Mild Amusement

As I've mentioned before, the Mild Wife and I tend to cook enough food for a week at a time (we meal prep , basically). Generally, this means that we try to buy food in larger portions at places like Costco, because it's more conducive to this type of meal prep. However, we've found it difficult to buy absolutely everything there, because we don't need ten pounds of onions. So, there are still smaller grocery trips on occasion. This post is all about one such trip. In this particular case, the Mild Wife and I decided at the last minute that we wanted some dessert on a particular evening. I don't quite remember if it was a date night, if we decided to inject a bit of Sensuous Life into our evening, or if it was just a whim. Either way, I volunteered to make the trip to the store to get some ice cream. I figured that the store was only a five minute drive away, so it wouldn't be a big deal. Well, when I got to the actual aisle, I saw ... very little. The free...

Over the years, I have tried to be good about exercising. I was never fanatical about it, but I have partaken in various forms of exercise, including some martial arts and CrossFit. Heck, there have been a few fun posts about the shenanigans that resulted from these classes . It's been a fair bit of fun. However, as I've gotten older, I've noticed that I've had to adjust in order to compensate for nagging injuries and age. It's not a huge problem, but form becomes much, much more important if your knee feels a little funny when you do it wrong. It's just not fun to feel a twinge when you're doing something that you used to take for granted. In my case, this is most evident when I do an air squat. It's a movement that mostly just relies on your body weight, so you don't need to put tons of strain on your knees or back. However, it's also the basis for a lot of other movements. Want to do back squats on the machine? That relies on the same moti...

As I've mentioned several times before on this blog, I have an interesting relationship with cooking. I enjoy doing it, but, frankly, the Mild Wife is better at it. There's no shame in that, that's just how it is. It's also something that's evolving, because there are certain dishes/items that I'm getting halfway decent at (see: the infamous cheesecake ). Still, in terms of general skill level, I'd trust the Mild Wife to put out a delicious meal before I'd trust myself. Now, that doesn't mean that I am completely useless in the kitchen. Generally, I  try to contribute to the process in different ways. It's not uncommon for me to do a lot of the chopping and prep work , so that I still help with the preparation process. And, as that previous blog post pointed out, that particular work is often considered the hard part. So, I don't feel like I'm slacking in my contributions. Still, I feel like there is a sense that comes with having don...

The other day, the Mild Wife and I decided to donate a few items to Goodwill. We had some clothing and other household items that we weren't really using so we figured they could use a new home. It was a small pile of items, but we figured it'd be better to donate them than to throw them out. That in it of itself isn't very funny, but there were a couple of IKEA lamps in the pile, and fate would conspire to draw a laugh from these lamps by the end of the day. You see, the lamps don't fit very well in our car when they are fully assembled. So, I had to disassemble them in order to get them into a box. Given that these were IKEA items, it took all of about five minutes to take them both apart. There were maybe like three joints I had to screw together, and that was that. However, I soon discovered that the donation center doesn't take anything that has to be assembled. It hadn't occurred to me, but it makes sense. I wouldn't want to have to stock tools, tr...

At this point, the "sensuous life" bit has been thrown around enough that it deserves its own series. The first post was, understandably, about defining the sensuous life , and the second was all about a tongue-in-cheek suggestion to rename mac and cheese (to "pasta a la fromage"). Basically, we just like adding a touch of pinkies-up to our lives. It's neither hard to do nor ridiculously expensive, but it always adds some hilarity into our lives. In this particular episode of the Sensuous Life, I'd like to discuss cheese platters. You see, one of the very first documented instances of the Sensuous Life was when we decided we wanted a cheese platter as part of our dinner. We sliced up a couple of cheeses from Costco, arranged them on a plate, mixed in a few fruits, and enjoyed the heck out of eating it for dinner. Every now and then, we mix in some cold cuts to go with it, so we often refer to these plates as " charcuterie boards." Strictly spea...

As you can probably tell by the recent titles, Friendsgiving was all sorts of fun. We had juice boxes , and the food got high marks from little kids . You can just imagine how much laughter was involved with all of that. Still, those were mostly funny things that happened on the day of the event. Today's post involves a little bit of fun that won't be going away anytime soon. I mentioned before that one of the munchkins was at the age where she was learning new words. She was quick about learning them, too, often repeating things that she had just heard. I know lots of friends of mine who have kids have warned me that their kids repeat anything and everything, but this was my first time seeing it play out in real time. Sure, I've seen kids at the daycare say things that I was certain came from their parents, but this was the first time I'd seen the action up close and personal. We realized this almost immediately after she repeated the word "juice" a minut...

Last time, I described the thought process behind the beverage selection for Friendsgiving  (there were juice boxes). That led to quite a bit of hilarity around the juice boxes, but the juice was not the only item on the menu that led to some full-on laughter. No, the other food managed to make an impression, too. More importantly, it managed to make an impression on the munchkins that were involved with Friendsgiving. I mentioned last time that one of those munchkins was a precocious fourteen month old. I know it's common for parents to gush about their child's accomplishments and potential, but this particular child impressed both the Mild Wife and me by picking up on words and incorporating them into her vocabulary very quickly. She was clamoring for juice a few minutes after walking in the door, and she'd never even heard the word or had the contents before. Like I said, she was a quick study. The really amusing part, though, came after she tasted the food. While s...