“Remoted” – Workday Twenty-Eight (Tuesday)

Some days and weeks go by quickly. Today was not one of those days and this does not feel like one of those weeks.

There was some down time between the major and important tasks today, so attention was turned to deleting old emails and files; chasing down loose ends on things not quite finished a few weeks ago before the special project; and mandatory online training/policy modules. The training is due to be completed by June 30, but hey, it’s all done now!

Back in the olden days before the pandemic, I signed up for our in-bank public speaking class, which would have been underway for a couple weeks now, but obviously that was cancelled, taking with it one of my performance goals for the quarter. Last fall, I came close to registering for the Certified Financial Marketing Professional exam in May (another goal), but there were a couple reasons that got in the way including a glitch when trying to buy the textbook and register for the exam on the website. It was annoying at the time, but now it feels like it was a stroke of good luck. It would have stunk to have been studying for an exam that wouldn’t happen, and then trying to get back into the exam prep groove months or a year later. Maybe next time.

The day started out sunny and nice, but then it got gray and the rain rolled in. It seemed to act like a sedative for the dogs and they spent a lot of time sleeping. It was a welcome break from their usual shenanigans and provided peace and quiet for the required reading of those positively riveting policies.  

Tonight’s kitchen experiment was Spaghetti Pie. For mysterious and unknown reasons, this morning a conversation about Spaghetti Pie that took place with a colleague from six jobs and roughly a million years ago popped into my head. His name was Tom and he visited his Mom for dinner regularly. He had told me she wasn’t a very good cook, but the one dish she made that he liked was Spaghetti Pie.

Deep dish Spaghetti Pie.

Tonight, I looked up a recipe for it. Basically it’s spaghetti, ground sausage, and sauce mixed with an egg to bind it, put in a dish, topped with cheese and baked. Mine had a bit too much sauce, indicating that maybe I should have read beyond the ingredients and paid some actual attention to the full recipe, but it was pretty good. 

Next time (if there is one), it will be less sauce and more cheese – like maybe some extra cheese layered in the middle because the only thing better than cheese is more cheese. And to Tom from that job in Worcester many moons ago, my apologies for having forgotten your last name and thanks for the random memory and the idea for dinner.

Spaghetti Pie is easy enough to possibly make the cut for my “COVID-19 Cookbook – Recipes for Never Leaving the House.” This imaginary masterpiece will really just be a lot of mediocre unstaged cell phone photos of random food made during this work from home/never leaving the house period, and one page of instructions along the lines of  “Look in your cabinets and fridge. Put some stuff in a pot/baking dish and cook it/bake it.” I don’t measure and half my stuff is made with ingredients prepared in bulk and tossed together later, so it will really be a brag book about “Hey, look what I did” (half the premise of Facebook) and the concept of "be loose, be free, it’s your danged kitchen." Whaddaya know, the book outline is basically done.

With the rain and the wind and the gloom, it’s the perfect night for hot cocoa and brownies while curled up on the couch with two fur babies (one of whom will have me up every ten minutes to open the door for him) and binge watching “Hart of Dixie” on Netflix. How did I not know know about this show before? Whatever. I know about it now, and it doesn't have subtitles, making it a most unusual selection that could really confuse the Netflix algorithm that suggests shows. After years of watching lots of subtitled Korean dramas, it almost feels like a miracle landing on a show that is in English.  But sometimes, I just don't feel like reading a show.