First back to work week of 2022

Oh January. It’s cold, the news is awful, and I’m having a hard time NOT feeling like things are getting worse than ever, as well as personally losing it, lowering my standards.

I spent this back to work week feeling like I was hardly working; rather than updating syllabi and getting my online classes up and running, I spent a lot of time sending email related to student internships (one of my classes – most of the almost 40 students I have are set with placements but there’s a handful that we’re still working on), cleaning up email in general, replying to Saleforce inquiries, and other administrivia.

I went into the office for a few hours on both Monday and Wednesday, but generally have been permitting myself an easy schedule with plenty of stepping away from the computer, like going along on Mark’s long walk on Monday and Friday, and taking breaks to sit at the kitchen counter and read, or on the couch with the cat. I didn’t really need to go in to the office at all – we’ve been told that due to the Covid spike we can work remotely, regardless of what our remote work agreements say. Except Monday I had a Covid test on campus (negative, yay!), and needed to do some work-related printing, and Wednesday I had an in-person meeting and the cleaners came, so I wanted to vacate. This coming week, I think I am going to go completely remote, but maybe I’ll try for a stricter schedule.

But this is what all the self help advice is telling us, right, as we enter the third year of pandemic? Give ourselves a break – no guilt.

Saturday, besides doing mountains of catch up laundry (see washer fixed, under Tuesday, below), I paid the property taxes, AND located both last year’s and this year’s receipts. I also reduced the the holiday wreath to what I think the city would classify as yard waste, that I’ll have to take to a drop off place on a weekday. I didn’t want to just throw it in the trash, and the city pick up won’t take wreaths with the trees. I pulled the greenery off the wire form, and and most the branches are less than 18 inches, which would make them brush.

Sunday I filled out my passport application – my current one expires August of this year. Got an app to take the picture, filled out the form, wrote my check. Now I need to take it to the post office to send it with tracking, which seems a little dumb, like maybe instead of renewing by mail I should of done a drop-off site which is most post offices but oh well.

I feel guiltier about not documenting, not taking pictures, not writing – because while I do understand that the world hardly needs the musings of another privileged 60-something white lady, to a certain extent that doesn’t really matter, because to that certain extent, this blog is for me – my journal of food & cooking, my recipes.

So here’s what we got –

On Monday and Tuesday, I started slow. Monday it was freezing and instead of walking with Susan, I walked with Mark, then walked downtown later to do my printing and Covid test, which meant I walked 8 miles Monday, which I should feel good about.

I liked the light in the bathroom Monday morning and played around taking pictures.

I made the leftover Christmas roast beef into a goulash with cabbage, I think that was Monday, and we ate it for dinner with corn bread left from New Year’s Day. On New Years we had had Hoppin’ John, and roasted sweet potatoes and squash, and creamed spinach left from Christmas dinner, and the corn bread, but no pics from New Years or Monday.

Tuesday I started the day volunteering at the Goodman food pantry. I took a big bag of candy and sweets to donate, stuff that people gave us over the holidays, like the Harry & David cookies that my friends in Pittsburgh who don’t bake so much anymore, send. And looking at the donations I was putting in the shelves a lot of other people did the same thing.

I also took a big foil pan filled with bagged leftover cookies for my fellow volunteers. Again, no pics, but it looked a sorta like this, last years leftovers for people to grab from the porch. Somewhere I have a picture that Terese took of me serving the bagged cookies at the pantry meal, but I can’t find it.

I came home and ate oatmeal for breakfast.

Tuesday dinner was a southern style bacon mac&cheese from Emeril, by way of Martha’s Everyday Food. It’s got evaporated milk and eggs and grated cheese, no white sauce and no pics either. And coleslaw, the last of the big head of green cabbage from my Tipi Thanksgiving box, and a cute little head of purple cabbage from the pantry a few weeks ago, before Christmas.

I didn’t get any exercise Tuesday aside from bending and lifting in the pantry, never went for a walk – but trying NOT to feel guilty about that.

And oh, yea, the big thing Tuesday was the washer got fixed! It’s been broken since December 19th – it stopped spinning on the last load of tablecloths from the cookie party. So I spent a bunch of time catching up on laundry on Wednesday and Thursday.

Wednesday I went to work taking a hunk of the New Year’s Day coffee cake with me, and some fruit.  I can’t remember what we had for dinner  – I think it might’ve been the night I made the roasted chicken and squash soup, a Martha idea, roasting the chicken and squash and onion, and pureeing with broth for the soup.  I tried to make a half batch and it didn’t work that well, the onion burned, and it was too thin. I added some roasted sweet potato that was also a New Year’s Day leftover, and corn, and that saved it.

Thursday I ate the last of the Hoppin’ John for late breakfast with an egg on top – well, that’s except for the bowl of it that’s in the freezer. It was good, but really too big of a midday meal – I just wanted to sleep after that.

I made avocado, chicken, and ranch wraps for dinner, that were well-received by Mark and Maja, but since I’d eaten that big earlier meal, I wasn’t really hungry enough to enjoy mine. And we had warm M&M cookies; have to do something to use up those red & green M’s I bought to put in the spritz cookies. No pictures, but this is them, from 2018.

Friday was leftover night, and tonight is the King Arthur pan pizza, top recipe of 2020.

And a few random other shots from the week.

And friends, family, good meals, and cups of coffee. We’ll get through this.