#306
New kid, first day of school
Last Friday, I cleaned my disgusting home office, which was full of dust I had been strenuously ignoring for a while. Typically, my husband, who has a dust allergy, is the main vacuumer and duster. While he definitely has vacuumed and dusted my office in the past, I couldn’t very well tell him to do so, not when he has worked and suffered through approximately 1,000 Zoom calls whilst I have twiddled away my time these last six months.
I mean yes, I did stuff, but there were definitely many times where I zoned out in front of a Dateline marathon on the couch, covered in little dogs.
The little dogs went to school on Friday, and then I went on the journey of Natty fucking Gann, trying to get a baguette for our cheese-based dinner. I drove past our favorite bakery and saw a line out the door and down the block and kept driving. It has been like this since one of the bakers participated and had a good showing in the Mondial du Pain, which is, of course, great, but the resulting news coverage has really fucked up my ability to get bread and pastries.
I know! I know. I know how it sounds. But first they stopped taking online orders for pick-up, and then the lines got longer and longer, full of I HIGHLY SUSPECT a bunch of people from the West side, who usually do nothing but complain about how confusing it is to drive on the East side.
Fortunately, the bakery has an outpost at a food hall just a little farther away, and the line is typically very manageable. But I got there and discovered…they were out of bread. So I drove back to the main location, where I bought the very last baguette AND a croissant for my trouble.
Yesterday, I started my new job, and now I will not be able to drive around aimlessly in search of French carbohydrates. Sunrise sunset, but I am pretty happy about it. I am excited about joining Google Meets, I am even excited about Slack. Slack!
My previous job was sort of weird in that there was a very definite separation of church and state when it came to contractors. My own manager and team were very inclusive, but there were rules about which meetings and activities contractors can attend, so, as a contractor, I was naturally on the outside of things sometimes. At a start-up, aka the type of environment where I have mostly worked since 2013, everyone is up in everyone else’s business all the time. Knowing what’s going on is the currency of the realm, and there can be a pressurized feeling of trying to get your arms around absolutely everything all at once. But I have a good onboarding plan, which honestly is half the battle.
There’s also my Virgo tendency to want to be the best/favorite of everything, like I really want to be the shining star gifted student of onboarding, which is, of course, ridiculous. But you can’t fight HARD SCIENCE which is definitely what astrology is.
I’m working slightly odd hours this first week to have some overlap with folks in other time zones, so I tried to plan dinner accordingly. I’m a little sad to call a temporary halt to long prep times and more elaborate recipes, but I am also grateful to divest myself from Distraction Cooking as a coping mechanism, so: mixed blessing.
Yesterday we had leftovers, and tonight I’m making harissa apricot chicken. I am a big fan of a recipe that calls for an ingredient I always seem to have and can never use fast enough: apricot jam. On Wednesday, I’ll make a pizza, and on Thursday, we are going to a wine tasting. There will be food, but it’s always wise to eat something ahead of time, and leftover pizza will do the trick. I made reservations for Friday at one of our favorite neighborhood places. The weather is agreeably mild this week, which is good for cooking and also good for wearing whatever outfit I want when we go out.
I won’t do a Two Things this week because there’s a lot of new information being dumped into my brain, plus it’s tiring to be “on” all the time at a new job. In terms of shopping-related content, though, I did order a pair of big-buckle EVA Birkenstock Arizonas and am so far quite happy with them. Ideally, I would like these to be indoor summer house shoes, but we will see how long it takes me to mindlessly walk outside in them. I’ve put my old Birks next to the door to try to train myself to do so.
Finally, it’s June 16, which is a holiday in Cleveland since 2016. The Knicks? I don’t know who or what you’re talking about.
I am happy that you are returning to work, even if it means less ongoing entertainment for me. Also, I am glad that I am not the only one who buys Indoor Summer Shoes. I am a fan of "slides" that have some amount of arch support and over the years I have learned to always buy 2 pairs, one for outside excursions and one for In The House. My current ones in rotation are those Cloud slides that were all over the place a few years ago. And of course true to me, I fell in love with a platform style they no longer seem to make so I had to track down Pair Number 2 on Poshmark and now they are in Hoard status since who knows if I will ever get another pair.
I'm excited for you! Also, I saw The Journey of Natty Gann in the theater, and just writing that out has aged me further.