Mild Amusement

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...

It's been forever since we've seen some of our family, because of all of this pandemic business. It sucks, but it's how this year has gone. As much as I'd love to see some of them, we're trying to play it safe and do our part to keep the virus under control. Still, we're thinking of them, so we try to do little things here and there to show them that we love them. In this particular case, we sent some chocolates to our family that lives out of state. It's the holiday season, and we figured some nice treats might be fun for everyone. And since two of those folks are munchkins, we figured that they would especially enjoy the chocolate. Now, we don't have any control over when the shipment arrives. We did pay for shipping to arrive by a certain day, but whether it shows up in the morning, afternoon, or night is up to the delivery company. As it turns out, this particular shipment showed up in the evening, almost near bedtime. So, my sister did the responsib...

Today's story, much like many of the recent ones, is about groceries during a pandemic. There have been a few amusing stories along those lines already, including a fun way to describe items that we are craving at a particular point in time. As I've mentioned before, we do prefer to have groceries delivered where possible, since it minimizes our contact with others. It involves a little bit more planning and sometimes we have to adjust due to availability, but it's mostly worked out so far. For this particular order, there were two items of note: bok choy and oat milk. Let's start with the oat milk, shall we? I don't remember at what point we started to drink oat milk, but it's been a reasonable substitution for other kinds of milk (we actually sampled a few of them before settling on that). So, I added it to our order, and allowed substitutions. Generally speaking, we prefer getting some version of that item to not getting it at all. Sure enough, we got a noti...

Whenever the Mild Wife or I feel like having a snack, there are a few go-to's that we tend to have often. I've mentioned at least one of them before: the peanut butter and nut/fruit mix . In fact, I still have that one fairly regularly. Now, I don't think I can quite explain how these particular items were the ones that became such staples, but over time, we have noticed that we fall back on them. We certainly appreciate the taste of them, or we wouldn't keep eating them. Still, there are a bunch of things that we like eating that we don't have as regularly as some of these snacks. I don't eat mango all the time, for example, even though that's probably one of my favorite fruits. I mention all of this because quesadillas are part of that snack rotation. It's a fairly simple snack to make, and it can be quite filling. All we really need to do is heat the tortilla and cheese on the stove for a little bit, and we're set. In terms of simplicity, it's...

 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 ...