Mild Amusement

These days, I do a lot more cooking than I used to. As the Mild Wife has often pointed out, I should probably know how to cook some of my favorite dishes. Plus, we both enjoy the process, and I make a decent sous chef . In the process, there have been quite a few amusing stories. I can now pick out the ingredients in my food with better-than-zero odds, I get to plate the food however I want to , and we even managed to find some funny Amazon reviews in the process. Ultimately, the point is that cooking is an enjoyable process for the Mild Wife and me. I suspect that's a big chunk of the reason why we enjoy watching the Great British Baking Show . I fully realize that baking is not the same as cooking savory food, but it's still fun to see people create things. And in some ways, the fact that it's a different skill set makes it easier to sit back and watch. I am not realistically going to make royal icing any time soon, so it's fun to watch it appear when someone else...

I don't spend as much time with the kids at the daycare these days, so the little kid posts have been fewer and farther between. In fact, the last time I wrote one of these was a little over four years ago . As it so happens, many of the kids have been fairly young, so they haven't exactly been good at providing quote-worthy sound bites. However, they are still people, albeit little ones. That means that they have little personalities, little motivations, and do little things. And it's fun as all heck to watch those little people do those things. It's just plain awesome sometimes. In this case, one of the little munchkins is at about the age where he's learning to move around. He's got control of his head, he can sit up, and he's curious. That set of conditions tends to lead to bucking around and jolting in an attempt to get at things in one's general vicinity. After all, you're stable, and you've got things you want to see and touch. Unsur...

Sometimes, little kids have some very odd beliefs about the world around them. Some of it is the adults' fault: we tell them stories about storks delivering babies and boogeymen who visit children in the night. Some of it is the result of very sound logic being applied in very incorrect ways. My favorite example of this comes via NPR's "This American Life," where one little girl came to the conclusion that her best friend's dad was the tooth fairy (seriously, listen to the episode if you get a chance). Either way, the point stands: little kids can believe some very strange things. I was, of course, no exception to this rule. For all that I liked science and understanding how the world around me worked, I had some very notable gaps in my knowledge. A lot of that was around food. I never questioned what was served to me ( for a very good reason ), so I just ended up glossing over what I ate. I knew there were various ingredients that went into the food, but I cou...

It's always interesting to me how people deal with shoes inside of their homes. There doesn't seem to be a universally accepted custom around what to do. Some people ask that you take your shoes off as soon as you get inside. I've even seen some families provide a set of house slippers precisely for this purpose; once you surrender your own shoes, the household provides you with a courtesy pair. Other folks will happily let you walk around with your own shoes on, regardless of what kind of flooring they may have. In my own case, I was taught to take off my shoes when entering a home. I always thought it was a Chinese tradition, but according to at least one link on the Internet, it's far more prevalent than just in Asia . Regardless of where it came from, I always take off my shoes when I enter. Or at the very least, I ask people whether they want me to take off my shoes. If they leave it up to me, I generally take them off. It's more of a custom than anything e...

So far, in our continuing saga about the Mild Honeymoon, yours truly discovered the joys of a winter coat , people were extremely generous with the champagne , and we managed to drink too much sake . Through it all, one of the recurring themes was that we didn't speak nearly enough French to really understand everyone around us. I'm pretty sure that sake order would've gone a lot differently had it been conducted in French, for example. Still, it was an ongoing source of amusement and occasional consternation. Now, the Mild Wife and I both tried to learn as much French as we could while we were there. We paid attention when people spoke to us, we tried to repeat back little phrases we knew, and we made liberal use of our friend Google while we were in town. We didn't want to be completely helpless if the situation ever called for some basic French, and it just seemed like the right thing to do. No one wants to be labeled that stereotypical ugly Americans on holiday. ...

To catch everyone up, the last time I described the Mild Honeymoon, the Mild Wife and I had decided that we had actually had more champagne than we wanted . To be clear, it was a good problem to have, and we were lucky that the folks around us were so nice. It was just a bit much. So, we decided to keep our alcohol intake down. We would have a glass here, but we weren't about to have a ton of anything. That plan worked great until we decided to have Japanese food one night. See, we usually appreciate a bit of sake with our meal, so we figured we'd relax our alcohol limitation for that meal. After all, you can usually get sake in a smaller portion, so even if you drink, you can enjoy a relatively small amount. In fact, some of the sake bottles you buy are only about 300 milliliters. A regular sized wine bottle is usually 750 milliliters, so you're definitely not drinking the same volume. With that in mind, we figured we'd order the sake. It'd be a nice, small ...

Let's continue the tales from the Mild Honeymoon, shall we? In our last chapter, we discussed how yours truly learned both the definition and the value of a winter coat . I realize it's going to be one of things that I laugh about, and others laugh at me about, for many moons to come, but it was all part of the experience. We took all of it as it came, y'know? Now, for this blog post, there's a bit of an interesting back story. After we got engaged, the Mild Wife wanted to prep for the wedding. We did a lot of it together (there was a spreadsheet), but some of it she just had to do herself. In fact, some of it didn't even cross my mind. For example, the Mild Wife had to figure out what makeup she was going to wear on the day of the Mild Wedding. In hindsight, I understand why: it was a fairly long day, and the makeup had to simultaneously photograph well, allow her to eat, but still look how she wanted. That's a lot to ask for, and you don't necessarily lu...