Routines

My normal morning routine is to get up, wander downstairs, make coffee in the Keurig and take my daily medications (allergies, reflux, vitamin D since I’m a home body who never gets sunlight), do some mobility work (shoulder spin up, 27 squats), then wander back upstairs, plug in various devices (phone, watch), open the laptop to read comics, sip coffee, etc. That’s a fair approximation of most mornings. This morning I disrupted that by making oven bacon and French press coffee. Almost forgot to take my drugs because it threw me off my rhythm. But both the coffee and the bacon were worth it.

Tried putting the bacon on two aluminum baking sheets, one on the lowest rack, in the cold oven, then setting it to 425. Once it hit 425, timer for 12 minutes, and done. The lower rack made very crisp bacon as the husband likes it, and the upper one was slightly softer like I prefer. I think we may have a winner. And of course it produced nice clean bacon fat to pour off for later cooking.

Decided this was the year to upgrade our various i-devices, so we’ve both gotten new iPads (a mini, in my case - I like the smaller size for caring around the house), and we picked up watches yesterday (walked into the Apple store and basically asked what models they had in stock; thankfully the red & green ones they had matched our favorite colors). Waiting to order phones for another week or two to make sure they don’t arrive while we’re out of town for Thanksgiving. We’ve skipped several generations of updates in each of these, so it was time. Expensive, but fun to have new toys to play with. I’m still getting used to the pen with the iPad, and I think I’m coming down on the side of “nice, but totally unnecessary”.

I was all set, and then

I was all set to go downstairs and play video games, and instead I cleaned out a kitchen cabinet and reorganized two drawers. At least I did something productive? I did eventually play on the Switch, but the diversion was a strange left turn from what I had been expecting to do. I blame the french press coffee for a) taking more time; and b) making me dig through the cabinet that holds my coffee supplies and decide it was time to reorganize it. Then I still had time on the coffee, and a bunch of kitchen towels that needed to be put away, so that drawer got redone, old ratty towels got tossed, plastic freezer bags got consolidated, etc. Then the dishwasher got emptied, which meant some minor reorganizing of the drawer that holds the various plastic food containers. Whee.

Oh, the sacrifices we make

Made another batch of melting potatoes this evening, this time in a 15.5" x 10.5" baking pan, to see if it would accommodate more potatoes to feed the crowd at Xmas. I am happy to report that it did just fine. While I was able to pop in more potatoes (which I didn't measure, just peeled and plopped into the pan until it was full), I don't think it could take much more broth lest it overflow on the way back into the oven, but it did fine with a slight increase. It was a hard sacrifice to make to ensure it worked, but the husband and I girded our loins and ate the very tasty result of the experiment for dinner (along with some broiled kielbasa, and sautéed zucchini). And I'll have plenty for snacking on/lunching on this week, as it was a very large batch. So difficult.