Nose, Ears and Eyes have it

So I went in and they took my temperature and said, “Oh ya, you’ve got a fever there.”

Then we discussed symptoms and they went, “Tsk! Tsk!”

Then I whined something about “make it go away now, please” and they said, “HAHAHAHA! Oh gracious, dear, you’re way past the window for antiviral medication and we’re far too understocked to just give it out anyway! You’ll just have to ride this one out, ha ha ha.”

At this point, I said, “Well! OK! Glad we had this little chat, good seeing everybody, I’ll just be going now!” and tried to weasel my way out the door before anybody could remember that I was overdue for having my lab work done.

Aaaaaaaaaand the good doctor threw himself in front of the door and barked, “HOLD IT!”

Damn. He’s good. He can sense a runner right through a closed door. Must be one of those classes they have to take; maybe an elective, like Illegible Handwriting, or Avoiding Crazy People. (He missed that last one, obviously.)

And then he peered up my nose (does he not have an awesome job?!), and into my ears (past the cobwebs) and down my throat (again…awesome…makes me wanna go back to school for a whack of years so I can also join this Noble Profession), and then he listened to me breathe and cough. Then he made Doctor Face and went, hmmm a couple times, and then he wired off a prescription for the cheap antibiotic because my sinuses and my ears are not merely “stuffy” but infected.

Also, I may be developing pink eye. Triple Awesome!!! But weird, because none of the kids have it and I don’t generally just sort of develop pink eye all on my own.

I need to have help. Usually from one of the kids.

Then again, maybe my eyes just wanted to close the circle, so to speak. They wanted to be part of the great cycle of love and goodwill that is my entire head right now.

Sinuses! Ear drums! Eyes! Are you feeling the LOVE, people?!

And then, just as I was starting to think whew, he totally forgot I’m overdue for my…, he did it. “OK, and while you’re here…you’re WAY overdue for the torture chamber so! We’ll just have Evelyn here strap you in and jam a metal rod into your flesh, ‘kay?”

Evelyn is such a nice sounding name, too. You wouldn’t expect someone named Evelyn to be a brutish thug who tortures people for a living.

And then draws a smiley face on the band-aid oh yes she did.

Thanks, Evelyn. That just makes it all worth doing, you know?

(Aw, I kid. Evelyn is actually a very sweet lady, whose name is not Evelyn but rather an equally nice sort of name, and if I wasn’t worried that someday I might say something mean about her in a fit of pique and then she’d find my blog and be all oh, REALLY?! and then start filing the points of her needles blunt when she saw me coming, I’d tell you what it is. But I doubt she would. She’s very good at her job, and takes a lot of pride in being able to get the deed done without any unnecessary drama. If you didn’t know better, you might not even realize you were being tortured. Only people with my finely tuned senses are able to pick up the true horror involved in having blood drawn. It’s a gift. Really.)

Now, I told you that so I could tell you this: Is it not kind of ironic that Captain Adventure is just getting over a sinus infection, and I’m just starting one? What is this, some kind of mother-son bonding thing?

Because I can think of better ones, people.

Things involving Play-Doh, or maybe rollercoasters. Stuff like that.

Sinus infections? Not high on my list of bonding experiences.

But hey, what do I know about anything, right? Maybe these are the things of which our warmest memories will be made. “Hey mom, remember that time we both had sinus infections, almost at the same time?” “Sure do, honey! What a wonderful experience that was, both of us, taking antibiotics, blowing our noses every eight seconds…” “Yeah, and you kept blowing songs, remember? And I thought it was hysterical that you could make music when you blew your nose?” “Oh yeah. Good times, son, goooood times…”

And just think: The timing is such that we’ll have these conversations over Thanksgiving dinner! Sweet!

…with any luck, Uncle Captain and I will be able to totally gross out the grandkids, each and every year…

(…heh…I can just hear the conversation now… “Mooooom, grandma isn’t going to tell that sinus infection story again this year, is she?” “sigh… probably, Junior, prob.uh.lee…”)

Drunk and Disorderly

I took cold medicine this morning. Real cold medicine. Cold and Sinus +10, now with extra Stupid Sauce. I did so because of two things: I had a fever of 103.1, which I worried might actually cook what few gray cells I have left in my brain.

And, my sinuses were threatening to explode, enveloping the entire San Joaquin valley in a slimy mushroom cloud.

The cold medicine has not made what I would call significant improvements to my sinuses. The fever is way down, but the sinuses are still threatening mass destruction.

And now, I’m drunk.

Seriously. I’m falling-over, bleary-eyed, can’t-think-straight, think Loony Tunes are hysterically funny, bawling-over-Pepsi-commercials drunk.

I had to email my team and bow out of a day’s work today, because I realized after a few (ahem) interesting moments “working” that billing for my time today is the moral equivalent of walking into a branch with a gun and yelling, “PUT THE MONEY IN THE BAG!!!”

It would be robbery, pure and simple.

The honest, decent thing to do is let them know I’m too drunk on cough medicine sick to work, and take the rest of the day off. Or at least as much of the day as is required for this flip-flammin’ stuff to wear off so I can think straight.

I don’t wanna, because next week I’ve got three days off due to Thanksgiving, which is going to make for a very light paycheck as it is…and it will be the only paycheck between now and Christmas, and I was rather hoping to have, you know, more cash in the days leading up to the Festive Occasion so that I could do something wild and crazy, like maybe buy presents for my family.

{grumble! grouse!}

Eh, oh well. You know? It could be a lot worse. I could be getting this sick next week, for example. (Because nothing says “Happy Thanksgiving!” like the person serving up turkey sneezing Black Death all over it. Would you like extra germs with your gravy, mom…?)

Or I could have no paycheck at all.

Or I could have no cold medicine at all. I could be lying in bed gasping out my last, waiting for the Grim Reaper because I had no method to get my fever down, or because I couldn’t get my airways un-inflamed enough to breathe.

Lots of human beings have died that way, when something as simple as a danged aspirin might have saved them.

Me, I have cold medicine that does (all kvetching to the contrary aside) clear up my passages enough that I can get air into my lungs, and wrestled my fever down from ‘!!!’ to ‘!’…and in a little bit, I’ll truck on over to my doctor’s office where I will probably be given a prescription for antibiotics because it’s more and more likely that I don’t have a cold, but {GASP!} the flu (oh. the horror.)

I’m getting the cheap stuff, though. We already discussed this on the phone. None of that $106-a-pop stuff for this little chicken, ooooooh no. Give me the $6 pills, if you please! As long as they work eventually, I’m fine with that…

My doctor, he loves me. Seriously. How many doctors have patients they can have the following conversation with on the phone:

Him: You need to come in. Today.

Me: Wellllllllll…can’t we just, you know, phone it in?

Him: No. I need to see you in person before I can prescribe anything. Makes me feel important. Humor me. (I love this guy. He really does say things like that.)

Me: Ya know, people survive the flu without antibiotics all the time. It’s just the flu. I know it’s just the regular old flu. If it’s even the flu. It’s probably just a cold. Seriously? I think it’s just a cold. I can just wait it out. Never mind. I’m good. (He and I both know I’m actually resisting coming in because he’s going to want to do blood work and I have an unnatural fear of needles. The very thought of them makes me queasy. Ugh.)

Him: {heavy sigh} Just come in. If you have the flu, the antibiotics will cut not only your downtime, but reduce the chances you’ll give it to someone else.

Me: Welllllll, OK, I’ll come in – but if you’re going to give me antibiotics, I want Plain Old Pills, the ones that are six bucks for the whole course…not that hundred buck stuff you guys are prescribing for the kids right now.

Him: {REALLY heavy sigh} The newer stuff works up to two days faster, you know.

Me: Dude, it’s Friday. I don’t need to be better tomorrow, I’ve got until Monday!

Him: {pounds head on desk a few times to make the pain go away} OK. Whatever. Cheap stuff. Got it. Made a note. See you this afternoon.

Me: Okey-Dokey, Boss, see you in a couple hours!

Him: {begins sobbing quietly as he hangs up the phone}

See? He loves me. Especially when I then don’t take my medication on time or as prescribed or until gone, then storm in yelling that my symptoms came right back! What kind of hack business is he running here, anyway…?!

(Someday, that man is going to prescribe me cyanide and kill me dead. And there isn’t a jury in the world that will convict him for it, either.)

ANYWAY. Just another fun-filled day of excitement around here, huh? I’ve got a cold or the flu or something, there’s a storm brewing outside, the cat is snoring on the bed…it’s a never-ending rollercoaster of thrills, let-me-tell-you…

Breakfast of champions…

My husband was home with a sick Boo Bug today (and yesterday), so he made dinner tonight: The time honored “breakfast for dinner,” which kids think is some kind of awesome treat and parents know is a desperate attempt to pretend everything is fine and they totally planned this.

…it’s not like they didn’t think about dinner until two minutes before it was supposed to served and only then realize that the Magic Dinner Elves were on strike and it wouldn’t be appearing on the table like magic, all by itself…

Then he turned to me and said, “Oh, by the way, we’re out of bread again. And cookies. And cheese.”

Because gracious knows, I can totally whip up a batch of Cheddar in the two hours between getting home from work and going to bed.

Ahem.

Anyway. Tomorrow, I will be staying home with the sick Boo Bug.

First of all, it’s kind of my turn.

Secondly, I too have a cold and it is rapidly developing to the stage where I can’t stop sneezing, coughing and yawning.

And third, I finally got the last pieces of the puzzle put together today, so I can actually work from home…which kind of blows holes in the whole, Wellllllll, but if I’m not onsite, how can I possibly work and earn money? argument.

So I guess I’m taking my first “floating” telecommute day tomorrow. SURPRISE! (I honestly thought she was going back to school tomorrow. She was fine last night, which led me to believe that today would be her 24-hour ‘symptom free’ period…but no, her sore throat and fever returned tonight, so! No school for the Boo tomorrow!)

Tonight I made sure I would be able to work tomorrow. I logged into the network, got the VPN connection working, tested my ability to ping servers, send and receive email, and most importantly write and execute scripts on the SQL Server.

Check, check and check.

Well. Allrighty then. I’m ready – I can stay home with the sick child (and my own sick self) but not lose an entire day’s pay doing so.

I don’t like to think about how much money I’ve lost through the years because I couldn’t do this – or how many jobs I’ve lost, come right down to it.

Of course, on the flip side…no more days off because I’m sick, unless I’m actually too sick to work. Which, let’s face it, is pretty darned rare.

Actually, I’m almost never too “sick” too work.

“Too hopped up on cold medication,” on the other hand…yeah. That can be a problem. I took some Dayquil yesterday? Holy crap.

FIRST OF ALL, “non-drowsy” my arse. About half an hour after I took those two bright yellow little dabs of sunshine, I was practically snoring. I was doing a constant head-bob thing. Doooooooozing of-HELLO! MY CHIN WASN'T HITTING MY CHEST, I'M WIDE AWAKE...doooooooooozing off again...

ALSO, it whacked me. My vision was weird. I swear, my eyeballs were actually crossing. I kept giggling. I would sit there listening to people in meetings and my mind was just wandering all over this weird little Dr. Seuss-like world inside my head.

I was, like, completely stoned.

On Dayquil.

This, dear readers, is why I will never be found pounding back random pharmaceuticals handed out by a friend at a party or some junk like that – I don’t need them.

Just give me a dose of Dayquil, and I’m good for hours.

ANYWAY.

I had a good laugh on myself tonight. All those years when I had no way to telecommute in times like these – when I would have given my front teeth to be able to do so. How many times did I find myself grousing that if only they’d let me, I could have finished this or that project, gotten this or that done, not lost an entire day’s wages because Baby was sick or daycare was closed or both…

Now I can. Precisely one (1) week after starting my new job, I can carry on a day’s work from right here, almost as though I were sitting over there instead.

This is how modern and with-it and accommodating my MegaBank has become.

And how great is my gratitude?

Well, it went something like this…

“OK, VPN is working fine…email is working fine…internal IM checks out…I can see the servers and the tables…test run of the SQL…OK. I…can totally work tomorrow, right from my home office!” {pause} “Damn. I could’ve used a day offline to {clean, plant, cook, shop, tend, nurture, etc.}.”

Heh. There’s just no pleasing some people, you know it?

Shrink Ray Spaghetti

I am a tad peeved tonight. I made spaghetti – “real” spaghetti, with store-bought spaghetti noodles. I’ve gotten pretty darned good at making homemade pasta when we’re talking about fettuccini-width or wider, but anything thinner is a tad advanced for my skill set at this point. (The last time I tried it, I ended up with weird globs of mushy stuff that resembled nothing edible this world has ever seen before. It was weird. Almost like ‘glass’ noodles, but…not…quite…) (I tried passing it off as a delicacy. I failed. So I made fettuccini instead and we ate dinner quite late that night.)

Oh, and for sauce, I’m totally cheating: Costco has these enormous tubs of basic tomato sauce for three bucks, right? It’s about forty pounds worth of tomatoes in each of those cans, boiled down to the right consistency for sauce but utterly lacking in, you know, flavor and character.

So! I take one of those big food-service sized cans, add my own garlic, onions and herbs from the garden and simmer it all together for an hour or so, then portion it out into four containers – one for that night, three to go into the freezer for other applications.

Next year, I’m hoping the micro-farm will provide enough tomatoes to lay down actual for-real homemade-from-scratchy-scratch sauce. But for this year, I’m grateful for the almost-free pass on it.

Now, given that I buy flour in bulk and such, it’s about impossible for store-bought pasta to be cheaper than what I make at home – it costs me about $0.27 a pound to make it.

BUT, I had a gift card and it was on sale and I said, “Won’t it be nice to make what the kids still consider to be ‘real’ spaghetti for a change! And without all the cleanup!”

Then I went to make it tonight and guess what? The grocery shrink ray totally got me. I assumed I was buying one-pound packages, because this is what I’m used to the packages being. One pound, or 500 grams (which is slightly over a pound), take your pick.

Not twelve ounces, which is four ounces shy of a pound, which means that when I dumped two packages of spaghetti noodles into the pot I wasn’t getting the 36 ounces that is enough for the family but rather 24 ounces which is not nearly enough.

Suddenly, the 2-for-$1 deal wasn’t so great.

And what have we (re)learned today, Tama?

Always, always check the price per unit, not per package. Especially in Times Like These, where bottom lines are being squeezed everywhere, just because a package looks about the same as it always has doesn’t mean it actually is the same size.

Sigh.

Meanwhile, it is quickly becoming all too clear that I am going to have to rethink how we’re handling dinner. Our timing is just a bit too tight, and too easily thrown completely off by even small things like a train being ten minutes slower than expected, or an email from a client we didn’t expect to hear from needing something now! we never thought they’d be interested in hearing about again, or a testy phone message from a medical provider who would very much appreciate receiving their three million and fifty bucks now, please.

…wait…didn’t we pay that? I’m pretty sure we did…hang on a second, how much? No, that’s not right, I’m sure that’s not right, but I’ll have to find the EOB on it…{three hours later} See! It so wasn’t three million and fifty!

It was five million and fifty…geesh, get your account right, people…!

While I’m frankly not feeling the love for putting together a once-a-month cooking day (both because I’m already feeling like every day has been an all-day cooking ordeal for, like, the last two months, and because of the recipes calling for things I’m really not feeling the joy of recreating from scratch SO I’ll probably end up just buying six packs of Cream of Something soup and forty-seven carrots [maybe even pre-diced from the freezer section] and a whack of bottles of sauces and oils and unguents because I am not going to try to figure out how to manufacture my own soy sauce right now thank you all the same), well…

It is the psycho-busy-frugal-cook’s best friend.

So…I’ll spend some quality time with the recipe books and weekly circulars for my local supermarkets and see what I can come up with to fill up that freezer with weeknight meals for now through the end of December – because ohmygah, people, is it sinking in for you guys that Thanksgiving is next week, which means Christmas decorating starts next weekend, which means that we are officially heading into the deadly skid of party-party-party-gift-gift-gift-obligatory-appearances-ho-ho-HOLY-CRAP-HOW-MUCH-DID-WE-JUST-SPEND-ON-ALL-THIS?!?!

Sigh.

I hate this part of the holidays. The pressure to be all things to all people in your life, in all the expected places (from Grandma's house to the office holiday party), lest they think you don't care about them can be a bit overwhelming, can't it?

Ah well. It's also a really joyous time, especially if you can let go of all that aforementioned garbage. We love, we laugh, we live, we go on...even if we burn the turkey, forget how to get to Aunt Maude's house and buy the nephew the absolute WRONGEST DS game ev-ah...

Hey all you people...I just ate a saaandwich, not an ORDINARY sandwich...

(Bonus points for recognizing the song reference in the title.)

This morning started with a slight temper tantrum. SEE, I got a crummy night's sleep due to my husband's Super Power - which is that he can sleep through anything, AND, in the unlikely event that Whatever It Was *did* wake him, he can go back to sleep practically instantly.

I do NOT have this Super Power. in fact, I have the exact opposite of Super Sleeping Powers. I have the "takes hours to fall asleep, can be wakened by the sound of a fly landing on a windowsill downstairs and then need two hours to get back to sleep" curse.

SO! My husband peacefully slept through his own nasty-cold-enhanced Super Snoring, which Dog my witness was so loud it set off earthquake monitors as far away as Bakersfield, and I...didn't.

Thus I was already cranky before I even got out of bed to discover that elves had once again failed to come in the night and undo the disasters all over the house...most especially the one in the kitchen.

I'm already barely clinging to any modicum of civility before that first cup of coffee - when I can't MAKE said cuppa Joe without drama, well.

It can get ugly PDQ.

But I got the coffee started and then I made myself a sandwich for lunch.

I was kind of pissy about the process. Stupid rolls were all lumpy-looking. Stupid roast beef bag was all greasy on the outside. Stupid ale-based mustard wasn't open yet, stupid packaging, stupid scissors stupid missing stupid would it KILL people to put the stupid tools back in their stupid place after use?!

(Oh yeah. I'm CHARMING first thing in the morning. And prone to throwing things. And cussing.)

So I cut the roll with a knife that didn't seem TOO dirty and used a different mustard because the scissors (all 417 pairs we own) were AWOL, and put roast beast on it and then put on my jacket, went into my front yard, in the dark, at Wicked O'Clock, to pick spinach for my sandwich.

Seriously, I wish I could hear my neighbor's thoughts sometimes.

Other times, I am sooooo grateful I CAN'T.

Then I snarled goodbye and headed for the office, leaving my sick husband home with the sick child for the day.

The coffee had already made a big difference in my attitude about Things by the time I got to my desk...but then, I ate my sandwich.

Folks...try adding that 7-grain to your next batch of bread.

You're welcome.

Also? Spinach you just picked a few hours ago has a crunchy sweetness that is hard to match, even compared to farmer's market fare.

It's going to be a grind, trying to keep all these balls in the air...but it'll be worth it.

I only wish I'd had time to make some chocolate pie last night, too.

Lane changes and leftovers

Tonight, 580 decided to kiss and make up. In spite of leaving the office a hair too late for comfort, we had pretty darned quick-moving traffic.

Mostly, this is because I was driving. No, seriously…see, my husband is one of those people who will get on the freeway (eventually), and then stay in the wrong slow lane for a while, then decide things aren’t moving well and that something is ‘obviously’ wrong up ahead, and then take some 600 mile “short cut” to get around the five miles of backup.

OK, it was only 60 miles.

Still. You can either put up with five miles of backup, or, you can take a (all kidding aside) thirty mile “short cut” through the hills and vales and valleys and dells and end up stuck behind a flatbed truck going fifteen miles an hour because he’s (quite reasonably, actually) spooked by being a large truck on a tiny, lightless country road in the middle of what appears to be nowhere and are we quite sure we’re still in California?!

This is how my husband “saves time” whenever the traffic is backed up on the freeway. Which is always, which is also why he will frequently come staggering in at 7:30 even though he left the office at 4:00. “The traffic was brutal, so I took the short cut…”

Uhhhhhh…huh…

When I drive, the elapsed time between getting on the freeway and being in the fast lane is something like eight nanoseconds. No fooling around. No lollygagging. No ‘let’s see what the traffic is doing’ or ‘let’s wait to hear a traffic report.’ (Also, occasionally, a certain…ahem…shall we say effective use of our vehicle’s acceleration / maneuverability?)

And then, just because Life is perverse that way – the traffic will magically clear up so that I can turn to him and say, “SEE? It’s not that bad, you just hafta find the zen of the freeway…and get in the fast lane right away…”

In the same way, though, whenever we do have the rare circumstance where we are in two cars and the traffic is awful and he does his 400-mile-short-cut thing while I stick by the freeway…y’all know what happens, right?

He gets home in half an hour, while I’m sitting on the freeway waving a flashlight at the rescue helicopter that’s dropping food for all of us poor, stranded souls.

Because Life is really perverse that way.

ANYWAY. We got home in plenty of time for our divide-and-conquer approach to dinner. Tonight I had it easy in one way, but hard in another: Dinner was a very simple fridge-diving affair. I threw rice into the rice cooker (an appliance I scoffed at before I owned one [“what’s wrong with a danged pot with a cover? it was good enough for my momma, it’s good enough for me!”], but now can’t imagine life without), put some leftover roast beef into the microwave on ‘gentle cook’ to reheat, and dug through the fridge to pull out leftover corn, peas and carrots from other meals – my fridge tends to get awfully full of tiny Tupperware containers with not-quite-a-serving of various things, which can be a bit dangerous to combine due to my habit of deciding plain old butter or salt is “boring, let’s try paprika! Chili powder! What’s this stuff, I dunno, maybe it’s crab spice! LET’S TRY IT!”

Which is fine on its own, but if you throw together several things made several ways, the result can be…interesting in a bad way.

But fortunately, I had a streak of boring so all the vegetables had reasonably similar seasonings – no Cajun doing battle with Indian or BBQ sauce trying to conquer the soy.

The roast turned out really well yesterday. I kept it super-simple: I made a bed of sliced onions and carrots for the roast to sit on in the broiling pan, then mixed together a bottle of dark brown ale, some Worcestershire sauce and fresh cracked pepper. A little went into the bottom of the pan, and about a quarter cup was poured over the roast before it went into the oven – then throughout the roughly four hour roasting time, I’d baste it whenever the spirit moved me…technically every half hour but hahahahaha, yeah, party, people over, kids everywhere…sometimes every hour. Or so.

And then I got use my cool deli slicer thingee and wow…how did I ever live without one of these things?! It made beautiful thin slices perfect for sandwiches and quickly-warmed-up leftovers and I love it even though it’s a royal pain in the backside to clean up afterward.

Also, I’m terrified I’m going to stick a finger into the whirling blade of death, because trust me – I’m an expert at Stupid Maneuvers Like That.

I swear, I am the reason we have to have warning labels that say things like, “Warning: Do Not Stick Head Into Fan Blades.” Wow…on reflection, that WOULD be rather dangerous, wouldn’t it…

Meanwhile, my challenge for the evening was wedging a baking session into the mix. We used up the last of the bread this morning, so I needed to get something bread-like together for tomorrow or else.

When I first started mixing, I thought I was making regular old bread. But then it sort of changed on me, and I ended up making rolls.

I don’t know how these things happen. Really. One minute I’m making the standard bread recipe, the next…well.

I replaced about half a cup of the regular flour with Bob’s 7-Grain Hot Cereal, added an extra half-tablespoon of sugar and cut back the salt a smidge and instead of making two loaves of bread, I made eight sloppy-looking rolls.

Because I didn’t know I was making rolls until they were on the baking sheet and I was saying, “Oh. Apparently, I’m making rolls…”

I did have a couple sort-of reasons. One was that making rolls eliminated the second rise I like to have for sandwich bread. The other was that rolls take less time to bake, and since I have a cold I really want to go to bed sooner rather than later – less baking time meant a sooner bedtime.

And of course, this kind of “different” is something the Denizens will like in their lunches. It’s got a neat nutty flavor, but isn’t “too” whole wheat. (Because gracious, we wouldn’t want “healthy” bread, would we?!)

Should make an awfully good roast beef sandwich wrapper tomorrow – with some stone ground mustard, Swiss cheese and maybe some freshly-picked baby spinach…

I had a dream…

No, really. A real one, you know, while asleep? A very vivid sort of dream, the kind where you wake up and swear you could actually feel, smell and taste what you were dreaming about.

It’s about the fourth time I’ve had it (with minor variations), but it still just tickles the heck out of me. It started a couple weeks ago, after I read a newspaper article about the mess left behind by pot growers – we’ve had a whack of people busted this last year after they grew insane amounts of cannabis inside their Central Valley homes.

Which is one way to keep it from being spotted from the air the way it usually is, I suppose.

Anyway. The article talked about things like ripped out appliances and altered walls (some knocked out to make more room, others added to hide rooms they didn’t want found, stuff like that), strange wiring and piping and all kinds of other debris you would (upon reflection, which I’d never paused for on this topic before this article threw it into my face) naturally expect to be left behind when someone is unexpectedly arrested for transforming an entire suburban dwelling into an indoor growing field.

Apparently, they even left behind the grow beds and lights…I mean, even upon reflection that kind of surprises me. I’d expect the police to impound that kind of stuff as Evidence, you know? "Yes, Your Honor, we’d like to direct the court’s attention to forty THOUSAND watts of growing lights, plus six acres worth of growing tables…"

Hard to say you weren’t up to anything in the face of something like that, right?

Whiiiiiich leads me to the new recurring dream I keep having…which is that I have rearranged the inside of the Den so that I can grow spring and summer vegetables in the dead of winter.

All four of the Denizens now slept in two bunk beds in the master bedroom, while their father and I took over what is now Captain Adventure’s bedroom – formerly the retreat off the master bedroom and thus not a “full” bedroom in size.

You can imagine what my husband’s joy would be, if I proposed we actually do this.

There was a path to the door, and a path into the kitchen – but the rest of the Den was transformed into fields of grow tables, with lights hanging above them and this insanely intricate watering system that siphoned water out of the spa (repurposed as our gray water tank).

I’d even moved the laundry equipment into a sort of lean-to right next to the spa, so that the washing machine’s hose just spat the water straight on in there. Genius!

I had these massive solar panels not only on the roof but over the driveway and even hanging from the limbs of the big tree in front of the house (the neighbors would love that, don’t you think?), which not only powered the lights but charged up these deep-cycle batteries that kept them going at night as well so we could get the “ideal” amount of light and warmth for the strawberries and corn.

Yes. Corn.

Growing inside the house.

Of course, what really cracks me up about this is the way I wake up and think, You KNOW…I COULD maybe put just one or two small grow beds in the front room…

I suspect I may be just a touch overly enthusiastic about the whole gardening thing, here.

Speaking of the garden…there isn’t a whole-whole lot going on out there right now. The colder weather has shown up, which when combined with the shorter days has resulted in the expected-but-still-somehow-disappointing slowing down of plant growth.

Although I did find a tiny little bud of future broccoli on the oldest of the sprouts, and the Brussels sprouts are starting to bud on the stalks.

So, we have that going for us.

I have a minor disaster in the Brussels sprouts, though – there were moths (I think they’re cabbage butterflies) (ack!) that found them very appealing nurseries, and holy smokes did they ever do a number on one of the six plants I have back there. It was a big, robust plant…now it is a shriveled little shell of its former self.

They’ve about killed it…and now they’re moving on to the survivors, with a murderous gleam in their buggy little eyes. They scoff at pepper spray and openly mock oily, soapy water.

However, they’re about to come face-to-face with a bottle of neem oil, bwa-hahahahaha. Hopefully, that’ll put an end to their reign of terror out there.

I planted more peas and green beans a couple weeks ago, and plan to put in another little plot of them today, plus a reseeding of the just-harvested bok choy and spinach beds…and that should be the last of the planting until February around here.

Except of course for things I start inside…you know, to get a jump on spring, when it gets here?

…just maybe one or two rooms little trays of things…

Wow…new record on the flaking out there…

I didn’t make dinner last night at all. Which is darned shame, because it would have been pretty darned good – chicken pot pie with a citrus-scented gravy instead of the usual “country hearty” style. (My lemon tree is really putting out the lemons right now – they’re so sweet you can actually eat them, right off the tree!)

But, one of the things that are going to happen from time to time happened last night: We hit Traffic. Not merely, you know, the ordinary bumper-to-bumper stall-in-go from the Dublin BART station over the Altamont Pass…or even the equally usual Fun Friday! points added.

Friday is the worst day of the week for the commute. The problem is that we don’t have enough ways for people to get to other places around here – the 580 freeway is about the only way for people from the Bay Area to get just about anywhere they want to go.

Whether they want to head up to the mountains (skiing, water sports, sitting in the lodge sipping rum toddies while other people do those crazy things) or down to the pleasures of Los Angeles, visiting family in Colorado, whatever – they pretty well must take 580, or travel way out of their way to take 80 instead.

But 80 is just as packed so, you know, what do you buy yourself – nothing.

So Friday is already a bad commute day…but last night, somebody ran into somebody else at a really rotten time. (Which would be any time after noon on 580 East.)

We left the office at 4:10, and didn’t get to the babysitter’s house until 6:30, precisely…which was a minor miracle, since at 6:10 when I called to tell her we were coming as fast as we could but stuck in an Uber Backup, we were still a good twenty miles away and the traffic was just barely thinking about starting to break up.

When we got there, we found the Denizens cheerfully chowing down on chicken nuggets and French fries.

There are times when you just want to hug people. The way we’re working things now, my husband will drop me off at the house to start dinner while he goes to get the kids – then, when they all get home, it’s less than twenty minutes until food is on the table.

That’s only twenty minutes of the kids yapping and yammering about how “starving” they are. I don’t know what’s up with that lately, but it seems like all four of them are constantly hungry – and when they sit down and start eating, they’re actually packing away the food. Usually I can get away with preparing a meal for four and we’ll have leftovers – these days, I actually have to plan for six “adult sized” portions of food if I want to have any leftovers…which I generally do, because that’s how I get lunch the next day.

Anyway, I’m sitting there in the car with a nasty head cold clamping down on my sinuses, thinking, Great. And we have to go straight to the sitter’s because we’re LATE, and then when we get home it’ll be an HOUR before dinner is ready, and then we’re eating at eight o’clock and maybe I’ll just order in a pizza…

(I love pizza. I truly love pizza. I could eat pizza for breakfast, lunch and dinner pretty much forever and ever. And I don’t like my own homemade pizza that much – I like pizzeria pizza. I’ve never been able to replicate it at home. Oh, my pizza is OK, sure, but…the Real Deal, with that thin chewy crust, tangy sauce, double cheese, and…you know what? I’m going to shut up about it now, ‘kay?) (My parents got me hooked young, at a place then called Vince’s, now [watch out for sound on this link if you’re at work!] Gaspare’s…still there, still awesome the last time I went [which was WAY too long ago, and if I were a dutiful blogger I should totally go back and check them out again, you know, purely in the interest of science and accurate reviewing, because LORD FORBID, they might have gone way downhill in the couple years since I last went and I would hate to be passing along an inaccurate review…yeah…I totally need to arrange a trip to Gaspare’s, like, today, maybe…], if you’re in or around San Francisco, you should totally go.) (But don’t tell me about it. Especially if you get the one with the ground chicken, which I think was called Chicken Garibaldi?, because ohmygah, I can taste it right now, soooooo goooooooooood…) (Stop. Tama, seriously. STOP this madness, right now…)

ANYWAY. When I got home and the kids were sitting around the table making Happy Noises eating dinner, and she was all, “Wellll, I couldn’t very well feed my kids, but not them, too, you know? They were hungry and I knew you were in that traffic jam so…I hope you don’t mind that I…”

Do I mind? Seriously? Do I mind?

Honey, Angel, Best Choice In A Sitter EV-AH©, I could kiss you right now.

And if I didn’t have a nasty cold obviously starting its Reign of Terror in my system, I would have.

I’ll make the pot pie tonight instead. I’m kind of thinking “modified Hollandaise sauce” for the base gravy – something with that buttery-citrus flavor, but not quite as heavy as Hollandaise generally is. A little less butter, probably, and with the stock I just made adding more chicken punch to things.

It’ll either be awesome, or it will suck mightily. Kitchen adventures are often like that, you know? Something sounds good, but then between the idea and the end product there’s a…glitch or two.

Or there isn’t, and it’s perfect the very first time you try it.

We shall see how this one works out.

Tomorrow, I’ve got a 15 pound beef roast going into the oven.

Yes. Fifteen pounds. Our new Raley’s store had these beautiful beef sirloin roasts on sale for $1.77 a pound – the whole roast was only $26!

But actually, it cost me nothing, because I had a coupon from Raley’s where if you got a prescription filled they gave you a $50 gift card…thanks to Captain Adventure’s sinus infection, I had a new prescription!

So! I got the roast and some special treats for the family – crackers, yogurt and tortilla chips!

I was verrrrrrry popular around here for a while.

Anyway, tomorrow we’re having some folks over, so I’m going to roast most of it (and put what lean I do trim off to neaten the roast through the grinder for some fresh ground sirloin), and we’ll have a wonderful roast for lunch tomorrow…then I get to play with my new-to-me deli slicer and we’ll have roast beef sandwiches for lunch next week!

I’m so excited about that, I’m planning to make some crusty sandwich rolls to put it on.

(I also love roast beef sandwiches. Almost as much as I love pizza – and I get it almost as rarely, because I’m so danged cheap fiscally sensible (snort!) that whenever I see a $7-per-pound price tag on the raw ingredient, I get spooked and say, “What’s wrong with a nice slab of baloney, anyway?”)

I also may have to run back to Raley’s again this weekend, because I got another coupon from them where you get a free turkey with a $50 purchase – I could get two more of those big special-priced roasts and a free turkey! I wouldn’t try to freeze a roast that size as-is, but would slice one into smaller roasts and put the other through the grinder – at $1.77 a pound, it’s worth the effort.

The brand new usual

First things first: Captain Adventure is a new man. I have to say, that super-expensive antibiotic does indeed work better in fewer days than I’m used to Augmentin working.

Also, he likes it better…when I add a drop of food coloring to it. I think he hated the taste when his infection was in full-swing, but I noticed his protests yesterday were kind of…not real. Like he was protesting because he thought he should rather than because he really didn’t like the taste. Same thing this morning. So tonight, I added a small drop of red food coloring to it (it’s supposed to be strawberry flavored, but is a white liquid) and guess what?

He loves it. LOVES it! It’s delicious! It’s the best pink medicine ever!

Kids. Go figure.

ANYWAY. Today was my first day at the new job. This whole thing has been a lot like riding a bike after a few years away – full of false starts and “oh yeah, pedals” and “oh…right…don’t squeeze only the front brakes…”

The hardest part for me has been getting used to the concept that I’m going to be away from the Den most weekdays. Yesterday I kept thinking, No problem, I’ll do that tomorrow…oh wait… or Well, Friday I’ll…oh…no, no I won’t…

Before I got started this morning, I had some jitters. It’s been a while since I worked outside the confines of a firm, for one thing – I wasn’t an independent worker, I was a member of a consulting team. The client often didn’t even know my name, let alone my face, my individual skill sets or whether or not I was the one who pulled the rookie move of firing off that SELECT * FROM MASSIVE_TABLE query that locked down the database for six days.

Whoopsie. (Actually, that one wasn’t me…but I did pull one where I had an unhandled error buried deep in a convoluted whack of script that created a lovely never-ending loop because the IF never found its THEN…yeah…that one was fun to troubleshoot…)

ANYWAY. It didn’t take long before I was finding myself thinking, I know this…I really do…

Which was no real surprise because I’ve worked for this client, off and on, for a lot of years.

A lot of years.

Like, 23 of them.

Yeah. You might say we have a certain history, which means that when it comes to data structures, policies, acronyms and such…I have a certain advantage.

Largely because of my history with this client, I’ve also had a tendency to keep an eye on the news pertaining to the entire industry – which means I’m already aware of the merger in question, some of the more (ahem) interesting facets of it, and ways in which “my” company differs from the one they acquired.

So it wasn’t long before I was feeling like I had a pretty good handle on what was going on.

Which felt both weird, and very comfortable. Like I know exactly what we’re talking about but wait! Shouldn’t this be…you know…harder…to understand…?

It’s strange how these things can go. On the one hand, it’s very strange. Dropping the Denizens at the babysitter’s house in the morning…the eerie quiet of the commute, with nobody shrieking from the backseat, no little voices quarreling or singing or telling endless stories.

And there is a jolt that happens around 2:00, when my body-clock suddenly starts screaming, “Time for the first pickup!!”, but I don’t have to jump in the minivan and start charging off from Den to School 1, School 1 to School 2, School 2 back to School 1, then home-again-home-again-lickity-split to beat the bus…

My body doesn’t quite know what to do with the information that I don’t need to, you know…get moving. It got kind of hyper on me, then it got kind of lazy and wanted a nap, and then it said, “You know what would be good? Chocolate. Downstairs. Here. Let me draw you a map, because remember how we worked in this building back in 1999-2000 (different division, different floor, same building), and there was that little chocolate nook? Ya, still there – saw it on the way in…”

The biggest challenge I’m going to face at this gig isn’t going to be the database work. It’s going to be the part where my brain draws little maps from where I am to everything from cheap dim sum to expensive crepes, and then informs me that if I walk “briskly” I could totally hit most of them in a single lunch hour.

It’s a rough life, but somebody’s got to live it.

Then I came home and made dinner. Because nothing says “oh yeah, real life…” like coming home to a swarming horde of Denizens who walk through the door already yapping, “Starving! Starving! Starving! Starving!”

Which they always are, in spite of having eaten two snacks at the sitter’s house in the three hours they spend there after school.

I thought in the interest of keeping myself honest and to avoid a nightly call to the pizza delivery place public education, I’d try to post what I’m throwing together for dinner around here on these working evenings. I don’t guarantee I’ll always make it, because you know what? I’m tired, and it’s getting late, and tomorrow is coming like a speeding locomotive. I suspect I’ll be awfully good about it Monday, with severe faltering by Wednesday and flat-out “can’t…tired…bed now…post later…” by Friday.

But I’ll give it a college try, anyway.

So! Tonight, we had lemon butter baked chicken, mashed potatoes and a bok choy stir fry. The spuds came from the farmer’s market a couple weeks ago (and really needed to be used), but the bok choy came from our own backyard – along with the garlic and lemon juice.

In other news, it’s amazing how “too much” of something like bok choy or spinach ends up being far less impressive after being cooked. I harvested that mini-field of bok choy and thought, Wow, I hope we can use all this before it goes bad… and then tonight it was, Oh…wow…I hope there’s enough for all of us…

Thanks to the Denizens distrust of anything green and leafy, there was plenty.

For me, anyway.

Here’s the recipes…if they can be called recipes, when really this was just me throwing stuff in the general direction of the heating implements and hoping for the best.

Lemon-butter baked chicken

1 whole chicken, cut into eight serving pieces, skins on (just trust me – you can peel them off later if you loathe them)
~1 tablespoon lemon juice
8 small pats butter, smooshed kind of flat
Salt and pepper to taste

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Arrange the chicken pieces skin-up in a 13x9 baking dish. Sprinkle lemon juice evenly over the top, then add salt and pepper to taste. Take the smooshed butter pats and smear them under the skin of the chicken. (I believe the original recipe I’m sort of basing this on had you mixing in the lemon juice with the butter, blah blah blah – this works just fine and takes less time.)

The butter not only adds flavor and tenderness, but buys you a free pass. Technically, you “should” baste every ten minutes with the pan juices, but, uh, well. Distractions happen, and the butter will help prevent this from becoming a tragedy.

Put in the oven for 20-30 minutes, until you’ve got cooked chicken – the breasts will tend to cook faster than the legs and thighs, so be ready to pull the breasts out and keep them warm while those thicker pieces finish up.

Mashed Potatoes

Super basic recipe here.

6 medium potatoes
1-3 cloves garlic (if you like)
Pot of water
1/4 cup butter /margarine
1/4 cup milk (more or less to taste)
Salt and pepper to taste

Fill a pot large enough to hold all your potatoes with water and set it over high heat to start heating. Peel and quarter the potatoes (unless they’re huge, in which case, uh, six-tize them – the goal is even-sized pieces that will cook relatively quickly), and drop them on into the heating water. I haven’t found any significant difference in quality between waiting patiently for the water to be all-the-way boiling or dropping them in while you can still do it with your bare hand, so in the interest of saving time I just heave ‘em in as soon as they’re cut. If you want garlic, go ahead and put it on in there as well.

Bring to a boil, then reduce to a simmer and ignore for fifteen to twenty minutes. When you jab one with a fork and it breaks apart without a fight, they’re ready. Drain, remove the garlic if you prefer a “hint” rather than a “strong presence” of garlic, add the butter and milk, and mash away – with a potato masher or with your electric mixer. Add salt and pepper to taste.

Gingery Bok Choy

~ 1 tablespoon oil
2-3 cloves minced garlic
2 teaspoons fresh minced ginger, or 1/8 teaspoon dried powdered ginger
4 cups washed bok choy, coarsely chopped
~ 1/4 cup water

Heat the oil over medium heat. Add the garlic and sauté until mellow and golden brown. Add the ginger and heat until fragrant, then raise the heat, add the bok choy and the water. There will be a burst of steam, and the bok choy will almost instantly go from 4 HUGE cups to “ohmygawd…is that enough for four people?!”

There is a technicality with bok choy you might want to observe: The white cores take a little longer to cook than the leafy green parts. Some people discard the white parts, which is a crying shame – I think it’s better to simply separate them when chopping, and sauté the white parts with the garlic. That also mellows the “extra” bitterness that can sometimes make an appearance in that part of the bok choy, especially if it’s fully mature like mine was tonight. (I couldn’t bear to harvest them for a while…they were just so cute…)

The total time to get this from fridge to plate was about 40 minutes.

But wait…one more thing…

After I’d cut the chicken into serving pieces, I put the carcass (still pretty heavily loaded with meat) into the crock pot along with an onion, more garlic, some dilapidated celery and a carrot from the bottom of the crisper, added water to cover, and set it on ‘low’ to start making some stock; I’ll also be reclaiming the meat from those bones, adding it to the leftover meat from dinner tonight and using it for tomorrow’s dinner.

Which I’ll tell you about tomorrow, if I can stay awake long enough.

Try to contain your excitement…