The Ramblings of a Mental Meanderthal

So if I get a calling (job) in Primary (kids' Sunday School), I can influence a few dozen kids to become feminists who do my bidding and use their limitless energy to take over a small country, yes? Awesome. I always wanted minions. Joking aside, I am not a child person. I am not a person who is thrilled at new interactions with an ex boyfriend who got a little creepy after the relationship ended. (I've been asked to be the music director, and he's the pianist.) But I am a music person. And I wouldn't get thrown into the deep end, because church will be via Zoom for at least another six months (probably), and I can learn the ropes in the interim. If I decide to do it. I can say no.

When I was 20, about to turn 21, I worked at a dry cleaners. The day before Thanksgiving, Dad drove me to work. I usually drove myself, but he needed the car that day. I walked in, and the boss put a frozen turkey in my arms. It had to weigh twenty pounds. I had no idea what to do with the damn thing. Dad had already left, and the turkey was bigger than our employee fridge. So it sat on the floor and defrosted, surrounded by an ever-increasing puddle of condensation. By the time Dad arrived, it had thawed through. Mom looked at it and decided we'd cook it instead of the smaller one she'd bought. (I don't remember what we did with the spare.) Because it was mine, she said I was going to cook it. I don't remember much beyond getting up early, being slightly freaked out by the innards inside the cavities, searching the exterior for feather remnants, and Mom looking satisfied that she wouldn't spend the whole day on her feet. She supervised and instructed, and she still

This is a take on "funeral potatoes," which is a Mormon thing. Someone I follow at Twitter asked for the recipe. I had to call Auntie to get exact quantities and sizes, as Mom's old recipe card is not very precise. INGREDIENTS 1 cube (1/2 lb) salted butter 1 can condensed cream of chicken soup, 10 1/2 oz. 16 oz. sour cream (pint) bunch of green onions, chopped (use all of the white and most of the green) 3/4 lb. shredded cheddar cheese (a good brand that melts well, like Tillamook) 2 1/2 lbs. russet potatoes, peeled, boiled, and cooled INSTRUCTIONS Peel the potatoes and cut into pieces about half the size of your fist. Do your best to make the potato sizes uniform on at least one axis; it doesn't matter if they are rounds in two or six inches in diameter, so long as the thickness is the same. Put them in a large pot, cover entirely with cold water, and throw in a tablespoon of salt or a bouillon cube (I like Knorr's vegetable). Put the pot on the stove on high hea

Warning: please don't expect me to be 100% coherent at 4 am. After four weeks of having a stationary bike and riding it most days, I finally sat down and Googled a few exercise terms to find out what kinds of cardio workouts there are and which ones I think would be best for me, how often I should do them, and all that. (The bike has an odometer to keep track of how many "miles" it's been ridden. I hit 75 miles tonight. 75 miles in less than a month; I am a boss . And then I Googled how many calories in a pound and in an ounce, and according to the bike's calorie counter, I lost a single ounce. That brought me back from any grandiose sense of pride.) My goal tonight was to maintain a speed of 10-11 mph in sixth gear (the bike has eight settings, with eight being the most difficult), and I probably managed it about half the time. The bike has pulse sensors in the handles, so if I grip it steadily for a full minute, I can get an idea of my pulse rate. (I hat

One of the categories in this year's Reading Glasses challenge is to annotate a book. I knew that taking notes from the book into a notebook would count, but I wanted to see what other options were, so I went to Google and YouTube. I watched a bunch of videos and read a few articles (a lot of the Google results have to do with annotating books for school) and came up with a system that mostly works. I take notes in a notebook. Anticlimactic after seeing some of the BookTubers' color-coded pen and post-it systems, but I don't want to leave residue on the pages, and there really isn't room to write in the margins, anyway. And I don't know what colors to assign to the content before I've read the book. So I chose to go for the simple option: the book, my notebook, and a black pen. My worst problem now is that I jump from book to book, reading several at a time, and I'm not sure how to handle that. I started a short story collection a month ago, and I am t

Since the civil unrest started several weeks ago, I've been listening more to Black voices via Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. This includes BookTube, which I consume but don't contribute to. (I'm too old and ugly to put my face out there for public consumption, which is why I blog.) One of the BT channels I have found is Ash at Bookish Realm. Ash is a Black woman and a librarian, and I really enjoy her content. She posted a video today on a "Mid-Year Freak Out," which is a thing I hadn't heard of ... but I love to talk about myself, so I will answer the questions below the link to her video. https://www.youtube.com/embed/Tm36IZ4pNl0 I've only finished 34 books so far, so there may be some books that answer more than one question. 1. Best book you’ve read so far in 2020 I'm not 100% sure on this one because I've read a number of really good books, but I'm going to say Pachinko by Min Jin Lee. This multigenerational story of a Korean fa

It can get too late to clean. Vacuums are loud, and apartment walls can be thin. But you can tidy around the clock! (Wheeeee.) Marie Kondo talks about tidying, and that is part of the cleaning process. What do I want to keep? What can I discard? What no longer has any use? What am I scared I'll need again someday and don't want to let go of? What we own and where we put it is tidying. But we shed skin and hair and we stomp them into the carpet, we spill and sneeze, cats track litter in between their toes, dental floss flings tooth goop onto the bathroom mirror, and soap scums up the shower. Taking care of that is cleaning. I've spent hours today gathering stuff and sitting with a recycling bin, trash can, and shred bin, and I decide what to keep-or-recycle-trash-shred. This is the verb I invented: KoRTS. I will continue to korts the bedroom until I am sleepy, but quiet hours are 9 pm to 9 am. My mess is big enough that I don't think I'll korts enough to be a

Because I'm not working and am too sick to sing, the most exciting thing in my life is that I have the spring cleaning bug. Circumstances have made it necessary, though. The toilet decided to stop working Monday night, and there was very icky stuff on the floor and in the tub by the time the plumber arrived Tuesday morning. It really wasn't that big of a mess, but the nature of the mess grossed me out. Neither Mom nor Dad was able to help, so I did a deep cleaning of the bathroom and hall yesterday. Two loads of clothes that had been touched by the yuck in the tub, so I was in the laundry room. I am easily distracted and take lots of breaks, so it took me over ten hours, start to finish. Now the bathroom is SPARKLING. I decided I might as well go all out, so I cleaned the ceiling and walls, outsides of cupboards, and got on my knees (ouch) three times to scrub the tub. The floor got mopped twice. Dad normally takes care of the dishes, trash/recycling, and his laundry. He di

WARNING: Here be swearing. So I follow a blog/Twitter/Facebook page called "Unfuck Your Habitat." The creator of the blogs is pretty sweary, and I sometimes am, too. So I didn't let the profanity deter me from a method of keeping my home habitable that might actually work. I will abbreviate the name of the blog and method to UFYH from here on in. I think UFYH started on Tumblr with photos people submitted of their before and after spaces. The creator also outlined her method, basically saying that you do what you can when you can. If you're physically or mentally disabled, neuroatypical, mentally ill, or emotionally disabled, you can still get stuff done. And something is better than nothing at all. Bringing in help is good if the help understands you make the decisions. Being of help to someone else is good, so long as you bring in kindness and leave judgment at the door. What to do when the people you live with don't feel it's their place to take care of m

Mom's out of town. Dad went to my cousin's to watch football. (He's back now.) I stayed home and did eight loads of laundry. No television, no conversation. In between trips to the laundry room, I sat in the living room and read or played sudoku. So quiet and pleasant to sit in the sunshine and read with a cat on my lap. It was idyllic.

No resolutions to 2020. Just trying to keep my head above water and find a job so my parents, cats, and I don't live in our cars. The temp job I mentioned almost a year ago is done. I'd got very good at it by the time my hours ran out -- eleven months will do that -- and I was sorry to leave. The boss tried to keep me, but they don't have the budget for it. I'd much rather be employed than not, and I would gladly take it if offered, but the position never felt like a place to settle, more like a step on the way to something else. Here's my Year in Books, as defined by Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/user/year_in_books/2019/38060115 My favorite books I hadn't read before were Becoming , Into the Drowning Deep , Internment , Circe , The Urban Cycling Survival Guide , and An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth . I read at least that much fanfiction as well, if you count repeats. I keep fanfic on a basic Kindle and read that before bed. I've fa