I had an extremely uneventful day; everyone else in the family left this morning, leaving me with an empty house and no vehicles available to escape it. So, true to my sloth-filled nature while in Iowa, I stayed in bed, messed around with my laptop, and finally showered and went upstairs to eat lunch just as my mother was returning (at two p.m.). I prefer to believe that I'm not sloth-filled, actually. Instead, chalk it up to the fact that I just don't switch timezones when I come here - waking up at 10am and going to bed at 2am is the same as my 8am/midnight schedule in California.
Now that you have that fascinating tidbit to ponder, I'll toss you another one - I made my favorite caprese salad for the family tonight. This is the one I often make when I have people over for dinner, from my go-to Barefoot Contessa cookbook, in which I roast the tomatoes until they are almost caramelized and then arrange them on a platter with fresh mozzarella and basil. I thought they were awesome, as usual (although I over-peppered them); my mother seemed to think they were good and ate several; my father ate two and declared them 'better than that other shit you made' (the 'other shit' being my ill-fated attempt to introduce my parents to the joys of risotto three years ago, which they have never forgiven me for); and my brother missed supper, walked in late, and turned his nose up at them. I was pleased, though, and particularly impressed by the quality of the fresh mozzarella that I picked up last night - it was on sale, so I got two 8oz packages for $4, and the Wisconsin mozzarella rivaled anything produced by those so-called happy cows in California. While I still doubt that I will move back to Iowa, the quality of the cheese I've had in the past two days does improve the odds.
Sadly, I didn't write today; I was too busy playing with tomatoes, watching some fine CBS programming ("Big Brother" followed by "The Mentalist", which I love and don't watch nearly often enough - as is true of all television, since if I were left to my own devices I would usually just forget to turn it on), and doing a project for my local romance chapter that I volunteered for and that took a good two hours to finish. I agreed to coordinate the historical category of a writing contest they're running, and since the main contest coordinator sent me all the historical entries this morning, I had to go through and make scoresheets, verify that the entries opened properly, and send the emails out to the judges with the manuscripts and scoresheets to be judged. This wasn't difficult, just tedious, and this is the kind of work-type task that I strangely miss if only because it gives me an excuse to watch tv in the background. Perhaps I watch less tv because anything that I consider 'work' (writing, research, editing, blogging) is something that requires concentration, while my past life involved a lot of stupid spreadsheets that could be done by a trained monkey. Ah, the good old days.
And now I should sleep; I'm supposed to be up, showered and dressed by 9:30am so that I can have some mandatory fun time with the family, and since I haven't gotten out of bed before 9:30 the entire time I've been here, this could be a challenge. I would make a trained monkey do it in my place, but [censored] is already invited to the mandatory fun time (zing!). So I shall go to bed and wake up like a good girl - goodnight!
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