Tuesday, August 27 2019

Dear Journal,

Good morning everyone! I love a weekend as much as the next guy, but it felt nice to get back to work yesterday. It stayed pretty rainy and cloudy throughout all the day, which made it really easy to focus on getting work done. We're creatures of our environment, aren't we? It's funny how something as simple as the weather can influence how we work - even indoors.

For lunch, I went for a quick walk to go take out some cash. I needed bus fare for the ride home, and yesterday morning I had to borrow some from Rodney's piggy bank. Later I laughed with Marissa about how strange it felt to steal money out of a child's piggy bank, taking great care not to wake him up with the sound of jangling coins. I imagined I owed money to a bookie, or I was about to go hit a casino. But I didn't - Rodney knows I'm good for it. By the end of the day I paid him back with interest.

For lunch, I grabbed a chicken wrap from the Good Food cart. Their name, which really is Good Food, makes it hard to rave about them. Can you picture it? "Hey that looks pretty good, what are you eating Alex?" Good Food. "Um OK. Yeah it does look good." But the name is literally the only bad thing about the Good Food cart.

After work, I took Rodney to Hy-Vee to pick up stuff for philly cheese steaks. I love the kind of meals that come together from economical ingredients. To my delight, this recipe called for about a pound of regular low-end sirloin. I only had to buy one steak, sandwich rolls, and a few other things we like having in the house anyway, like cream cheese, kimchi, and a white onion.

When we got home, I put Rodney to work on the buns. I don't think he quite grasped that I wanted him to hollow out the inside of the sandwich rolls, but he seemed to enjoy himself just moving the bread crumbs from one bowl to another. Meanwhile, I was searing the steak in some olive oil, admiring my big stainless steel pan in its element. I gave the steak a good sear, then moved in some chopped white onions to cook around and under the meat. After letting the steak cool, I cut it up into small pieces and tossed it with the cooked onions, cream cheese, kimchi, and shredded provolone. Rodney was still working on the bread crumbs, but he helped himself to plenty of shredded provolone right off the cutting board, and I couldn't yell at him because I do the same. We stuffed the sandwiches with meat filling then topped with more cheese. They baked for about fifteen minutes. Being a Philly native, I let Ziggy eat the little bit of filling left in the mixing bowl. That's only fair, right?

After wolfing down the cheese steak sandwiches, we caught up around the dinner table. Marissa and Rod had a pretty cozy day too. Marissa just got a pretty big art commission for a company in California, so she's been pretty busy holding it down for Astuary Art. Rod watched TV, played with toys, and read books.

After putting Rod to bed, Marissa worked in the shop a little longer and I cleaned up the kitchen before working a bit on the upcoming class reunion. In "potluck" style, I made a list of things to bring and created a Google form to help people fill it out. I hadn't looked at the Google office suite in a while, but my word has it gotten good! I was impressed with how well Forms integrates with sheets. I chuckled thinking of all the college assignments I bungled, limping by most of my college career on pirated versions of excel, creating multiple copies of the same spreadsheet, handing out my dropbox password to everyone in my study group. Seeing all the new web based tools available for students almost makes me want to go back and do college again. Almost.

We concluded the evening by finally checking out The Handmaid's Tale. We were pretty impressed! The whole dystopian America thing is very creeping, as it's compelling. Over the hour long first episode, it was so much fun to mentally piece together the rules of their backwards society. We have two whole seasons to watch, so it looks like we're going to be busy.

So that's our time together. Hope you all have a wonderful Tuesday today. It looks like the weather will be much warmer today, so the Fall delusion is over for now. Today, go for a walk, eat some Good Food, and get your work done.