Tuesday was not a productive day

Monday I worked at the Douglass-Truth Library, and then walked to Capitol Hill, intending to go to the big QFC on Broadway and buy some food, get some cash, and also charge my orca card. I came to the Whole Foods first, though, and shopped there which turned out to be a bit of a tactical error, because it was more expensive than QFC would have been, and then I still had to stop at QFC to charge my orca card. Which also turned out to be something of a tactical error, too, because after I waited In a long line to charge up the card at QFC, I walked to the bus stop which is right next to the Capitol Hill Station, with tons of machines for charging cards. Oh, and I bought a carton of three salads at Whole Foods, kale, corn & black bean, and roasted squash, and it leaked.

But I came home and had a healthy dinner of roasted veggies; the kale, etc. leaky salads weren’t that good and went into the compost. Too raw garlic and onion-y, big hunks of scratchy kale stems.

Tuesday I drove out to Bellevue to have a late breakfast with an old friend from Madison, at his local – which is kind of a mom & pop, Chace’s Pancake Corral, which seemed appropriate since I know this guy because we were both cooks at a greasy spoon in Madison. Spudnuts on State St. It was a little different because we had a union, although, as I’ve been known to say, this union had like 75 members at its heyday and a union that small can’t do shit for its members.

We sat and ate and chatted pleasantly and then I drove over to the Bellevue Public Library, which was a very nice building and I even got a covered, free, parking spot, but when I went in and set up at a table, the WiFi sucked and I couldn’t even get email to download.

So I drove back to Seattle, and decided I’d do a little grocery shopping by car, because I needed toilet paper. I went to Grocery Outlet, “Gross Out” as my local family calls it, but they had zero recycled toilet paper. I almost bought a plastic bin of greens but after Chace’s waffle for breakfast I was deciding to go the all-sugar diet for the day, and wanted Ben & Jerry’s and Gross Out didn’t have that either. So I went back to the smaller 15th Street QFC and bought a carton of Jerry Garcia, a 12-pack of toilet paper, and some dried pineapple.

When I got back to the house, I took the dog out and worked a bit but ended up lying on the couch for most of the afternoon, and finished my day by binge-watching the last three episodes of Outlander and eating my Cherry Garcia.

Wednesday went better – got a reasonable amount of work done at the local library, ate a bagel at a Broadcast Coffee for late lunch, took the dog for two good walks. Took yet another pic of those left-on-the-tree apples up the street, that are so fascinating to me; I just can’t get any of the shots to look as good as the back lit wallpaper on my phone where the apples pop out, though. I also took and a bunch of pictures of bell peppers for my Garden Expo demo, and even got one big red pepper ironed onto muslin in the basement. This year instead of demoing how to cook your veggies I’m going to demo how to print your veggies on fabric and make that into stuff. A coin purse with collards printed on it – that I sent away to get printed – and an apron with the peppers that I’m ironing on.

And I baked a batch of scones, apricot and marzipan. They’re not very sweet, I didn’t add any extra sugar, just the sugar in the marzipan, and the sugar in one of the cartons of vanilla yogurt Mark bought when he was here. The marzipan was another Whole Foods problem – I wanted less-sweet almond paste and they only had marzipan. I had two small ones for dinner and then I ate one in the morning with more yogurt and jam.

And I guess – I bought all the photogenic peppers at Whole Foods, so they were good for that.