Mild Amusement

 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...

Every now and then, the Mild Wife and I like to have food delivered to the Mild Home. It's not a very frequent occurrence, but every now and then, we decide to order something instead of cooking. That's how, and why, I embarked on a quest to become a topping whisperer , for example (long story short, I have resolved to find new pizza topping combinations that taste good). Now, this post isn't so much about the actual as it is about something else that usually comes with the order. Basically, whenever you order food from a restaurant, they usually include napkins in the bag. For some reason, we almost never use those napkins with the meal that is provided. I think part of it is that we usually put the food on a plate of some sort, so we end up setting down our usual place setting with the food. After all, it's still a meal, it was just cooked by someone else. So, we end up using our own napkins, and we usually just stash the to-go napkins in a drawer. Recently, however, ...

Thanks to the pandemic, I no longer have to commute to work. I am fortunate enough that I can work remotely, so my commute is effectively thirty seconds these days. I live far enough from the office that it used to take me a noticeable amount of time to get there, so I'm saving a bunch of time as a result. That's a great thing, but it brings up an interesting question: what should I do with that extra time? In my case, I decided to use my commute time to exercise instead. At this point, I've been waking up early for years, so I've gotten used to it. I'm not even sure I really need my alarm most mornings, my body would probably get up at that time on its own. So, I chose to get up at the same time as before, but instead of sitting in a car or a bus, to hop on an exercise bike for a period of time. Once I'd made that decision to use that time for exercise, though, the next question became how long I should exercise. The most obvious answer was to replace an equal ...

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 ...

Recently, a friend I haven't heard from in a while mentioned that he's found a new pastime during the Coronavirus pandemic. I can't exactly fault him, since I've taken up brewing kombucha during my time. We're all doing things a little bit differently these days, you know? So, what was this new hobby? A virtual version of the Telestrations game, played among a group of folks he knew. Now, if you're like me and you've never heard of this game before, it's based on the Telephone game that people often played as kids. If you're unfamiliar with that  game as well, the basic premise is that no one can repeat a phrase with 100% accuracy. So, you get a string of people, and you have each of them whisper a phrase to the person next to them. More often than not, the phrase will be transformed in unexpected ways because someone in the chain will have added a slight tweak, and those tweaks add up over the length of the chain. Eventually, the phrase becomes s...