“Remoted” – Workday 114 / Day 163 (Wednesday)

This morning I woke up and didn't know what day it was. There isn’t enough variety to the days to differentiate, so it’s surprising this hasn’t happened more often with the five-going-on-six month of sameness to the days. The wardrobe rundown isn’t always super helpful, as I seem to wear stuff on repeat a lot. 

In bed, half asleep, I tried to remember the last thing worn during daylight hours and fill in the clues from there. It was a long sleeve cotton print shirt and olive capris. That helped. It’s a thin summer weight cotton shirt that was still too hot and I was sweating through our team video meeting, so that would have been Tuesday or Thursday. We talked about work projects, so that means it was the Tuesday meeting, and today must be Wednesday. Oy. That was a lot of thinking before coffee. I showered and dressed in a fresh new outfit to hopefully create some strong markers for the day. 

Dogs on National Dog Day.

Work, work, blah, blah, then it was suppertime. There was an English cucumber and no other traditional garden salad ingredients on hand, so it was time to try the “Smashed Cucumber Salad” recipe I recently found when searching for "English cucumber recipes." I have no idea why English cucumbers are sold shrink-wrapped in plastic, but it came in handy today. Step one to the salad recipe is “wrap cucumber in plastic and smash with a mallet until slightly flattened.” Done and fun.

According to the lengthy dissertation preceding the recipe, smashing releases something in the flavor that doesn't happen with just cutting. Whatever. It was smashed with a metal meat mallet, removed from the plastic, cut, and drained. An hour later it was added to the dressing. It tasted okay and was easy to make, but I wouldn’t fall all over myself to have it again.

Today being National Dog Day, the word dog was top of mind even more than usual. The wacky word association game had me soon craving a hot dog. Luckily, there were some in the fridge, for possibly the second time in four years, bought on a whim the last time I was in a grocery store. It was boiled hot dog, steamed bun, and cucumber salad for the win. Of course, it was not without incident.

Dog day supper and a scorched towel.

To steam the mostly still frozen bun I put a too large cooling rack over the too small pan of water cooking the hot dog, and a dish towel over the bun to trap the steam. Really, it should have been a proper steaming basket and a larger pan, but there was no time to go shopping for these things. Yankee ingenuity is a handy thing. Canine Overlord Winston demanded to go out. After the door and gate opening duties, which can be done in 30 seconds when properly motivated, I checked the food. Good thing.

Somehow, the towel was already scorched. Clearly, I should not be left without adult supervision. And why does this only happen to the good towels and never to the crappy ones? The bun, oddly, was still frozen in the middle and ended up in the microwave. The fire hazard was removed and by then, the outside dog was barking to come back in. Re-entering the house showcased the stench of the scorched dish towel to maximum effect. Yuck. It might be a great candle fragrance if you want to keep people away. 

With proper folding, the scorched section of the towel can be hidden when hung on the oven door or the refrigerator handle, which is good, because the quality of new dish towels is awful. The newest ones I have look nice, but they don’t absorb the water, they just rearrange it on the dishes. Looks like the few effective ones will be clung to until I’m dead. 

Supper was good, but I wished there were some potato chips to really make it special. So, I made brownies. The logic holds. There are no chips here presently, nor anything that could be baked or fried to resemble a chip, but there was brownie mix. Work with the tools at hand. Nothing was scorched during the brownie bake, so at least that was a win. And brownies smell better than scorched dish towels.