Mild Amusement

Recently, I had to make a trip to the office . It was an unplanned excursion, but I still had to physically go in to the building. It was a bit of a comedy of errors, so I can laugh about it now. However, all of that just involved the reasons for why I had to leave the house. There were still a few bits of hilarity once I arrived in the office. As you can imagine, there are far fewer people who go into the office these days. That part wasn't surprising to me; in fact, I wasn't sure if I'd run into anyone at all. However, I wasn't prepared for the other residents who seem to have set up shop in those buildings. You see, with fewer people around, the animals don't have to worry quite as much about running into something that scares them. Specifically, the geese don't have nearly as much competition, so they're free to wander the grounds. I was reminded of this when I saw a sign that actually said to watch out for them. As a reminder, geese are very, very terri...

I have been working from home for something like eighteen months now. It's long past a novelty at this point; it's just how I get stuff done for work. Sure, I get to have my own snacks and do push ups without any funny looks, but at the end of the day, I'm trying to get work done. Now, as it so happens, I have a work laptop that requires company-issued credentials in order to log in. This isn't super uncommon, so I don't really think much about it most of the time. However, if you have to renew those credentials, things start to get a little bit more interesting. I remember a long time ago, I used to have to get a new badge that was encoded with new credentials. It was very much a process where I had to rely on others in order to complete. These days, there is a self-service portal that lets me go through the motions on my own. That's much better than the bad old days, but since I'm not working from the office lately, that means having to do this remotely....

There are a bunch of everyday tasks around the Mild Home that require waiting some amount of time. Say I put want to put something in the oven, I need to make sure that I take it out after a set amount of time. I mean, bad things happen if you leave food in the oven for a long time. If you're lucky, it's just inedible; if you're unlucky, then the smoke alarm is involved. Quite a few of them involve food (steep the tea for X minutes, uncover the pot after Y minutes, etc.), so that should come as no surprise. However, I recently had to use baking soda and vinegar to help unclog a sink. As I discovered, you don't just dump those things down the sink. You wait 5-10 minutes after mixing those ingredients in the sink, to let them do their thing. Otherwise, it just fizzes for a bit, and nothing really happens. In either case, I needed to wait for a set amount of time. Now, when it comes to setting a timer, I have a few options. There are timers on the stove and on my cell phon...

A few months ago, I tried my hand at making home-made dumplings . It came out all right, and it was definitely passable for a first attempt, but we always said that we should have another go at it. After all, if we liked it all right when we made it with no first-hand experience, it should come out even better after having at least one rep under our belt, right? We found out this weekend. First of all, the Mild Wife helped with the dough preparation this time around. I knew to be wary of making the dough too sticky this time around, but because she has more experience with baking, she was able to guide us through the pitfalls. What really surprised me was just how little water you can/should add at a time. We're talking about a tablespoon at a time when you're trying to make a ball of dough. I mean, I knew not to overwater it from previous experience, but it still surprised me to add in that little water at a time. Still, there was a method to this ( including the trusty sanduk...

I've mentioned it before, but I like to watch some Netflix while I do the dishes . I don't remember when I started the practice, but it's become a routine at this point. It gives me something to focus on while I do chores, and it makes the whole experience more enjoyable. All in all, it seems like a good idea to me. Now, I know that my screen time is limited. I'm certainly not going to wash dishes for two hours, so I can't watch an entire movie in one go. Heck, half the time, I can't even watch half of a movie in a single session. Ultimately, that drives my viewing preferences, so that I tend to favor episodic shows. Basically, that's how I watch some show or another: one dishwashing session at a time. Recently, that's been the Star Trek: Enterprise show. I never watched it when it first came out on television, so this is my chance to see the whole series. As with many series, there are some good episodes and some not-so-good episodes. Still, it's a...

For much of my life, I have had a really large appetite. I never really intended for this to happen, but it just did. In fact, people around me would occasionally notice the amount of food that I ate , and there would inevitably be some good-natured ribbing about it. It was just one of those random tidbits that was true about me, sort of like the color of my hair or which of my hands is my dominant hand. However, that started to change as I got older. I'm not geriatric, but I wrote over a decade ago that my appetite was starting to look more like the average person's  (also, it's more than a little crazy to me that I can reference something I wrote 10+ years ago. That seems like a lifetime ago). Time and age have definitely changed that particular fact about me. What's more, as it's become more of the norm for me to eat less, I have started to feel uncomfortable if I eat too much. It's not even a matter of comparing how much I eat now versus what I used to eat; ...

The Mild Wife and I make spreadsheets. It's just one of those things that we do. There was a time when I probably would've contested whether this was true, but as time has gone on and more spreadsheets have "magically" appeared in our lives, it's become harder and harder to dispute. I mean, we were talking about a wish list, and a spreadsheet popped out . The most obvious place where this comes up, though, is with our monthly budget . I mean, we're literally talking about trying to make sure numbers match up. Even if I didn't love spreadsheets quite as much, this would be one scenario where it'd just make sense to use this particular tool. There are lots of numbers to track, and we want to keep an eye on how much we're spending. This seems like a classic case for a spreadsheet. Well, given how prevalent they are in our lives, this also means that I've gotten used to seeing some of the numbers. In very simplified terms, I track monthly payments ...