Mild Amusement

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...

 Sometimes, the weekends get a little busy. We don't really go anywhere these days, but we still have obligations that pop up on Saturdays and Sundays. It's not really an aberration, it's just that we have some responsibilities that we have to deal with outside of the traditional Monday through Friday schedule. It's not really a huge deal, but it does have one very interesting side effect. You see, this occasionally means that the Mild Wife don't eat our meals at the same time. Let's say the Mild Wife has a meeting at 11AM on a weekend. We do tend to have a hearty breakfast or even a brunch together that morning, but we will get hungry after that. If the Mild Wife's meeting goes long, I have to make a decision between having a snack to hold me over, having a full blown lunch, or waiting longer to have a late lunch. Depending on the situation, the Mild Wife and I will choose one of the three options. In fact, we have chosen all three of those under different ...

 Every now and then, the Mild Wife and I will crave a particular thing for dinner. Sometimes that's something that we make and sometimes that's take-out from a particular place. Basically, it's just a matter of feeling having a particular something for a meal. It can be as simple as making some quesadillas because we felt like having it as a snack, so we're really not talking anything extravagant here. Really, it just boils down to preferences for food popping up occasionally. I don't think that's particularly noteworthy, as that basically boils down to, "what do you want for dinner?" Since it's just the two of us, it's not a huge deal, and we tend to stock up on enough of the basics that we can make a good chunk of our craving foods at home. However, there is a bit of a twist here. I've noticed that the Mild Wife will have a craving for a dish several days in a row. It doesn't happen all the time, but it has happened enough times that ...

I like to write. It's more of a hobby than anything else, but I enjoy doing it. I get to create worlds and characters, so it's like a workout for my imagination. And if this blog is any indication, my writing isn't going away any time soon. Basically, it's something that gives me a little bit of joy. Now, I don't just write here, I also respond to Reddit writing prompts on occasion. I have to admit that I don't write there as much as I would like to, but it's more fun with an audience. Sure, I can still come up with interesting ideas or a clever turn of phrase when I write on my own, but that forum is nice because it has a built-in reader base. So I can see what works, what doesn't, or even if someone has constructive feedback. Basically, it's more fun when people read my stuff. However, not all feedback is created equal. I definitely appreciate the congratulatory "well done" and I find the constructive criticism helpful. After all, that...

 Continuing on with the general theme of amusement during quarantine, today's post involves a microcosm of life during COVID-19. It's not so much that I'm trying to focus on that as the topic, as it's a daily part of our lives, like it or not. Many of the things that happen, laughs and all, happen with that as a backdrop, and many of these anecdotes are actually precipitated by the quarantine itself. For example, today's post involves masks. We try very hard not to leave the house unless it's absolutely necessary, but every now and then, something comes up that requires us to leave the house. For those occasions, we want to take every precaution to keep ourselves safe, so we needed masks of some sort. My first instinct was to buy some, but as you can probably imagine, lots of people thought the same thing. The end result was that finding a mask, at least initially, was not particularly easy. So, we figured we'd try to make our own. The Mild Wife and I don...

I can't remember where I saw it, but there was a funny graph about the relative importance of socks and sweatpants in 2020. It looked sort of like this: With credit to  https://accidentalfire.com/2020/04/03/relative-importance-2020/ The general gist of the graph is that as people have quarantined, the need for comfortable, "at home" clothing has gone up, and other things have become less important. I definitely chuckled when I saw this. In that vein, I recently got myself a new pair of shorts. Much like the sweatpants line in the graph above, my desire for comfortable clothing during the summer heat has gone up quite a bit. I actually don't own tons of pairs of shorts for everyday wear, so it was nice to pick up a new pair. Now, we ordered the shorts online, much like every other purchase we've made in recent times. That meant that I didn't get a chance to try them on first, or to see how they fit. I wasn't particularly worried about this because men's...

 Today's post is going to be short and sweet. It took place over the span of about two seconds, but it was too perfect a quip not to write about it. So, let's start with the setup: I was on a call with a bunch of other people from an organization. That's a pretty common thing these days, since the pandemic has forced remote work for a lot of people. However, this was the first time that many of us had met, virtually or otherwise. So, we were doing a round of introductions. When it came to this one lady, she gave her name, and said that her goal was to "stay employed so I can continue to do this." We could all tell by the tone of her voice that she was joking, and many of us erupted in laughter. Like I said, it was a good one-liner. However, the next bit was the part that prompted me to write this post. I asked her if it was possible to win a meeting, because, if so, she had just won. That drew even more laughter, and I suddenly imagined a scoreboard or people prac...