Mild Amusement

My job requires me to sit a lot. It's not a huge inconvenience or anything, but it's a well-known risk of my profession that it can lead to back pain and carpal tunnel. It's just one of those things that I have to watch out for. For the most part, it's not a huge deal, especially since I do push ups every hour during the work day . Getting up at least once per hour helps to break up the long periods of sitting in the same position, so the longest amount of time that I'm seated in the same position is about an hour. I hadn't intended those push ups to be a posture and ergonomic thing, but I'll happily take the side effects. Still, there's only so much that a quick break from sitting can do, so I started looking into ways to tweak my posture. I mean, why not be proactive about stretches and exercises to try to prevent harm? What's the worst that can happen? I have a stronger back? As it just so happens, I found a YouTuber that seems to have some good s...

I mentioned it in passing once before, but the Mild Wife and I have been  cooking things that provide food for several days at once. I'm not entirely sure that it was a conscious decision with tons of discussion in advance, but that's the routine we have settled in. So when we roast a chicken on the weekends, we eat some of it that day, and then use the rest of it throughout the week. We make broth out of the bones, and we shred the remaining meat to use throughout the week. But how, exactly, do we consume that shredded chicken? Well, we do all sorts of things with it. Sometimes we'll make fried rice with the chicken, sometimes we'll make tacos, and sometimes we make salads with it. There are a bunch of options. It's never quite the same thing, but cooking is much easier when your ingredients are pre-prepped and pre-chopped. Lately, though, we've been making sandwiches with the shredded chicken. Specifically, we've been making something like a chicken salad...

The Mild Wife generally likes to do her research when she buys things that are going to last a while. I mean, it makes sense: you're going to have this thing around for months, if not years, so you might as well make sure you make a good investment. No one is going to raise an eyebrow if you do your homework before buying a car, for example. It's an investment, so you want to make sure you know as much as possible before you buy it. As I've pointed out before, though, this habit also extends to makeup . Now, it's not as big an investment from a pure financial standpoint, but as I've discovered, many of these products are meant to last many, many months. What's more, you are literally putting this product on your face. I don't know about you, but I wouldn't want to slap on something that made me look terrible. So, she does her homework. Like I said, this makes sense to me. However, skin tones are not an exact science. It's not like there's a hex c...

The Mild Wife is fond of saying that people have "preferences." Like if you were to look in my closet, you'd probably notice that a fair number of my clothes follow a pattern. I don't wear tons of bright colors, for example. Sure, I've got some yellow and red shirts, but there are a lot more items in dark blues and blacks. I don't duplicate shirts or clothing items, but some colors definitely show up more than others. Like she says, people have preferences. Now, this also extends to habits in general. Heck, I've been known to say "habits die hard" on more than one occasion ( like this blog post ). It's the same basic principle as having preferences, only with muscle memory and repetition added to the mix. If you've done something for weeks or months, it's very likely that you'll naturally default to that again. In this particular case, the habit has to do with wrapping and unwrapping presents. To be completely frank, I tend to be ...

A couple of years ago, the Mild Wife and I thoroughly enjoyed a trip to Buenos Aires . We have a lot of happy memories about that trip, but one of the more surprising ones was that we had a legitimately good time chowing down on vegetables  at some Asian restaurants. I still somewhat suspect that this may have been a result of the local restaurants near our hotel, but in either case, we genuinely enjoyed those vegetable-heavy meals. One other interesting side effect of this trip was that we also grew to appreciate club soda . I don't quite remember at what point we realized it, but we realized at some point that if we consumed a glass of club soda around meal times, it seemed to help with digestion. I'm sure I can come up with some quasi-logical reason for this, but honestly, I don't know why this is true (it does, however, seem to be true according to WebMd ). All I know is that we felt better if we had more club soda, so we started mixing that in with our meals. Now, it...

Lately, the Mild Wife and I have been getting into plants and flowers. We've always appreciated having flowers of some type around the house, but it has become more of a point of emphasis lately. I can't quite pinpoint when exactly this change happened, but there are now more plants around the Mild Home. If I had to guess, part of it was that we have been sending flowers to my family members more often during the last year or so. In essence, it's become more of a part of our lives, so I'm guessing that some of that energy has been directed to the Mild Home. I mean, think about it; if you peruse the websites that sell plants and flowers more often, it's more likely to come to mind when thinking about your own abode. The funny thing about that is that it forms a cycle that feeds in on itself. If we're thinking about plants more often, we're also going to think about them as presents more often. We're way down the rabbit hole at this point. So, it should c...

The Mild Wife and I have always appreciated a little bit of time to watch something together via a streaming service. We sometimes partake in other activities while watching  (and they're probably not ones you can guess), but there are quite a few posts on here about Netflix-related amusement. Heck, last week's post was inspired by something that we watched on Netflix. Now, all that is fun, but this post isn't about Netflix. You see, we recently ventured into Amazon Prime Videos. We've actually had Amazon Prime for a little while, but we have never really bothered to check what movies or shows were available to us. For one, we already pay for a streaming service, so we didn't really have a huge desire to pay for even more content. Neither of us really minded choosing from Netflix's collection. However, we happened to be browsing through Amazon recently when we realized that there were free-to-us options. These movies force you to watch some ads, but otherwise, ...