After just over three full days of hosting (about seventy-three hours), my siblings have left and I am alone in my apartment except for the occasional quiet cheeps of my bird, Fidget, who is both missing the noise and attention of the last few days but also relieved that there are far fewer humans wandering around in her view. Which is, in its own way, a little bit like how I feel. While I am much more relieved to have the silence than I am missing the noise and attention, I do miss it a little bit. I would be lying if I said it wasn’t nice to have people around all the time. Incredibly exhausting, but nice. Nice to say good night to people as they went off to their beds and nice to know there would be people around when I woke up. Sure, the only time to myself I got during that whole three day period was either bathroom trips or when I’d tuck myself away in my writing closet to continue hacking away at my various writing projects once everyone had either left for the night (my sister’s partner and her friend were both staying at a nearby hotel) or otherwise gone to sleep, but it was also nice to have people to talk to. I’m definitely ready for a weekend to myself, though, especially knowing I’ve got some pre-planned social activities to help prevent me from getting too lonely and melancholic (both of which are tabletop games).

Now, all that’s left is to work my way through a mound of leftovers, try to get more sleep without staying up late at night, and slowly prepare myself for the coming week of work since I’ll be back to my usual schedule again. I’d hoped to be better rested by this point but, as I’m writing this, I’m still feeling tired enough that I’m considering letting myself take a nap if my afternoon pastime proves insufficient to keep me awake. I’d give it 50/50 odds, since I’ll be buckling down with either Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars or Spider-Man 2 because I started both of those last week or last weekend and then didn’t have time to play them much on account of all the cleaning, preparing, hosting, and also writing I had to do. Hopefully I can get the mental, emotional, and physical rest I need after the last entire goddamn year of this stuff since it has now, officially, been a year since I started family therapy in 2022 (which marked the start of my exhausting, endless, year from hell).

All of which makes it sound like I’ve been miserable for days, which couldn’t be further from the truth. I got to host and feed people, which I love doing. I got to meet my sister’s partner, which was very nice. I got to do some baking and cooking, all of which I enjoy but can rarely justify the effort that stuff requires when I’m just providing for myself. I also figured out why I prefer cooking to baking. It’s because baking is fairly rigid and requires either a fairly broad knowledge of the process or to follow recipes incredibly closely. I made cookies and had to carefully measure everything to get the consistency right before I baked them because past experience has taught me that getting it even a little off recipe (well, a statistically significant amount off) can cause the whole process to foul up a bit in unexpected ways. Sure, that time I misread the lowercase “t” that my grandmother had written in cursive and forgotten to cross as an indication that I should include a cup of salt isn’t exactly a failure of baking science and way more than a little bit of messing up the recipe, but I’ve made my favorite oatmeal cookies with extra raisins and wound up with an entire tray of crumbly lumps because my scoops of dough had too much raisin and not enough dough to stick it all together.

Cooking, on the other hand, is a very fluid, very improvisational process where none of the rules matter other than heat, allergies, and flavor. Gotta get stuff warm enough that its safe to eat, gotta avoid things that might make people sick, and you gotta tweak your recipes to fit the palate of your dining companions. Other than those three things, you can go wild. I absolutely just chopped a bunch of extra stuff I had around the kitchen from other recipes and tossed it under the turkey breast on the roasting rack, which added a great flavor to the turkey drippings that we used in making the best gravy I’ve ever had and the best boxed stuffing (the brand was a special request from my sister’s guest) I’ve ever had. Just absolutely stellar stuff that was an on-the-spot improvisation. As was half the mixing and flavoring of the entire meal yesterday (here’s a reminder that I write these a week ahead of posting them and a week ago yesterday was US Thanksgiving) since I made sure to buy plenty of ingredients for what I was making, beyond the minimum that I’d need.

Anyway, now I’ve got enough food for about two weeks, so I’m going to do my best to work through it all before it goes bad. I’m glad I bought and prepared it all, since a little bit of everything got consumed (and even more of it got taken home by my guests as leftovers), but I severely overestimated how much food everyone would eat. At least that means I don’t have to cook anything for the rest of the weekend. Too bad that doesn’t stop me from wanting to make popcorn or something and eat that instead of my copious leftovers. You’d think that, with a fridge full of some of my favorite foods, I wouldn’t even think of snacking on something I mostly use as a butter and salt delivery mechanism (especially since I’ve got two whole containers of mashed potatoes, which are superior to popcorn because they can deliver garlic as well as salt and butter), but here I am. Craving popcorn. I guess I’m gonna go eat some of those potatoes now and hope that fulfills the craving [it did not].