free-to-us options. These movies force you to watch some ads, but otherwise, ...

Recently, the Mild Wife and I started watching " The Big Family Cooking Showdown " on Netflix. I don't remember whether it was recommended based on previous watching history or if we just decided to pull it up on a lark, but we started watching it nevertheless. If you've ever seen " The Great British Baking Show ," this show has a very similar look and feel. It is a cooking competition, but it's not cutthroat at all. It very much feels like a family-friendly show featuring friendly families. Since this show specifically focuses on home cooking, you get folks cooking things that look like something we might actually attempt to make at the Mild Home. I mean, it can be fun to watch some professional chef cook a giant lobster and top it with caviar and truffle sauce, but I'm never going to make something like that. The stuff that these folks make, though, looks something we might actually attempt to make. We might not make the recipe exactly as is, but w...

I have a bad habit of forgetting to check the expiration date on some things. It's not that I'm trying to hold on to items for longer than they are useful, it's just that I forget that they're there. For example, I used to keep some allergy meds in my backpack back when I was going to the office. It wasn't that I needed them all the time, but I didn't want to take a stroll outside and then spend the rest of the day being unfit to be around people. So, I took a precaution by keeping some meds on me. However, I didn't need them very often, so they just sort of sat there for months. And then the Mild Wife would notice a long time after that, and exclaim that I had expired allergy medicine. You get the idea. The same was true for a pack of gum that I used to keep in my lunch bag. It was there mostly as a precaution when I was packing lunch and bringing it to the office . I didn't have pungent foods for lunch very often, so it mostly sat there unused. From wh...

I once mentioned, a while back, that I sometimes have difficulty finding items that have been moved slightly, even if they are in a clear, transparent container . The Mild Wife has largely solved this problem by labelling the jars, so as to provide visual hints. Still, it's not a foolproof method. You can't realistically label the fridge shelves, for example. And no matter how clever the system, there are bound to be brain farts that mess up the system. In essence, a sufficiently talented fool can always defeat a fool-proof system. That, my friends, is why the Mild Home has recently had an uptick in the phrase, " look with your eyes, not with your mouth ." From what I understand, this is a fairly common saying in some Asian households, so the Mild Wife recalls it vividly from her childhood. It was not so common a saying in my own household as I was growing up, so it is still somewhat novel to me. Incidentally, that also makes it a little more amusing to me. The joke ...

Every so often, a random topic of conversation makes its way through the Mild Home. There is no real rhyme or reason to it, it just sort of happens. It can be about just about anything, and, in all honesty, it's part of the fun of conversations between the Mild Wife and I. I mean, imagine if you're just sitting there on a random Thursday afternoon, and then suddenly you find yourself cackling at the notion of someone in the family might have two cats . That's spice of life type stuff, you know? Anyhow, I have a new addition to this random assortment of musings from the Mild Home. In this case, we're going to revisit a childhood lullaby, Baby Beluga . Now, it has been many, many years since I have sung that particular song, so I don't remember all of the lyrics off the top of my head. All I really remember is "baby Belua in the deep blue sea, swim so wild and swim so free." I actually suspect I'm not alone in this, either, because that's arguably t...

As is the case with many of these posts, I don't really remember what started the conversation. I remember the punchline and I remember the laughs along the way, but I cannot pinpoint the exact details that led to that turn in conversation. Still, bear with me, because the punchline is worth it. So, at some point, the Mild Wife and I were commenting that in many Filipino households that have a cat, there are decent odds that the cat is named " Muning ." Obviously this rule is not without exceptions, but let's just say that the Mild Wife has seen a lot of "Muning's." As best as I can tell, it's sort of a term of endearment that means "cat," but it frequently becomes the cat's actual name. I suppose the closest translation I can think of would be something like "kitty" in English, where some people just name up naming their cat "Kitty." In fact, the Mild Wife has even shown me social media posts bemoaning the fact tha...

As with many people, I tend to spend a lot of time interacting with my coworkers. I mean, it's about a third of your day on any given work-day. Unless you work in an environment where socializing is highly discouraged or you have problematic coworkers, you're eventually going to learn a little bit about them. I know some of their kids names, I've met some spouses, they've met the Mild Wife, and on and on. It's not that I set out trying to make friends with them, it just happened over time. This ultimately means that we end up talking about hobbies or other random bits of life, so the conversation sometimes takes a turn towards daily life. In this instance, the topic turned to food. Early on during the pandemic, one of my coworkers was saying that he was eating a lot of oatmeal. It was something he had available, and finding groceries at the store was a bit of an uncertain proposition. So, I mentioned to him that we had found that miso paste was a quick way to add s...

Continuing with our Christmas 2020 series , today's blog post will talk about cookies. Specifically, let's talk about Christmas cookies. I know that making and eating Christmas cookies is a tradition for a bunch of families, but it never really became a huge thing for my family when we were growing up. I don't really have a good explanation for it, but I don't exactly have a sweet tooth ( given what happens when I have dessert right before bedtime , this is probably a good thing). I just never got those cravings, so I never felt like I was missing out on anything. This means that I didn't make gingerbread people or houses, I didn't cut out sugar cookies in the shape of Christmas trees, and I didn't decorate those cookies with red and green frosting. I have plenty of happy Christmas memories and I enjoy the holiday just fine, but that particular bit of nostalgia just doesn't exist for me. You know who it does exist for, though? The Mild Wife. And since we...

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...

 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...

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 ...

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...