* I pulled the corner-to-corner blanket back out and started working on it again. It's nice to have a simple thing, sometimes, even if it takes like 15 minutes to complete a row because it's getting so big. I might work until it's either 4' on a side or I run out of the first ball of yarn and then start the decreases. The color coming up now is a peach/pale orange. I can't tell what will be next as the cake collapsed and I had to rewind it into a ball months ago and I can only see the outer layer.
* I made hoisin glazed chicken meatballs for dinner
They were pretty simple - a pound of ground chicken, a half cup of panko crumbs, some five-spice powder and smoked paprika and garlic powder, and a couple tablespoons of hoisin sauce and an egg (they were originally a recipe for a sriracha barbecue sauce but I didn't have that, and decided hoisin might taste better than plain bbq. I also put the five spice powder in in place of the cumin in the original recipe, and swapped in more crumbs for the shredded parmesan the original recipe called for). After baking them I mixed more of the hoisin with some rice vinegar and a small bit of sesame oil (to make it more liquid) and tossed the cooked meatballs in it and baked them for a few more minutes.
They were good
Next time I might cut up a few green onions and mix them in, too. I need to do more simple cooking for myself; I think part of the reason I get "down" some evenings is that I just kind of pick at quick-fix things for dinner and then I feel sad and not-taken-care-of. There are a lot of simple recipes out there (these took less than 10 minutes to mix up, and they baked while I finished my piano practice for the day) and I just need to motivate myself to make them. I also have the stuff needed for those black bean burgers I like; I could make a batch of those later this week. (This recipe made 12 balls so I have a couple more servings of this).
They'd probably be good over rice but I didn't feel like messing with rice so I boiled up some leftover gnocchi I had for a starch, and heated up some red cabbage from a jar as a vegetable.
* One more PT to go. The guy promised to get me some diagrams of the exercises I can do at home - I learned a new one today that I can tell works the obliques, which I need to work on (They get stiff and hurt and nothing can make you feel lousy and old like a messed up oblique) so what I need to do is figure out a good time of day to do these - ideally you warm up for 10 minutes before hand, and if I had enough time after the morning work out that would seem the best, but a lot of days that would mean getting up at 4:30 instead of 5 and I'm not quite willing to do that. Possibly what I could do would be to walk - even just in place - for 10 minutes when I get home and then do the stretches. (I suspect before bed might be a good time, relax the muscles).
He also commented - "Your face really flushes when you're working hard" and I laughed and said it was because I was Irish (I flush out in the heat, too, and I blush easily). He laughed and said "Well, you don't seem to have the stereotypical temper" and I laughed and said it was because I had worked on it. And yeah, I do have a temper, but the thing is - I've never been able to turn it against another person. On myself, yeah - I "yell" at myself all the time. Or inanimate objects - I've cussed out my share of printers, and once or twice when there were major supply-or-equipment failures in a lab I was teaching I excused myself for a moment and stepped outdoors and screamed, once, so I could go in and deal with it calmly.
When I want maybe to get angry at another person - or even in some cases where they might *deserve* a bit of a chewing out - I kind of sigh and speak very quietly and present it as "here can you do this to help me" or similar. Or I say things like "no, I'm sorry, that won't work" when a student is being unreasonably demanding.
I've had flashes of the old, quicker temper I once had (I got angry easily in grad school; I remember someone commented my cohort-mate Marc was calm and "to make him angry, that would be like p*ssing off a manatee" and I responded, "Yeah, and for me, it's like p*ssing off a raccoon" and they laughed because yeah, while I never yelled at any one, I did anger easily. And that kind of came back during the pandemic stress but I think it's getting better.
* Even though I do have a big tax bill coming due (the stuff I cashed in to pay for the renovations last summer) and I do have a few more payments towards the co-pays on the PT, I succumbed to temptation when I saw a good-condition vintage Garfield on Etsy similar to the one I had (I looked for it in my room when I was at my mom's and didn't find it) and yea, I kind of want a Garf now. He's like the one I had as a kid.
(And dangit, after I ordered, I realized I have a cedar chest in the basement with some other things of mine in it, and he might be in there if I still have him? I should look when I'm up there in May; I should try to travel light so I could carry a few things back with me like that. And yes, I'd have 2 if I still had mine, but then I'd have Old Garf and New Garf even though they are really both-the-same-age Garf.
But more and more, weirdly, I do feel a certain nostalgia for that era - sort of the mid-to-late 80s. I was in late junior high (which wasn't a good time, socially, for me) and high school (which was a lot better for several reasons) but there were a lot of pop cultural things that I remember fondly from that time - I've talked about Mrs. Grossman's Stickers (and sticker-collecting in general*) and the Smurfs and Garfield and that was when there was a resurgence of interest in teddy bears, partly because of the Bialoskys' books on them. And to me, those were all Good Things, sort of pleasant and comforting things. There were other things - I remember other comic strips I liked ("Calvin and Hobbes" started about that time, and "Mother Goose and Grimm," for example) and Strawberry Shortcake, and yes, the original run of My Little Ponies and Care Bears (I thought I was "too old" for them but always had secretly wanted a Grumpy Bear and now I have one! And also a giant neo-care-bear that is rainbow sherbet color and is called Kindness Bear or something similar, and her motto is "Dare to be Kind" which is close enough to the cadence of "Cruel to be Kind" (A song from just about that era, though I don't remember it and only learned of it lately) that I recently tried unsuccessfully to write a parody version called "Dare to be Kind")
(*Do kids still collect stickers - I mean real stickers, on paper sheets and everything, not "virtual badges" online? Or has that gone away? I remember reading a few years when people were proposing that toys were on the way out, to be replaced by just virtual online everything, and I guess some parents would like that - no Barbie shoes to be lost, or Lego bricks to step on - but I also think we lose something when we lose the tactile dimension, and several people in higher ed I've talked to have noted - as have I - that lab students seem to be less comfortable doing labwork now, and when you talk to the ones who really seem to enjoy it and have a knack for it, you learn that they grew up playing with Lego bricks, or building models, or doing dollhouses.....)
But I can't quite explain what it was. I guess those things were "safe" in the fact that they were designed to be "kid friendly." I think I mentioned before that my first foray at about 13 into the grown-up section of the library, I mistakenly selected a book that turned out to have some quite graphic sex scenes and some violence (it was teenagers in the 1950s! I didn't know teenagers "boinked" back then! And I didn't expect a couple of the kids to be in a gang!). Anyway, as a very innocent 13 year old, it put me off every "grown up" novel other than "classics" published in the 1800s (and therefore: unlikely to have anything graphic, though some books you can read between the lines) for a long time. (And I still do a quick test of a new-to-me author; I open the book to three random places and read a couple paragraphs at each point and if there's graphic sex or violence, back it goes on the shelf and I don't buy it or check it out. I don't care if other people do, it's just not for me)
So being able to retreat into something that felt 100% safe was good.
* Speaking of older novels: I started Elizabeth Gaskell's "Wives and Daughters." I'm only about 50 pages in but it's really enjoyable - it moves slowly and yes there's a lot of description and talkiness, which some people dislike, but which I enjoy. I guess later on Dr. Gibson remarries and is the target of a lot of gossip, but right now it's mostly centering on his (motherless) daughter Molly. And Molly seems a very shy and timid child, and her discomfort at a "fancy do" really made me feel for her- her feeling of being out of place, and being afraid to speak, and fearing offending people, and having something like rejection sensitivity - I relate to her.
And I need a character to cheer for or relate to in a book, and here she is.
* Sunday afternoon I sewed a bit more on the blocks for the long-stalled Jelly Roll quilt; I'm almost done with this but even with it being lighter late now (and so: easier to see in my sewing room; when it gets dark, even with the lamps, it's harder to work), I don't have a lot of energy when I get home, and also this is a pattern that requires close attention so you get the bits where they need to be, but I should have it done soon.
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