Last week was a quiet week; between a sick kid and a supertitle gig I spend most of last week at home. Trying to work, getting distracted, cuddling, and reading.
The week started with yet another sick child. The five year old had been running a fever all weekend. He’s a good patient and just lay on the couch all weekend, moving to his bed when he got tired of that. We had had plans to get the Christmas tree, and when he still wasn’t feeling better on Sunday, I sent the Husband and other two kids out to get the tree from our local fire station, where we always get our tree. They came home with a nice tall tree, the bifurcated top led the tree to be dubbed Maleficent by the ten year old.
While they were gone, I strung the outdoor lights. We have a motley assortment of lights and every year I try to remember how I strung them up the year before so that things don’t look too patchwork. We have red and white lights – those go on the front stoop. We have multi coloured lights – those go on the hedge. But those come in two sizes, so I have to be strategic on how those go on. Plus one set actually has a white light setting which we use after Christmas. Then we have one set of white lights that go on the witch hazel tree. Every year it seems like we have too many or not enough but then push, prod, and re-adjust and things work out. I need to just take a picture for posterity.
The lights for the tree were also kind of a saga. The Husband bought a new set of lights for our tree because one of our string of lights had that cliched section that didn’t light up. Unfortunately, the new strand was not the right quality of white light to match our existing strand, even though both were “warm white” light. The nuances of “warm white” baffles me. So I took our old light strand and swapped out light bulbs until I figured out the problem and managed to move the non-light up section to the end of the strand. Fine, we wadded up the non-light up section and pushed it into the middle of the tree. Lights went up on the tree. Not an hour after we put all the lights on the tree, the middle section of one strand went out. Argh!!!! By this point we were kind of over it and decided to leave everything. There is a swath of unlit tree in the middle of our tree, but we have decided just to live with it. I’m putting a reminder in my phone to buy new lights for next year.
Anyhow the rest of the week: Two days at home with a sick kid, with a trip to the pediatrician whose verdict was some kind of virus. We watched a lot of Snoopy. I tried to convince him to watch Steven Universe, but he was reluctant. I did watch one holiday movie as I worked – Steppin’ into the Holidays.
The the five year old got better just in time to go back to school for the scheduled half day. (I’m a little baffled by all the random half days and days off that the kids get…) With the half day, I took the five year old and his friend on a walk on a trail nearby that I’m sure is lovely in the spring, but in the winter, it is pretty clear that the trail is mostly a cover for a sewage pipe that runs the length of the creek. While it was nice to be out an stretching our legs it wasn’t the most picturesque winter stroll. But we went to Sweetfrog after, and that was a nice treat. My favorite Sweetfrog combination is: plain yogurt, mochi, fresh fruit.
Thursday night I had a super title gig. The featured singer was someone I had worked with before so that was fun to hear her sing. I’m always unsure if singers I work with remember me because I feel like a lot of my job is to be in the background, but this singer gave me a huge hug and was really happy to see me, so that was nice. It was a lovely program, the theme of which was “nomads” so a lot of the pieces had some kind of mystic/Orient flavor to them. Beautiful music, but also some of the translations/texts were definitely a little cringey in how they exoticize women of eastern cultures.
Random thoughts on watching the World Cup. I wouldn’t call myself a sports fan, but I am a “big event” fan, and the World Cup certainly is that. Despite playing soccer for much of my youth, I am definitely not up on any of the soccer language or subtleties. I don’t have a favorite team and usually root for the underdog. This week, I watched most of the quarter final games and it was harrowing. Talk about underdog stories. What I’ve discovered about me and soccer:
– Seeing athletes cry gets me every time. Not in an “they shouldn’t be crying” kind of way, but more like a “That’s so sad” kind of way. Disappointment is I think the one emotion that I find the saddest.
-Athletes are really good looking. There’s youth on their side, of course. But they all have a certain glow about them. Maybe it’s that light of determination in their eyes, or the glint of optimism. Maybe it’s just sweat. Anyhow. Gah. I feel so agist to have said it, but I do feel like I spend a good amount of my soccer viewing time just marveling at how beautiful these players are.
-Soccer is a game of instants. It’s not a million instants like basketball or glacial instants like baseball or football. It’s fast but sometimes it takes a while to score so you have to stay glued to the set, or you will miss a goal. After missing one goal by going to the bathroom, I did not move off the couch again while play was still going on. And when a team does score, it’s always breath taking. Every single goal was deemed beautiful and amazing and perfect by the commentators.
-Watching soccer is really stressful for me! Especially having to decide the game in penalty shoot out. Soccer is such a team sport, and the penalty shoot out- where it’s down to two people – just seems the wrong way to decide things. It’s nail-biting and I hate nail-biting.
Grateful for this week:
– That my friend decided to throw herself a birthday gathering and I got to see some friends that I’d fallen out of touch with. It was so nice to see everyone.
-Hulu. Or rather being able to afford Hulu so I can watch the World Cup.
– The Husband for putting the kids to bed while I worked in the evenings.
– my food mill. I had bought at bushel of seconds at the farm stand at the five year old’s request for apple sauce. The Husband bought a food mill for me for Christmas one year when the ten year old was a baby and I wanted to make my own baby food. These days I only use it to make apple sauce, but oh how easy it is to make apple sauce with it. All I have to do is remove the stemps, quarter the apples, cook them down with about 1/2 cup water until they are soft, then run them through the mill. No peeling or coring.
Looking Forward to:
-Tuba Christmas! I really hope we can get tickets. This year they have a system where you can reserve your free tickets, which is different from in the past when you just showed up and tickets were just handed out. (We did this last night and it was awesome.)
-The ten year old’s school choral concert.
– Christmas baking. I’m starting to work on my list.
-World Cup semi-finals and finals.
And then Christmas is in less than two weeks. Eeep! Gotta to start thinking about what we are going to have for Christmas Dinner – I think it will be ham. And then finish with the Christmas shopping – I have the list, just need to buy everything, and also gifts for teachers. And do festive things and do cozy things.
What We Ate: Pretty much everything we ate came from Jenny Rosenstrach’s The Weekday Vegetarians. I didn’t think I would like this cook book a lot, but it’s proven to have some rock solid easy recipes.
Saturday: I went out to celebrate a friends’ birthday and I probably ate five plates of truffle fries.
Sunday: Cheese and cracker and snack dinner as we tried to put lights on the tree.
Monday: Quinoa and Roasted veggie salad. This was really tasty. The roasted veggies were carrots, cabbage, and beets.
Tuesday: Pinto Bean bowls. Pinto beans eaten over rice, topped with avocado, pickled onions, pickled jalapenos, sour cream, radishes.
Wednesday: Charred broccoli and tofu with spicy peanut sauce. Eaten over egg noodles. Simple and really tasty.
Thursday: I was working and got a grain bowl from Beefsteak, a vegetable heavy restaurant. I made up my own bowl combination today and liked it so much, I took a picture of the recipt so I could order it again.
For the record, it was: Quinoa, butter poached sweet potatoes, cooked cabbage, steamed kale, edamame, sauteed mushrooms, scallions, kimchi, pumpkin seeds, sesame seeds, toasted seaweed, miso dressing and garlic yogurt sauce.
Friday: Pizza (take out) and the Guardians of the Galaxy holiday special – which was hilarious and festive and touching.
Yes on the World Cup! The games have been so fun to watch. My husband is HUGE into soccer- as in he watches it constantly, even in non-World Cup times. Most of the games he watches are either European or Mexican league soccer. He never watches the MLS. I find most of those games to be not that interesting, really. Maybe because a regular league game just isn’t as high stakes? I don’t know. But these world cup games have been so fun to watch. And yes, so many of them are very good looking!! Soccer players also are just very, very….. fit. 🙂 It’s not like other sports like football where you get a lot of variety in what the players’ bodies look like, based on their different positions. In soccer, they are ALL perfectly trim, strong but not overly bulky or muscular. I guess they have to be fit yet light, with the constant running and sprinting. Anyway, I’m excited to see Messi and Argentina go on to the final. I like Messi. He is an interesting guy. We always like how he’s quite small for a male professional athlete (only I think 5’7″ or 5’8″), and my boys are currently small for their ages, so it’s nice for them to see someone be so successful at their sport, while still being much smaller than many of their fellow athletes. He had a difficult childhood too, with many health issues he had to overcome (we read a book on him a couple years ago).
I was a little sad that Croatia lost because I like rooting for the underdog, but I think Argentina will make an exciting game on Sunday for sure.
I didn’t realize Messi was so relatively short. He’s so fast and twisty on the field that his height didn’t register.
We have been loving the World Cup – my husband and son are big fans. I am so glad I don’t regularly watch sports though; even though I have no “skin in the game” I get so invested emotionally. Last year watching the SuperBowl at one point I literally thought – I could have a heart attack, this is putting me through such an emotional ringer.
We also had a strand of lights burn out this year on our tree – AFTER it was decorated. Boo. Thankfully I had a back-up set, but it was not fun. Also, I agree about how weird the differences in “warm white” can be. Can’t there be more standardization?!
We have the same quality of light issue with standard light bulbs. When my In Laws passed, there was a whole shelf in their closet full of incandescent light bulbs, which at first I thought was overdone, but now I realize when you find the light you like, stock up because you may never find the same thing again!
Holiday lights!!! I have so many feelings on this. When our cat was young and adventurous, she chewed through a strand of lights on our tree (not plugged in – she wasn’t harmed in any way!) and it was so close to Christmas that all we could find to replace it were larger “white” bulbs that had a bit of a blue tinge to them. I was so upset. I could barely function. I made a note to buy some the weekend after Thanksgiving, but even then, the pickings were slim. We ended up going to Fleet Farm where I proceeded to purchase eight strands of lights that met my exacting standards. Now I know that I have to think about lights in October to get what I want! So, I get what you mean about how they all SAY they’re white/clear lights, but THEY ARE NOT. Such a frustrating experience if you’re a bit neurotic about these things.
I didn’t think I was neurotic about Christmas trees until the white light issue. Then… oh boy.
Ooooh – October might be the perfect time to buy lights, especially since stores are putting the Christmas stuff out earlier and earlier.