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You Know the Drill
Oct. 15th, 2020 09:56 pmAnother week down.
It got hot again, dangit.
My pepper plant keeps dropping flowers, I assume due to the heat. But this week two are hanging on after the petals fell off. Here's hoping there are some jalapenos in the works.
Most of my week was straightforward. There are some pretty big changes happening at work, like big enough to probably change our job descriptions after a few months. I'm going to be helping to train people in those changes, and frankly I'm a little nervous about it. So I went around on Monday and visited the training rooms in the office, and made sure I knew how to access all of the equipment I'd be using. Doing this got me some weird looks from my coworkers, which honestly kind of perturbed me a bit. I mean, if you were giving a presentation on something fairly new in a room you'd only been in once and using equipment and files you'd never touched before, wouldn't you want to at least give everything a once-over beforehand?
All I did was go into the training rooms, ensure that I knew where the programs were that I would need to access, and login to each computer (when logging in to a new computer at work it can take a while for your profile to be uploaded so doing it in advance saves like 3 minutes). Then I went back to the call floor stations and ran through some demo scripts that I'll be using for the presentations. That's it you guys! Nothing weird! Sheesh. Doesn't anyone prepare for stuff in advance any more?
That was my big excitement for the week, the rest was normal. I am sneakily preparing some of my boyfriend's gifts as his birthday is coming up. No details here because I'm not sure if he still reads this ;)
On Tuesday after I finished work we moved all the deck furniture off the pool patio, because on Wednesday someone is coming to power wash it for us. I moved all of my plants to the side of the house, but left the large planter because we decided it's too difficult to move.
After that we ordered a pizza and I made wings in the air fryer. Love those air fryer wings! Zero oil required, I just toss them lightly in the sauce, cook for 20 minutes, then coat in the sauce and cook for another 5. They come out perfect every time, crispy skins just the way we like 'em! We also enjoyed some beer from a local Tampa brewing company. One of Jameson's friends introduced us to this beer last Fall, so we've been looking forward to it's arrival. I was finally able to find some last week. I don't drink beer often at all but this beer is worth it: it tastes like coffee and chocolate and pumpkin spices and it's just fabulous. Cheers!
We watched an episode of Haunting of Bly Manor before Jameson had a Call of Duty hang with his friends. Although it's not cooling off here in Florida yet, watching scary movies and shows puts us in the mood for the season :)
On Wednesday the deck guy came around 10am and got to work. It took several hours because he had to wait for the power wash to dry and then the layers of sealant. In between layers I drove to the grocery for dinner ingredients, and mostly just hung around the house for the day. Jameson also didn't have much to do so he played Doom and did some work in his studio.
When the deck was finally done it looked awesome, super clean. I forgot to take a "before" picture, bummer!
Doing this is very expensive, like to the point where I question affordability. But for now I think it's worth gritting my teeth and getting it done. It keeps weeds from coming up between the bricks, and prevents ants from making nests in there too. Gets rid of a lot of mildew and things that build up over the course of the year. Florida humidity breeds tons of nasty stuff no matter what we do to prevent it.
Anyway, with that done I got started on dinner. Last week I discovered that Cooking Comically recipes are now available on WebToons, and there are many recipes featured there that are not in the cookbook. I found one for salmon in a lemon honey butter garlic glaze and decided to try it out. The recipe calls for baked salmon but years ago, after my first bite of sous vide salmon, I swore I'd never bake salmon again. So I sous vide the salmon with some herbs and the lemon/honey/garlic, then when it was done I seared it hard and coated it in the remaining glaze. For a side I made a mushroom, pea and mint farro recipe from The Mediterranian Dish, we've paired it with salmon before and the earthy flavors of the farro and mushroom match nicely to the flaky citrus-coated fish. It was pretty delicious if I do say so.
Later on we watched more Bly Manor, then Jameson played Call of Duty with his friends while I had a fight with my computer (the audio jack is dying).
Thursday I woke up way later than usual. I've been extra tired all week, maybe some things are catching up with me!
After a nice breakfast I meal prepped and de-boned some chicken breasts for tonight's dinner (the grocery gave me bone-in breasts for some reason, I think the dude was new and I wasn't watching him bag it). In the middle of that the doorbell rang. It was one of Jameson's friends, dropping off the cookies he'd ordered from Quarantine Dessert Company! This is a startup run by two ladies who've lost their jobs with Disney and are trying to earn some income. Fortunately they are wonderfully talented bakers, so they've been getting a lot of orders! They usually sell out within a few hours of opening for orders.
Jameson got us six pumpkin spice cookies, and six salted chocolate chip cookies. Man are they delicious. I can tell they use a butter-based recipe because the cookies are fairly flat, soft and chewy. Mmmmm.
These cookies are really big so I usually cut them in half and eat half at a time. Since there are so many I'll probably throw some in the freezer after a few days to help preserve them.
The rest of the day was pretty chill. I cleaned the shower and did a few resistance band exercises and watched anime. Jameson played some games and watched concerts on YouTube and helped his students when they needed it. In the afternoon we went for a walk and talked about various things, like we do. Then we came home and got showers, and while he worked with a student I started on dinner.
It turns out that the air fryer makes some excellent chicken parm! I gave the chicken the ol' flour-egg-crumb dip, preheated the air fryer to 360, and cooked two pieces of chicken at a time for 6 minutes. Flipped them, added a dollop of basil marinara and mozzarella, then back in the air fryer for another 6 minutes. They turned out absolutely perfect, crispy on the outside and perfectly cooked on the inside. I boiled some whole wheat penne and made a salad and garlic knots for the side (the garlic knots were store bought).
After dinner we cleaned up and watched a little TV together: The Final Table, which is kind of an international version of Iron Chef + Chopped, and some more Bly Manor. Man that show is getting intriguing! Then we had cookies for dessert, and while Jameson played Call of Duty I wrote this blog post and chased a fly around the kitchen, hoping to feed it to my venus flytrap or sundew. I did catch the fly and put it in a bag with the carnivorous plants, but I think the sundew was too small to hold such a big bug and the flytrap wasn't hungry. I came back a few hours later to find the fly drowned in the water at the bottom of the bag. I suspect it got tangled in the sundew's sticky goo and fell down there, couldn't get out, and drowned. Lame.
On the other hand, my sundew is making goo! I've been worried about it because for the first few days after I got it home it was looking pretty dry. It's too hot for these plants outside and too dry for them in the house, so the best I can do for now is to stick them in a ziploc bag with the top open and leave them in the window to get some sun. The bag helps to replicate the humidity they're used to in a greenhouse. Hopefully once it starts cooling off I'll be able to put them comfortably outside. The fact that the sundew has started producing digestive juices again is a good sign that it's comfortable for now. yay! And it looks so pretty <3
It's been another week of the usual.
Tomorrow I work from home, and we'll start putting furniture back on the deck.
Saturday I have my first presentation at work, wish me luck.
Sunday is my "extra day off" for the month of October, no plans so far.
Monday, work in person. Tuesday, work from home. And then another weekend.
Pretty soon Halloween will come, so I'm looking into places to get pumpkins and researching how to make the best seeds.
We also want to make caramel apples, and I want to roast some Japanese pumpkin in the air fryer.
What should I make for dinner next week?
It got hot again, dangit.
My pepper plant keeps dropping flowers, I assume due to the heat. But this week two are hanging on after the petals fell off. Here's hoping there are some jalapenos in the works.
Most of my week was straightforward. There are some pretty big changes happening at work, like big enough to probably change our job descriptions after a few months. I'm going to be helping to train people in those changes, and frankly I'm a little nervous about it. So I went around on Monday and visited the training rooms in the office, and made sure I knew how to access all of the equipment I'd be using. Doing this got me some weird looks from my coworkers, which honestly kind of perturbed me a bit. I mean, if you were giving a presentation on something fairly new in a room you'd only been in once and using equipment and files you'd never touched before, wouldn't you want to at least give everything a once-over beforehand?
All I did was go into the training rooms, ensure that I knew where the programs were that I would need to access, and login to each computer (when logging in to a new computer at work it can take a while for your profile to be uploaded so doing it in advance saves like 3 minutes). Then I went back to the call floor stations and ran through some demo scripts that I'll be using for the presentations. That's it you guys! Nothing weird! Sheesh. Doesn't anyone prepare for stuff in advance any more?
That was my big excitement for the week, the rest was normal. I am sneakily preparing some of my boyfriend's gifts as his birthday is coming up. No details here because I'm not sure if he still reads this ;)
On Tuesday after I finished work we moved all the deck furniture off the pool patio, because on Wednesday someone is coming to power wash it for us. I moved all of my plants to the side of the house, but left the large planter because we decided it's too difficult to move.
After that we ordered a pizza and I made wings in the air fryer. Love those air fryer wings! Zero oil required, I just toss them lightly in the sauce, cook for 20 minutes, then coat in the sauce and cook for another 5. They come out perfect every time, crispy skins just the way we like 'em! We also enjoyed some beer from a local Tampa brewing company. One of Jameson's friends introduced us to this beer last Fall, so we've been looking forward to it's arrival. I was finally able to find some last week. I don't drink beer often at all but this beer is worth it: it tastes like coffee and chocolate and pumpkin spices and it's just fabulous. Cheers!
We watched an episode of Haunting of Bly Manor before Jameson had a Call of Duty hang with his friends. Although it's not cooling off here in Florida yet, watching scary movies and shows puts us in the mood for the season :)
On Wednesday the deck guy came around 10am and got to work. It took several hours because he had to wait for the power wash to dry and then the layers of sealant. In between layers I drove to the grocery for dinner ingredients, and mostly just hung around the house for the day. Jameson also didn't have much to do so he played Doom and did some work in his studio.
When the deck was finally done it looked awesome, super clean. I forgot to take a "before" picture, bummer!
Doing this is very expensive, like to the point where I question affordability. But for now I think it's worth gritting my teeth and getting it done. It keeps weeds from coming up between the bricks, and prevents ants from making nests in there too. Gets rid of a lot of mildew and things that build up over the course of the year. Florida humidity breeds tons of nasty stuff no matter what we do to prevent it.
Anyway, with that done I got started on dinner. Last week I discovered that Cooking Comically recipes are now available on WebToons, and there are many recipes featured there that are not in the cookbook. I found one for salmon in a lemon honey butter garlic glaze and decided to try it out. The recipe calls for baked salmon but years ago, after my first bite of sous vide salmon, I swore I'd never bake salmon again. So I sous vide the salmon with some herbs and the lemon/honey/garlic, then when it was done I seared it hard and coated it in the remaining glaze. For a side I made a mushroom, pea and mint farro recipe from The Mediterranian Dish, we've paired it with salmon before and the earthy flavors of the farro and mushroom match nicely to the flaky citrus-coated fish. It was pretty delicious if I do say so.
Later on we watched more Bly Manor, then Jameson played Call of Duty with his friends while I had a fight with my computer (the audio jack is dying).
Thursday I woke up way later than usual. I've been extra tired all week, maybe some things are catching up with me!
After a nice breakfast I meal prepped and de-boned some chicken breasts for tonight's dinner (the grocery gave me bone-in breasts for some reason, I think the dude was new and I wasn't watching him bag it). In the middle of that the doorbell rang. It was one of Jameson's friends, dropping off the cookies he'd ordered from Quarantine Dessert Company! This is a startup run by two ladies who've lost their jobs with Disney and are trying to earn some income. Fortunately they are wonderfully talented bakers, so they've been getting a lot of orders! They usually sell out within a few hours of opening for orders.
Jameson got us six pumpkin spice cookies, and six salted chocolate chip cookies. Man are they delicious. I can tell they use a butter-based recipe because the cookies are fairly flat, soft and chewy. Mmmmm.
These cookies are really big so I usually cut them in half and eat half at a time. Since there are so many I'll probably throw some in the freezer after a few days to help preserve them.
The rest of the day was pretty chill. I cleaned the shower and did a few resistance band exercises and watched anime. Jameson played some games and watched concerts on YouTube and helped his students when they needed it. In the afternoon we went for a walk and talked about various things, like we do. Then we came home and got showers, and while he worked with a student I started on dinner.
It turns out that the air fryer makes some excellent chicken parm! I gave the chicken the ol' flour-egg-crumb dip, preheated the air fryer to 360, and cooked two pieces of chicken at a time for 6 minutes. Flipped them, added a dollop of basil marinara and mozzarella, then back in the air fryer for another 6 minutes. They turned out absolutely perfect, crispy on the outside and perfectly cooked on the inside. I boiled some whole wheat penne and made a salad and garlic knots for the side (the garlic knots were store bought).
After dinner we cleaned up and watched a little TV together: The Final Table, which is kind of an international version of Iron Chef + Chopped, and some more Bly Manor. Man that show is getting intriguing! Then we had cookies for dessert, and while Jameson played Call of Duty I wrote this blog post and chased a fly around the kitchen, hoping to feed it to my venus flytrap or sundew. I did catch the fly and put it in a bag with the carnivorous plants, but I think the sundew was too small to hold such a big bug and the flytrap wasn't hungry. I came back a few hours later to find the fly drowned in the water at the bottom of the bag. I suspect it got tangled in the sundew's sticky goo and fell down there, couldn't get out, and drowned. Lame.
On the other hand, my sundew is making goo! I've been worried about it because for the first few days after I got it home it was looking pretty dry. It's too hot for these plants outside and too dry for them in the house, so the best I can do for now is to stick them in a ziploc bag with the top open and leave them in the window to get some sun. The bag helps to replicate the humidity they're used to in a greenhouse. Hopefully once it starts cooling off I'll be able to put them comfortably outside. The fact that the sundew has started producing digestive juices again is a good sign that it's comfortable for now. yay! And it looks so pretty <3
It's been another week of the usual.
Tomorrow I work from home, and we'll start putting furniture back on the deck.
Saturday I have my first presentation at work, wish me luck.
Sunday is my "extra day off" for the month of October, no plans so far.
Monday, work in person. Tuesday, work from home. And then another weekend.
Pretty soon Halloween will come, so I'm looking into places to get pumpkins and researching how to make the best seeds.
We also want to make caramel apples, and I want to roast some Japanese pumpkin in the air fryer.
What should I make for dinner next week?
