Life of Wry

I don’t really know how to spell cabootster.

Here are some of my favorites of the grand nieces and nephew this past month. Just this past month… I have so many favorites, I could just fill volumes.

River…

Mags…

Juni….

And a couple others…

The good news: I don’t have cancer. The other news: it appears I have gone from zero to three lipomas in just a few weeks, which, I guess is kinda weird, but not life threatening, so all things considered, I’m okay with that.

A lipoma is a lump under the skin that occurs due to an overgrowth of fat cells. Doctors consider lipomas to be benign tumors, which means that they are non-cancerous growths.

I guess I also need to wait just a little bit to get confirmation of these things.. they’ll confirm through ultrasounds, but nobody (two doctors) seems too concerned, so I’m taking my cues from them. Their nonchalance is good enough for me.

Also… sounds like weight could be an issue, so now I have a medical reason to drop some of that extra covid weight.

~~

Speaking of low cal dinners!! Look what I made tonight:

Cream… parmesan cheese… butter… yes. But also some other good stuff!

A most pleasant coffee and scone this morning with Vicki… on this, St. Patrick’s Day. (That would be a mocha, white chocolate, almond scone, I believe.. but all I tasted was green.)

This popped up in my Facebook memories today.. a post from 11 years ago, back when [non-Irish] moms made St. Patrick’s Day fun for their [non-Irish] eleven-year olds…

I can remember cooking with fish sauce in a previous life. When John and I traveled to Thailand — sometime last century — we attended a wonderful cooking school in Bangkok and learned a lot about cooking Thai food over the course of an entire week. Thai cuisine relies upon fish sauce for a lot of its character. I think most of Southeast Asia — maybe all of Asia — uses fish sauce. I don’t remember finding it nauseating. For years we cooked up great Thai dinners. Always had the fish sauce handy. Maybe it’s another cruel by-product of aging, that our tastes change?

Anyway… two hours post dinner, I’m still tasting fish sauce, still smelling fish sauce, it seems to have permeated everything and I think we might have to sell our house and move to a new fish-sauce-free home. I’m seriously losing it here. And I blame the fish sauce, and Christopher Kimball.

Though maybe we ate bad shrimp? Maybe it’s just another of Kimball’s foul recipes? (In fairness, I think this is only the second bomb.)

Here’s how it went down:

Prepped some finely chopped ginger, sliced shallot, diced garlic, thinly sliced jalepeno and some pepper:

Then caramelized some sugar over a hot burner with a little bit of water until mahogany in color (be brave, Kimball cautioned, let it smoke and turn dark brown). This was early in that process…

Here’s just a few seconds later…

Then comes 3T of fish sauce (off heat). After a moment, add the pre-prepped mix, return to the heat, and cook for just about 30 seconds. Then, finally, add the shrimp, crank to high, and cook until opaque (about a minute or two.. it was hard to tell because the sauce covered it pretty well):

Yum, right? Even though it smelled like fish sauce, I was hopeful the caramel sauce would neutralize the salt and smell and produce something sweet….

…. but no. It was rather bitter, fishy and decidedly not sweet.

Jim’s comment: edible.. but a 2 (on our 4-star scale).

And my hair smells like fish sauce.

What to blog, what to blog….

:: It was a GSD kinda day and that felt great. Cranked thing after thing out. Checked so many things off the list, then refined lists, and consolidated lists, and holy cow.. productive.

:: Reintegrated weights, bands, reps, and all manner of strength exercises back into the daily routine. Righteous feelin’.

:: Finished making dinner at 1:15pm, including, to Jim’s amusement, setting the table. Thanks Crock-Pot. Funniest line of the day goes to Jim: “What, you couldn’t get the dishes done ahead of time?” It was an arrow right into the heart of my fussy OCD-itude.. which I totally got (and loved). (Note: I am tending to get way out there on the OCD scale these days… wonder if it’s a sign of aging?)

And honestly.. that’s about the whole of it.

Here’s a pic of the slow cooker shredded green chile, green salsa chicken w/ jalepenos, garlic, green onions, cilantro, various spices and assorted accoutrements, over yummy brothy rice.

For some reason, I noted it as Magic Day in my calendar, so I’ll stick with that. More significant than the name, however, is the reality: Jim and I are now two weeks post our second Pfizer vaccination and are officially, responsibly, safely, ecstatically vaccinated. We are allowed to mix with others who are also two-weeks-post-final-vaccine-shot.. like, indoors! Like, any which way we want. We are good. Who’s ready for some socializing?

I have to admit to a small sense of apprehension.. not because I don’t believe fully that we are okay to mingle (or at least that the risk is as reasonable as we could hope for). I have full confidence in the medical science of vaccinations. But because the forced social distance has served as a convenient limitation on… oh… just doing things that sometimes are easier not to do. It’s always worth doing those things, of course, like planning & going on trips, having dinner parties, taking spontaneous road trips to see folks, attending concerts & games, or town halls & lectures… and …. all of those things — while worthwhile — require some degree of effort. We’ve been off the hook for an entire year. We’ve cocooned. We’ve burrowed into our selves, our homes, in our comfy clothes. No rushing out to meetings. No make up. No showing up. We’ve been blissfully anti-social, we were told to be anti-social… in a physical sense, anyway.

And now we don’t have to be.

We’ve said for an entire year: I can’t wait to be able to see people!! Or we’ve said: I can’t wait to hug my friends!! Or we’ve said: I can’t wait to travel!

And now we can.

Of course, I’m aching to see Peter and to feel like he’ll be safe when he travels. I’m desperate for him to start grad school for reals, to start meeting his people. I’m dying to fly to Chicago and rent a car and drive to Ann Arbor and stay at the Burnt Toast Inn on Williams and spend days walking around the campus and the town and eat in his favorite places. (And to see and thank Lisa and Claire for taking such good care of him!) I’m eager to get out of the house and on the road. I’m eager.. I really am.. to see people. And.. my comfy little introvert self (dare I say lazy? or maybe just procrastinate-y?) also will need nudges to make things happen, because there are no excuses now.

Well.

That is a challenge I’m happy to have. Bring it on, normal life. I’m (almost) ready for you.

~~

So here’s something very cool. My friend Chuck’s girlfriend Lisa’s (and she’s my friend too, since I visited them in Hawaii!) mom (Lois Barnes) is an artist. A very talented artist who paints gorgeous things (including Bluff Cove, high above and on the edge of which they used to live in Palos Verdes). During this whole pandemic year, she’s also been painting (the three of them live in Pennsylvania now) and produced this one — a reflection on this moment in history. She hits all the high points (and so many low points) in the below (a screen shot that I just grabbed off Facebook):

If you have any interest in a 16″x16″ canvas or metal print of this, let me know and I’ll send you the link to her online store.

I think it’s pretty cool. Every time I look at it, I see new stuff.

Mine just keeps getting longer….

And Jim has the benefit of an in-house hair cutter.. me! I cut his hair today, for .. maybe the 5th or 6th time this year? Looking pretty sharp!

(I cropped a photo that I took from a distance.. which is why it’s a bit blurry…)

After looking at this pot in our front yard for the past month or so.. I decided it just wasn’t quite right:

I think I thought it was too small. And maybe too shiny.

So… the other day I asked a neighbor where they got their big front yard pot, which I thought was a better implementation… and found out there is a place up the road in Vacaville called Pottery Paradise, right at Pena Adobe Road (have never noticed it before, though it’s very visible from I-80) (that white car’s on I-80):

I found about a dozen that I thought would work… here are some:

I picked one, finally. They loaded it in my car — not a trivial undertaking. It took three people and a fork lift:

I called Ruben on my way home, hoping he might be able to drop by and help Jim and me unload it. He showed up with Little Ruben and the two of them carried it themselves (no fork lift) and got it to its new home:

We found a new home for the shiny bronze one….. right on the front porch! Win win.

I got to spend a few minutes with Peter today. He’s been working on picking out Fleetwood Mac’s Landslide on the guitar. He’s making good progress! ‘Course, I’m the mom and would listen to and love Mary Had a Little Lamb, but honestly, he’s pretty good and it’s a joy to hear him play.

So, yeah, that was the highlight of my day.. so here are some stealthy screenshots that I took….

Look at that HAIR!

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Speaking of Covid hair… I was the last person to give Peter a haircut, which happened on July 26, 2020, the night before he left on his Ann-Arbor-or-bust road trip with Ray. Check this out!

It was so entirely, yummily dark and wet and stormy all day today (and not too windy, so I really, really enjoyed it without fear of falling redwoods!). I spent the day in that leather chair over there. I’m over here at the moment (window seat… because the sun suddenly popped out and shone right in my eyes), but, oh, did I enjoy sinking way down into that corner, reading stacked up articles most of the day.

Most of the time it was plain old water falling from the sky, but there was at least one instance of hail… (look closely for ice pellets)

Tsui, ever artful, posted on FB a far better photo of hail this afternoon….

My weather app says Peter had 69-degree weather in wintry Ann Arbor today… go figure.