The big Dinner is over. I’ve cleaned and cooked and dished and served and cleaned up after. I’ve got today off work, otherwise I would collapse in exhaustion. On the other hand…I don’t want to waste this day sleeping. Or vacuuming. So I’m taking the camera and heading out. An adventure for one.
Cause you never know what you’ll find.
We’ve got a big family gathering here tomorrow afternoon. Husband’s extended family is heading over for a get together and lots of food is waiting, almost ready! My biggest worry was that the rib roast I ordered turned out to be too small when I picked it up yesterday. “Oh well,” I thought, “everyone will just have to eat a lot of other stuff.” Still. It bothered me. Last time we did this we barely had enough meat and the roast was larger.
Today I made the salads and the do ahead mashed potatoes, the sweet potatoes and ambrosia. During all the preparation I realized I was running out of dish washing liquid. Really? I have to go to the store for soap? I planned this project so well specifically to avoid that last minute dash to the store. I really didn’t need anything, except that darn dish washing soap – and something for husband and I to eat today.
So I went to the grocery store which sits right next to a Subway sub shop. The plan was to pick up the soap and then run over to the sub store and pick up dinner for us tonight. In the grocery store I grabbed a couple things, bananas, stuff to make chili for later in the week…and guess what I found at the meat counter? ANOTHER rib roast just exactly the right size to add to the one I ordered! Tomorrow we will have enough meat! What were the odds that I’d run out of something which would make me go to the store when I didn’t really want to go out and that there would be one roast just the perfect size waiting for me. I muscled my way in between two women who were considering hamburger or pork and scooped that roast up.
And I sang along with the radio all the way home. Perfect. Like it was meant to be.
Which I’m sure it was.
Karma’s blog has challenged us to photograph our meals for a week. Or parts of our meals on some days. Certainly not all our meals…I mean how interesting can cereal look. Oh wait. Pretty interesting actually. But anyway, Karma is giving us until Jan 13 to put together a blog about the food we eat. You might want to go over to her blog to read the real rules as the above was only a representation of the truth.
This turns out to be a good time for food photography, given I’ll have a few days off and I have the big family dinner next weekend, so there will be lots of food prep opportunities. I wouldn’t want you to think we eat this well every week. Most of the time my husband is reduced to foraging for food either from the back of the fridge or some local eatery. And I bet there will still be a fair share of that between now and January 13.
Regardless, you MIGHT get to see a few of my favorite things to cook and/or bake. You never know. I’m hoping some or all of you will join in. As we move on into January let’s share what we use as healthy or comfort (or both) food!
Yum.
I just don’t feel any affinity for 2013. The number itself seems awkward, unwieldy, just a bit off. Where 2012 appeared to be a good, strong, well rounded and full number right from the start, 2013 seems rather empty and irregular. Maybe the problem stems from the odd number itself or maybe I’m superstitious about the whole 13th of it all. I don’t know.
I was unable to stay up to see 2012 out last night. Part of that was my uncomfortable feeling about 2013 and part of it was that I was exhausted from crazy work. Mostly I just wasn’t ready to let 2012 go. I know there are many people – thousands of people – that are more than ready to move on. People who survived Sandy, people who lost family members in any number of tragedies, people who are going to graduate in 2013, get married in 2013, have a child in 2013. But me? I don’t have a specific event planed for this new year; to me it appears as a long long beige tunnel the curves away into the future. There’s no telling what’s out there waiting and it’s a bit unnerving. It feels more comfortable to cling to the known, no matter how horrific some of it was, then move on into the beige.
I know, I know. I’m responsible for colorizing my own beige world and 2013 will likely contain amazing and as yet unknown events. And I also know that as I move into the year my feelings will settle down, my camera will be busy, my dog will sill make me laugh, work will be work, and my family will love me.
I was sound asleep when 2013 arrived, Katie and I snoring away when stupid neighbors began yelling and shooting off fireworks. Katie barked and made all the crazy noise go away and we settled back to sleep. I felt detached from the excitement, ambivalent about time marching on without me. Mostly I felt annoyed. But I’ll get over it.
I wish all of you a very very happy and healthy New Year. Time to join all the thousands who are out walking and jogging and eating right because this is January 1. I’ll go for a walk, track my points today. Tomorrow? Well tomorrow is January 2 and all bets are off.
Happy New Year to all of you!
Husband and I have a large portion of his family coming here to this house next Sunday for dinner. It’s the family Christmas thing that we do most years. It’s just that this year we couldn’t find a weekend prior to Christmas when everyone with small kids could come…and that’s the point of it all..that the smallest cousins get to see each other and play together once in a long while.
So anyway. I have a whole bunch of people coming here. Next week. For a meal. I have stuff to do. Lots of stuff and if I look around the house I see dust on everything and piles of books and papers and…just…stuff that needs to find permanent homes or the garbage. Which means I should be up and doing v.s. sitting on sofa and surfing. If you know what I mean.
But here I am over at a blog of a woman that does full time RVing which you all know is a secret (and not so secret) wish of mine. And she has these little virtual fish over in her left sidebar. Now I know that she’s currently not in her RV at all but visiting her kids for the holidays…so I thought I’d feed her fish. And then I got worried that the green one never seemed to get any food, and the red one was more agressive and I started trying to make sure that the green one got some food and then I just put in a lot of food for everyone and THEN I started to worry if a person could kill a virtual goldfish by feeding it too much.
Which makes me the official master of housecleaning avoidance.
By a long shot.
My husband and I went to see the movie “Lincoln” last weekend. Which was, by the way, incredible. I checked online before we left to find when and where it was playing and noted tickets were $8. I guess not so much, but I remember when…..ah well. I digress.
We stopped at a nearby restaurant and had dinner before the show. We dawdled. Talked. But still we were an hour early for the movie. So after we got our tickets and the requisite popcorn we sat in a couple chairs in the lobby and people watched. I was just fiddling around with the tickets when I noticed this:
Do you see it? Right in the middle of the ticket. Under the date. First I noticed the price…$6.50. Hmmm…maybe we were getting a matinee price. But it wasn’t afternoon. Then I saw it.
SENIOR
Really? REALLY!? We hadn’t asked for a senior price. The guy at the ticket counter just looked at us and made the decision to give us a break. We must look old. I tried not to feel indignant and held myself back from marching over there and demanding to pay more money. I stared at the ticket for a bit more, than showed it to my husband.
“Cool,” he said. Hmmmmm…he has a point.
But we are not old. Not by a long shot. No way.
I was wandering around in blog-land -you know how that goes – you check someone’s blog, and they talk about another blog and you go there, and then over there, and the next thing you know you’ve found something interesting that makes you stop and think. That’s what happened tonight. It was an old blog entry I ended up visiting; a guy writing about traveling to your ‘one place,’ a place you’ve never been but would like to see before you die. Sort of a one bucket bucket list.
You all know how much I love to travel, how I yearn for travel when I’m trapped in my beige cubicle, how I believe I was born a nomad. So this concept intrigues me. He writes about putting together a plan to see your ‘one place’ and his plan makes sense to me…take it in small steps and you’re very likely to make your dream come true.
So. Where would my ‘one place’ be? I’m thinking about it. Where in the whole world would I really like to visit, somewhere I’ve never been, somewhere I wouldn’t likely go unless I actively planned? I’m struggling with this, which surprises me. For someone who wants to go go go it seems odd that I can’t put my finger on my very own one place.
Where would your one place be?
Frisbee anyone?
Merry Christmas everyone!
Katie and I would like to wish all of you, all over the world, a wonderful holiday. This year it will be just the three of us together, Katie, her Dad and me. We will enjoy a quiet day, mixed in with a bit of barking at imaginary monsters at the front door. She’s practicing that now. Later on I’ll cook a holiday dinner for us and maybe we’ll watch a movie. Or take a nap. Simple, quiet ways to spend the one precious day off from work that I have.
Oh wait! Katie says it’s CHRISTMAS Mama! We have to have an adventure! Well. You never know. A good romp at the park might fit into our simple family holiday.
And then a nap.
Merry Christmas to all of you!
