Odds and Ends

I love lazy Sundays! Oh, wait, this hasn’t been a lazy Sunday. Ha ha oh well. 

I was in Charlotte last week for work and struggled to sleep all week in the hotel. I got home late Thursday night and these last 3 nights I have slept so well in my own bed. It’s been glorious. 

We had a problem come up at work last week and I had to get some support help from our software company and while I was at the airport waiting for my flight, they told us what happened and it’s a really, really big mess. One of the members of my team was doing a relatively normal purge process to delete some data and I don’t know what happened, but she chose the wrong option or something and instead deleted over 300,000 applicants from our recruiting system. And since that’s my part of the system, I get to help fix it. I’m not even a little bit mad at the person. I feel terrible for her. And I feel relief that I didn’t make that mistake and I’m not her supervisor or manager. We are trying to reload some of the data and since I’m not much of a data person, it’s been a bit of a struggle but I’m getting through it. I worked 10 hours on Friday and almost 7 on Saturday.  On Friday afternoon I sent the person a message basically telling her to hang in there and I’m glad she’s part of our team. I just felt I needed to say something because I really am not mad at her. I told the people helping to load the data that I was offline today. I do need a break and I’m taking it today. We have a paid holiday for Veteran’s Day tomorrow and I’ll be working it, so I’m not working today.

We had our primary program in church today. I had taken a break from work yesterday to go to the practice and we did the thing today. The kids did so well. It was my day to play the organ and since I’m the primary pianist, I had double duty today. All my mistakes were minor and the kids remembered words and the places where the melodies changed and they just did really good. They didn’t need me for second hour so I came home. LOL I’m sure it should have stayed and gone with the adults but that took a lot out of me. It’s relief to be done with it, even though playing music for the primary is one of my favorite things. 

And now I’m going to go cuddle in a warm blanket in my library for an hour and then get ready to go to family dinner. I made pumpkin pie bars for dessert. Never made them before so hopefully they turned out ok. 

Salt?

Sometime in the middle of quarantine in 2020 I watched the show Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat on Netflix and I’ve been thinking about salt ever since. 

Here are 2 things about me:

1. I don’t like to cook. I’m awful at throwing things together and almost always fail if I don’t have a recipe to follow. I feel fortunate that I don’t have a family to feed and can get away with popcorn or cold cereal for dinner some nights. Having to cook for a living would be the most awful job I can think of. 

2. I cook anyway. Mostly from scratch because I like to know what I’m putting into my body. I avoid boxed and premade foods almost entirely. I will admit that when I cook something that tastes good and is good for me it makes me happy and I enjoy that feeling. Luckily, I’ve learned to eat leftovers so I don’t have to cook every day.

But back to salt… When my dad’s kidney failed and he went on dialysis, he had to cut sodium completely from his diet. My parents were empty nesters by that time but the whole family kind of went along with it when we had family dinners. The food we brought or mom made just didn’t have salt, or very little. It was a big switch at first. That first year when mom didn’t add salt to Grandma’s roll recipe we all mutinied and said the rolls must have salt! But you get used to it and I cut a lot of salt from my diet as well, even when I was by myself. I figured I was still getting plenty anyway and it was probably better for me. Since dad’s been gone, I have added some salt back into things but I think I still eat a lot less than average Americans. I usually don’t add the full amount called for in recipes and I don’t do the extra things like salt my pasta water. I never add salt at the table unless it’s mashed potatoes or popcorn.

I’ve been thinking about it though. Yeah, sometimes I make some tasty stuff, but it could be because those recipes had the right amount of salt or fat or whatever to make them taste good the way they were written.

I borrowed Samin Nosrat’s book from the library. The Netflix show was based on the book. I’m reading about things that can improve my cooking. So the other day I put salt in some ground beef I was cooking for enchiladas. It wasn’t even a lot, but wouldn’t you know, I swear the meat tasted…meatier. Now I’m thinking about trying it again with something else. Maybe I’ll salt the pasta water!  LOL

I still feel that I don’t need to add tons of salt back into my cooking, but maybe I can learn to add some where it counts to get good tasting food that is still healthy. Plus, if healthy eating is what I’m after, I need to look at sugar intake instead of salt.

Anyway, yeah I think I might buy myself some different types of salt this year and maybe improve my cooking skills. I’m still not gonna like doing it, but tasty results will make me feel better that I did it anyway.

 

Then and Now

I was listening to a podcast the other day about packing for traveling and these guys were giving their expert tips. I had to laugh out loud when the very first tip was to pack what you need and don't pack anything "just in case".  I used to be such a "just in case" packer. Seriously, it was bad. As proof, I found 2 pictures:

2006

Picture #1 is from my very first foreign trip with my sister. We went to Hong Kong and Singapore for probably 11 or 12 days and we both took 2 suitcases. To this day, we can't remember what we packed in them and why we each needed 2. Rookie mistake for sure.

2015

Picture #2 is from our trip to Vietnam and Cambodia. Everything was in my 33L day pack or the sling and that trip also lasted about 12 days. And yes, the Pringles are a necessity when traveling. Ha ha


I don’t always take the backpack; this year’s Scotland trip was done with a carryon size, but I am now down to 1 carryon or backpack and 1 small backpack or purse.  Some of it is because of a lot of work travel a few years ago and you learn real fast to pack light when you are stuck with luggage for hours at a time. The rest of it comes from more world travel where I’ve learned from experience that dragging a suitcase (even a small one) across cobblestone or uneven bricks is just not fun at all. I’m seriously considering the backpacks that are made specifically for travel and don’t have straps and are not top loading for wherever my next trip is. Anyway, it’s a funny memory and I’ve come a long way.

 

The Road Home by Ellen Emerson White

I recently finished the Echo Company series by Ellen Emerson White (I believe they were originally published under her pen name Zack Emerson).  I bought them on impulse from a kindle deal I heard about through a blog I enjoy reading.  I started the first one on the journey to Peru and quickly read through 3 of them on the plane.  I finished the last 2 after I got home. Then I went and checked out some books about the Vietnam War from the library.

I love it when something I read makes me want to learn more about real life things. We study the Vietnam War in school from a historical and political perspective but these books seemed so real in the details that I want to know what it was like to be there because it sounds horrifying and terrible and so very sad for the men and women who went there.

Anyway, I really enjoyed the whole series. I loved Michael and his gang of friends from the first time they meet. Michael tried so hard not to let them in because they could be gone in an instant. And some of them were. Then Michael meets Rebecca.  These two both go through so much and from the moment they meet I was hoping for a happy ending for them.

The Road Home is my favorite book of the series. I’ve already bought myself a used paper copy. It goes on the keeper shelf and the second half of the book has already been re-read multiple times.  It’s about Rebecca coming home from the war and how she deals with trying to get on with her life when she can’t get over her recent past. I loved it. I won’t say it has a happy ending, but it has a perfect ending.  Perfect, and hard, and hopeful, which is why it is one of the best books I’ve read all year and one that I’ll revisit often in the future.

CERT

I finished my CERT (Community Emergency Response Team) training class last night. We had our disaster simulation exercise and it was very interesting, and a lot of fun. We were in a warehouse and had a drama club from a local high school act as the disaster victims. They had been all bloodied up and were moaning and screaming and did a really great job of acting like they were hurt and in shock. I was on the rescue team and had some catching up to do since I missed that class while I was in Texas. I’ve never been in a disaster and it gave me a lot of things to think about.

I took the class because it was something to do outside of my comfort zone and I would like to be able to keep my head about me and help my family and neighbors in a disaster.  I didn’t study the information in the book as well as I could have although I do have it now for a resource. But I came away from the class with a couple things. First, I have an outline of a plan to get myself a little better prepared for an emergency and I want to sit down with my family and make sure we all get better prepared. And second, I won’t be any use to anybody doing medical triage or search and rescue. :) Even the sight of fake blood makes me a little queasy and I don’t deal so well with panic. So I’ll be working on clean up or somewhere else away from the bodies in the event of a disaster. And that’s ok. Better to work with my strengths and leave the other things to people better able to handle it. So all in all, it was a good experience and I learned some valuable things.

Now I’m trying to think of what I might want to do next. I genuinely like learning and trying new things.