random thoughts – Day 1,388 – (Thursday) – food calms

It has been a slightly sideways 24 hours. There was nothing huge, but there were many small hiccups.

Wednesday night had the big sciatica flare and the all too regular need to reset the cable box and endure the annoyingly lengthy log in process. The box needs to be reset approximately every 7 to 10 days. the toilet has begun acting weird again. 

This morning had an extra volume of regular work plus long-awaited reviews finally trickling in. This was complicated by quirks like misplaced files, images that suddenly display wonky on the website, and Word documents suddenly displaying old edits and markups in a review copy. There were photos for a project sent to my cell via text that needed to land on my work computer in what turned out to be a 57-step ordeal. 

Luckily, it was a remote day so I didn't need to leave the house this morning, because the next door neighbor had a refrigerator delivery which involved a big truck and it's platform lift thing blocking my half of the shared driveway and the refrigerator blocking their half for close to 30 minutes.

Around noon, the Internet cut out. It required a reset of the wifi router. After about 20 minutes, I was back online and the work day proceeded.

Later in the day, the dude in the house behind mine sounded worse than ever as he hung out the window smoking and coughing. He was slumped over the window sill in his high visibility neon green hoodie. Even later, the dude next door remote started his car and it sat running right outside my office window with the stereo blasting for about ten agonizing minutes. I wish I knew why the people with the loudest music never listen to any music I like.

By the time I logged off for the day, I was feeling kind of antsy and cooking seemed to be a good way to redirect focus. There was a sudden desire for veggies and rice in a korma sauce, like I had a week or so ago. The pantry had rice, the fridge had veggies, but there was no korma curry sauce. Veggies were cut – brussels sprouts, carrots, onion – and tossed into the cast iron skillet with butter and olive oil whole rice cooked, but I still didn’t quite know what I was making.

There were options. Something with salsa. Maybe with tomato sauce and cheese. Or just cheese.

Tasty stuff.

Then, inspiration struck. Soy sauce, sesame oil, hand grated ginger, red pepper flakes, garlic. While getting the jar of chopped garlic from the fridge the last quarter of a jar of sweet orange marmalade was spotted and that was tossed in, too. When the rice was done cooking, about three-quarters of it was stirred into the veggies in the skillet. 

It was great. Possibly one of my best recent food throw downs, and done in less than a half hour. There was a little bit of heat from the red pepper and some sweetness from the marmalade. Everything was unmeasured, so it will likely never be able to be recreated. Not quite the same way anyway. But that’s how I roll in the kitchen.

After the calm created by the food, it was time for the discovery of a few more quirks. There was a text from the provider that I had forgotten to pay the December cable bill. Oops. That might explain why I wasn’t penniless the past two weeks. And I thought it was excellent cash management. 

Despite my having forgotten to pay the bill, the TV and cable turned on okay, probably still fresh from last night's reboot, but the laptop held surprises. All the programs that used to log in automatically were asking for new logins. What used to take mere seconds to access after logging into the laptop took forever to remember or reset. There may have been some cuss words.