Category: Cooking!

The past week has been frustrating in assigning priorities, but now that I’ve been ‘forced’ to stay home for a few days, I’ll be able to hold myself to my daily goals!

The week was full of myself saying that before I could sit down at the desk and write, I needed to make progress in my house project: handling the bigger cleaning chores before Sarah came back from her trip. Between that and minding the gremlins we had created, it’d be near 9 or 10 PM before I could make it to the keyboard.

Responsibilities are not fun, but it’ll be satisfying when Sarah comes home to clothes folded and put away, floors cleaned, and (if I’m lucky) the kids’ rooms not looking like tornados had come in for visits.

Another reason I’m trying so hard to make it into remote work as a cybersecurity analyst: I like house-spousing.

What else had happened during the week? Plenty!

Han discovered my learning how to bake and helped me figure out two recipes: shortbread cookies and hand pies.

Apparently, hand pies are meat pies but large enough to function as full meals. Got it from a Hobbit cookbook.

The next four days look like I’ll be staying at the house while Louisiana handles an artic blast that the residents are nowhere near prepared for, so with luck I’ll be able to sit down and write or study. Or we’ll have the power knocked out; one or the other.

Y’all stay safe in the weather.

-JB Swift

For all my progressive and liberal tendencies, I am very much a creature of habit and I’m reluctant to try new approaches to old techniques.

I’m also terrible with tech. It took several years of explaining to my elders that I have no idea why their computer wasn’t working and was more comfortable with the electronics of their generation. I tried learning how to code a few times; the results were amusing and infuriating.

But if it’s at a level I can understand, I will eventually try. It’s when I can figure out how to incorporate the new approach with my old understanding that I get excited.

Such as bento box breakfasts and scannable notebooks!

My wife got me both of these, and it’s taken a while to learn their usefulness. But, once I got over the hurdle that is “Swift is afraid of personal change”, they’ve turned out to be some of the coolest things I’ve received in a long time. (Sarah is a smart woman; she knows to give me a practical challenge that’ll result in me making my life a little easier in order for me to be happy with gifts.)

Learning how to cook for a bento box is a unique challenge for a US Southerner. Portion control is a strange concept and I can’t help but cook enough to feed 5 people even if it’s just me eating. But it turns out that one of my personal recipes (tuna with fried egg…just trust me, it works) is also a bento box recipe with rice and soy sauce. I can work with that.

The learning process is slow and I am reluctant to change, but if I can figure it out for myself, I’m all for it.

With that, the morning break is over and it’s back to the mail. Hopefully I’ll be awake long enough this evening to work on some of these pages, or at least start on an essay. Happy reading, folks!

-Swift