Let’s catch up! Here are some things that aren’t interesting enough to be a whole newsletter (presumably you find some of the stuff here interesting in some way, don’t tell me if you feel differently, thank you).
At some point in the last several months, I was added to a group text with what feels like 74 of my closest female relatives. I have a lot – A LOT – of cousins and aunts, and not one of them knows the first thing about group text etiquette. (To my horror, I seem to have landed a place in the “older” group chat rather than the more millennial-skewed second-cousins group chat, if one exists.)
What bugs me about this group chat is how they will spend one entire business day talking about acorns, for example. And no matter what gets posted, everyone feels compelled to respond with emojis, many of which are the praying hands emojis, because Jesus. (There is a large Southern Baptist contingent.)
In the case of the acorns, it was because my mother posted a picture of their deck covered in acorns (to be fair, it really was a lot of acorns). Then somebody had to jump in with, “Those aren’t acorns, you don’t know from acorns!” and it went on from there for another eight hours. When I dared to look at my phone again, I had 77 unread text messages. HIDE NOTIFICATIONS, please!
And no I can’t leave the group because then the praying hands emojis would be about me.
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I have often considered writing here about my very worst coworker, but something about it seems tacky. For one thing, I’m not in middle school. On the other hand, they are a monster. Where is the happy medium?
In any case, it is no longer a problem because this person resigned! I think we can all agree when I say: 🙏
Many of my complaints about this person are things that only matter in a very specific and narrow universe. So, in addition to being kind of mean, it probably wouldn’t be much fun to do the complaining part. And I really hate when that happens.
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Last week my husband requested a family-favorite recipe of yore: chicken dijon. This recipe, which I originally got from a meal-planning website called Fresh 20, dates back to our penny-pinching saving-for-a-house days (so retro!). I dug the saved recipe out of my archives and…realized that I actually do not like it very much. It sounds good in theory but it did not really deliver from a nostalgia point of view.
My husband was very pleased with it, though, meaning it falls under the banner of what my friend Christine would call man-pleasers. And you can never have too many of those.
Other man- and woman-pleasers I’ve made recently include the New York Times’ Marry Me Chicken and Smitten Kitchen’s chicken rice with buttered onions, the latter of which provided more than enough rice for beef fried rice the following day. (It also made my kitchen smell like Frank Sterle’s for the next two days but maybe you like that sort of thing, I don’t judge.)
Later this week I am making kale pasta, which, gazing into the Magic 8 Ball of my marriage, I can tell you will not be a man-pleaser.
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I’ve ordered the full-size candy bars for Halloween and I’m also going to give out the full-size Nerds that arrived after Halloween last year. I’m sorry but Nerds don’t expire. Plus they are probably illegal in California, so that’s exotic.
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Have a great weekend, may all your worst coworkers find a new company to terrorize.
And if you don’t have a worst coworker…well, I have some bad news.