Spoiler Warning for the first season of the Delicious in Dungeon anime.
Continue readingFood
One Week Into Pursuing Stability Amidst The Chaos Via New Routines
I’m now one full week into my new stress management process and while I do not care for how much time I have to spend thinking about and planning things (despite loving to do both of those activities), I really love being done with dinner and evening chores by nine every night. Prior to this week, I’d sometimes not get home and through with dinner until ten or even eleven. It was rough, to feel like I needed to cram at least some amount of relaxing into my evenings after dinner when I’d still be finishing up at the time I should be starting to prepare for bed, but this past week has been free of that. Which isn’t to say that I’ve gone to bed at a good time every night this week. I’ve had two nights this week where I was just too stressed and anxious to relax enough to even think about going to bed at my normal time, but I think those have more to do with some emotional stuff going on in the background rather than anything to do with my new routine. What I have gotten every single night is the realization that I have enough time for at least two activities before I should start getting ready for bed, even after doing some extra chores around my apartment. It makes it a lot easier to sign off for the night when you don’t feel like you’re desperately trying to cram something into the tail end of your day so you didn’t spend the whole thing dreading work, going to work, working, and then being so exhausted from work that it took you an hour to make dinner. It’s really nice to be able to just walk into my kitchen, spend five to thirty minutes sorting out my dinner, eat it, and then get on with the rest of my evening, even on days when I had to work until eight.
Continue readingGrilling Is The Reason For The Season
One of my favorite parts of the warmer months is backyard cookouts. I grew up with a father who enjoyed grilling and would grill at least once a week throughout the warmer months of most of my childhood (a habit that faded as I got older) and the act of grilling out has become indelibly printed on what my idea of “summer” is to the degree that I just don’t feel like it’s actually summer unless I’ve gotten a chance to grill out at least once. Or to eat when someone else grills out, as is most-often the case because I’ve lived in apartments all of my adult life and only one of them has allowed grills. So I’ve done what I can to guarantee myself at least one grill-out per summer, to make sure I get my fix, but sometimes that doesn’t happen until the end of the year. It really depends on when my local home-owning friends are available and what they’re up to on major US holidays, birthdays, and random nice weekends during the summer. It takes a lot of stars-aligning for grill-outs to happen without extensive planning, but they’ve been known to happen. I know that when I get my own house and have a basement/garage freezer for storing all kinds of extra stuff in the longer-term, I’m absolutely going to be the Spontaneous Grill-out Person. Someday.
Continue readingReflections In Post-Holiday Silence
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).
Continue readingHoliday Food And Vanishing Leftovers
As I work through my leftovers from the holiday feast I prepared for myself this past winter holiday period, I find myself reflecting on my cooking habits once again. After all, I’m aware I have a tendency to eat the same stuff over and over again because the recipes are familiar and require very little mental effort. Something like baking a turkey breast might also be fairly easy, but it’s not something I’ve successfully done very many times (I’ve eaten dried-out turkey all but two of the times I’ve made it myself) so it takes a bit more mental effort than even putting together a stew does. That has lots of steps, requires pretty active monitoring throughout the process, and requires a non-insignificant amount of chopping, but it’s still easier to make myself do that than it is to bake a turkey breast.
Continue readingHoliday Preparations
I just spent most of the last three days cleaning my apartment. Got everything sorted out, finally, before I sat down to write this post following my post-cleaning shower (I tend to break out pretty bad if I don’t shower right away after doing all the vacuuming and similar dust-disturbing chores). My apartment is clean, tomorrow is a holiday, and I have zero time-sensitive obligations. I’m on my own for Thanksgiving this year, but that’s fine. I’ve had practice the past few and this means I can eat whenever I want, don’t have to get out of my pajamas, and can mix up the mashed potatoes with a bunch of little extras just the way I liked it. It also means I’m going to have a boatload of turkey since I bought a turkey breast (bone-in) and then a frozen boneless turkey breast as a backup in case I mess up the bone-in one. I usually do ham because it’s easier and doesn’t require the delicate finagling that a whole turkey demands, but I figured I’d just do a more simple version of turkey this year.
Continue readingIt Doesn’t Count As Resting If You Do All Your Normal Work
Today is a holiday in the US. As is typical of many “ancient” and “traditional” US holidays, it has a bit of a troubled history. But, as a low-end white-collar worker buried in debt and being slowly ground to dust by the cogs of capitalism, I’m going to just enjoy a day off that doesn’t eat up one of my precious days of PTO. I’m also not going to have any kind of blog update beyond this one because I’m tired, I’ve got food to cook for myself, I thought it might be fun to just, you know, rest. I’ll be back with normal blog stuff tomorrow, but the post I wrote to post today is actually going to cover the post I would have written today so expect some additional thoughts on the latest God of War game in another seven days.
Growth
Arnold left his room in the dead of night, carefully stepping around every creaking board as he made his way downstairs. It was after midnight, his family was asleep, and Arnold had grown hungry.
He made himself a quick sandwich to hold him over while he pre-heated the oven. Once it beeped, and he’d finished the banana he’d taken after the last crumbs of the sandwich had disappeared, he popped a pair of pizzas in to cook.
While he waited the prescribed twelve minutes, he reflected on the constant gnawing hunger he’d felt while at school, where they wouldn’t even let him snack on the bags of pretzels he’d stuffed into his locker. He’d tried to sneak them into class by sticking them in his pockets, but the snap and crunch had given him away instantly. As had his classmates. Not even they understood what he was going through.
His parents got it, though, sort of. They didn’t like seeing him eat as much as he did, but they didn’t question his need for the extra food. He heard his dad saying something to his mom about “puberty” and him being a “growing boy.” He wasn’t sure why they thought that. He was eighteen, a senior in college. He’d gone through puberty years ago.
That being said, he was happy to let them assume whatever they wanted. They wouldn’t understand if he explained it, so he avoided it as much as they did. He hadn’t even seen a doctor about it. He didn’t want to end up in a lab.
So he ate two frozen pizzas, another banana, and then went to bed so the alien parasite growing inside him could get all the nutrients it needed. He was proud to be a dad, especially to such a special child.