Now and One Day

It seems like the word 'content' is getting a bad rap lately, like it implies a lack of ambition or gumption.  What should be getting a bad rap is not taking the perfect moments of contentment when you get the chance.  I think you can be content and still have dreams and aspirations, plus you can ditch the constant requirements to keep up with everything.

Recently I saw a photograph of an old woman with gray hair and wrinkles sitting in front of a window with a house plant behind her, reading a book with a cat on her lap.  That's exactly how I imagine myself when I'm old.

It's not to far off from the present.

The gray hair and wrinkles are developing nicely on their own.  The only wild card is the house plant.

Professor Longbottom, just barely a year old, is still more kitten than cat and can really tear apart a plant.  She attacks them shreds, and this resilient plant just keeps sending new leaves out of the top.  House plant care will have to develop as the cats and I age together.

Also, in my old lady fantasy the book reading is taking place on a house boat while Trent and I are circumnavigating the globe.  The cat will be named Mrs. Chippy  and I'll navigate with a sextant while Trent confirms my calculations with hologram longitude or whatever people are using in 20whateveryear.  Being wrinkle free in no way factors into the scene.

$240 Worth of Pudding

Everything we have to talk about right now is food related.

We're trying the thing where you pick a type of meal for every night for dinner.  Ours goes:

Sunday:  Popcorn, traditionally

Monday:  Soup ("Mom, I smell lentil soup."  "Actually, it's Indian cauliflower soup."  We loove youu Miss Hannigan.)

Tuesday:  Tacos (or taco salad or whatever)

Wednesday:  Buena Comida (because this is the night we eat a good meal, often at church)

Thursday:  Pasta (because any leftovers can be thrown on a bowl of spaghetti and topped with parmesean cheese)

Friday:  Friday Free Day (so Pizza or Nachos)

Saturday:  Extremes (because Saturday is either a delicious feast or 2 boxes of mac and cheese)

Like everything, that is flexible and subject to change.  Before school started I made a list called 'In The Strictest of All Possible Worlds' where I wrote down a plan that I knew I wouldn't follow:  get up early, all lunches packed the night before, clothes laid out, coffee pot set up.  It's nice to have goals to alternately reach or abandon.

Both boys have kids with major peanut allergies in their classes, so a recent lunchbox deception was pimento cheese sandwiches.  There's been an odd occurrence in this back to school season of people -adults- trying to sell me on an idea and starting with the negative.  Why isn't it common knowledge that you start with the positives, the sneak in or spin the negatives, or leave them out.  Pimento cheese was marketed as special cheese sandwiches on fancy bread, a real treat in your lunchbox tomorrow.  All three kids did the whole lick the bread and bring home an uneaten sandwich.  

Rush is on a quest for more independence, so he's been enlisted to help cook dinner.  I saw a photo recently of a bell pepper cut into the shape of an octopus sitting in an ocean of hummus.  That's not going to fool any of the kids in my house into eating an entire raw bell pepper.  But if someone gets to use a real knife to cut green beans, well those are the best steamed green beans ever made.

Tate's at my shoulder asking to bake something, but we're out of butter and the kitchen is clean so...time to distract him with books.

Always Angry

How does this fit into the Hulk's origin story?  

What I Worked on with Peggy Olson, Part III

Well, I finished rewatching season 2 of Mad Men.  Oh, the beautiful things I didn't pick up on the first time!  Father Gill urges Peggy to confess, and she does!  To PETE!  Ahhhhh!  

And I finished this:

In classic form, upon tying off the last stitch and laying it out, I noticed this:

It's very demanding to always be expected to know what year it is.  That was easily fixed; it's not like it was the first thing I had to rip out.  From design to framing, the sampler took about ten months.  I didn't work on it every day or every week, but I did work on it pretty consistently.

It appears to be a little crooked in the frame.  Of course it does.  Trent should be able to sort that out for me tonight.  If not, it's staying crooked.