After a lovely Christmas vacation with family my wife and I are now back at our own place and back to our “normal” lives. My wife started back to work early as she is already back to teaching in the classroom. I have one week before I need to return to work and school. This free time is slightly deceptive because I’ll also be working on planning the course I’ll be teaching next semester. I’ve also started organizing materials for my impending doctoral exams during this week. Some of my time, however, has been spent cooking and cleaning.
On the cleaning front I have a horribly messy bookshelf that sits behind my home office (a desk against the wall in our living room). It is filled with things I threw there haphazardly when we moved this past summer. Technology dominates the shelves. There are guitar amplifiers, microphones, digital pedals, and cables as well as a tin whistle and a harmonica on the music front. There are computer boxes, cables, external drives, a printer, blank CD’s and DVD’s, and other odds and ends on the computer side of things. It’s a mess. These objects don’t so much “adorn” as “plague” the shelf. This had to be cleaned up… and a morning was spent doing it.
As for cooking I went searching on the internet for ideas and with a little help was able to cook a whole chicken (stuffed with onion, carrots, and celery) along with potatoes and carrots in a roaster. Did you know that the web has access to most of those manuals for technological items (including roasters) that you might have misplaced over the years? I found a recipe, modified it a little, and my wife came home to be greeted by the smell of dinner. The roaster cooks a little fast, though, when we’ll both be gone for a part of the day next week. We’re in the market for a “slow cooker” and I’ll let you know how that turns out. Hopefully we’ll pick one up today, test it tomorrow, and be ready for next week. We’re getting everything ready for my son’s first day of daycare. Anything to help soften the lurking devastation of temporarily leaving our son in anyone’s hands but our own will hopefully go a long way towards better use of the family time we do have.