#309

The week that flew

I don’t know where the time goes. How did it get to be mid-July? I know this is happening because I have a job now and my days are more time-bound, but it still seems like it should be April.

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Let’s start with a sad story (with a happy ending!).

I try to be really careful with my things. For instance, I don’t really understand people who are always losing their phones or dropping them in toilets. This probably stems from the time I outlined the lips and eyebrows on my My Friend Mandy doll with a blue ink pen when I was six and received a very stern talking-to about taking care of my possessions (specifically, not defacing them).

Several years ago, I bought a pair of Ray-Ban 4191s on The RealReal, which I wore until a screw fell out and they came apart and fell onto the sidewalk. The screw was, of course, replaceable, but the frames were quite scratched, so I replaced them with a new pair on sale at Ray-Ban and have enjoyed them ever since.

Until last week, when I left them on a table at a restaurant. This seemed impossible to imagine because I am very annoying about putting them back in their case and then putting the case in my bag, but apparently I hadn’t done that. It started to rain while we were at dinner, and we didn’t have an umbrella, so I took my sunglasses off (it not being sunny, after all) and pulled my hair back because it was about to get wet. And I guess I just left my glasses sitting there.

I called the restaurant the next morning, and the man who answered the phone was very nice. He checked around, but didn’t find any sunglasses.

Ah well! I decided to buy a pair of older Marc Jacobs sunglasses on Poshmark that I’d been watching for a while but hadn’t bought, even though they were pretty cheap, because, after all, I already had sunglasses. I made an offer about 15% below the asking price, and the seller just… straight up aggressively declined? Like you could counteroffer with the asking price, MALLORY. Now they can sit there for another YEAR and a HALF for all I care.

(Pause for a brief interlude where I considered spending too much money on a pair of deeply discounted Courrèges sunglasses.)

I decided against this in favor of a $10 glasses repair kit from Amazon. After a lot of squinting and many shits and god damn its, I repaired my scratched 4191s. I decided the scratches were not that bad.

And then later that day, I pulled my cosmetic pouch out of my bag to get a lip balm, and that is when I found my other pair of 4191s. Hahaha, ha, haha. I had been careful with them after all.

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I’m still trying to find a couple more dresses for summer. I tried to buy this Pact dress, but sadly did not like it. It fit, the fabric was nice, it was certainly well-made… but it just looked weird? I don’t know how to explain it other than saying I felt like I was wearing a costume from a Disney Channel Star Wars spinoff. There were some nice details about it, but not nice enough to make me forget that I looked like a receptionist for the Imperial Guard.

As I boxed up the return, it occurred to me that everything I’ve ever bought from Pact has been weird. Two t-shirts with odd high-low hems (one I donated, the other I made into table napkins). The airplane cardigan, aka the most bizarrely cut garment I’ve ever bought (I donated it). The fit-and-flare dress which, upon inspection of my email, I’ve now bought and returned twice (WHY). The only thing I kept and wore with any frequency was a double-gauze dress, though I’ve now sold it on. I think maybe I’m done with my Pact journey, much as I support their commitment to a hefty organic-cotton jersey.

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I recently planned a family birthday gathering for one of my parents, and I am really not trying to shit-talk anybody here, but COME ON.

It is too hot to host a big gathering at my house at this time of year. We live in an old house; only the second and third floors are air-conditioned, and the first floor gets very warm around 6-7 pm when the sun blazes in the west-facing front windows. With two people and two dogs, the living room gets to around 81 degrees if it’s in the 90s outside. So I am not trying to have about 10 people in there.

Also, one year, I was essentially bullied into doing this and it was Extremely Not A Nice Time, so I am never doing it again.

I told my parents we’d go out to dinner – as we have RELIABLY EVERY YEAR FOR THE LAST SEVERAL. At first, they were fine with this, but then decided they didn’t want to obligate anyone to spend money at a restaurant, which wasn't going to be a problem, because I always invite everyone to be our guests (just call me Mrs. Potts), and what exactly did they think had been happening all this time? I was not raised in a barn, which they should know, having raised me! We got it settled in the end, but as I said to my friend Christine, sometimes I wonder what planet everyone is living on.

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I have been at my new job for a month! And it is going pretty well. I am getting back in the swing of things technologically, and this week successfully instructed Claude to pull all my Google Alerts from my email and prepare a prioritized weekly digest for me. I also made it pull all of last quarter’s discovery calls from our sales platform and surface customer concerns in their own language, which I will use to create new content. None of this is terribly groundbreaking, I realize, but I feel like I’ve made up for a little bit of lost time.

There’s also the New Kid Syndrome, which just annoys me in general and takes time to subside. At my previous job, I was always a bit on the outside because I was a contractor, even though I was there for a year and a half. But I had been at the job before that for more than five years, and I knew where everything was, how to use every system, and how to log in to everything. It’s just hard not to know things, and I am starting to get over that hump a little bit, so that feels better. I’m just getting comfortable with asking dumb questions (which in reality are probably not that dumb).

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Food corner!

I made a house favorite this week, which I’m pretty sure I’ve shared before: the smashed beef kebabs with cucumber yogurt. This is a good hot-weather recipe, as it only involves the stovetop and there is not a lot of faff. Tomorrow night I am going to try this halloumi souvlaki bowl.

I am trying not to get the explosive diarrhea parasite (obviously). Luckily, most of our produce comes from our weekly farm share, which I realize is not a 100% guarantee of nothing weird (for instance, a few weeks ago, my head of romaine lettuce came with a free dead lightning bug inside it), but it seems like the source of the problem might be large-scale suppliers of bagged produce. At least that is what I’m hoping? Fingers crossed I don’t regret this self-soothing thought.

Anyway, I did throw out a bag of kale earlier in the week for this reason, because I’d planned to eat it raw in a salad. I kept a bag of spinach, since I plan to cook it, but the longer it sits in my fridge, the more suspicious I get, so who knows.

Pre-lettuce panic, I made Caroline Chambers’ Chinese chicken salad (paywalled, I think, as are all/most of her links) and on Monday night I made her lemony protein alfredo. This involves the by-now-very-familiar trick of blending cottage cheese with parmesan, garlic, and lemon juice. To be honest with you, this is the only way I’ll eat it, as I cannot abide the texture normally. It worked well as a pasta sauce, though! And it was still good after gentle reheating the following day.

(Here’s another sad story: I have bad associations with cottage cheese because I remember my friend Laura eating it at the lunch table when her mom put her on a diet in THE THIRD GRADE.)

For the France-Spain World Cup match (sadly, France did not prevail), I issued myself a challenge: take about $15 to Grocery Outlet and try to put together an apéro. I ended up with some bleu cheese, a wedge of brie, some gochujang cashews, and sourdough crackers. I got a bottle of wine from our wine shop and supplemented everything with pickles and olives we already had, and you know what, it was just perfect. At Grocery Outlet, you really have to use your imagination, sometimes.

I have a few good recipes lined up for next week, including the unimaginatively named roasted peppers with beans and greens and this Provençal greens soup, though that will be highly weather-dependent. Right now, I cannot abide the thought of it; it was still 87 degrees at 9 pm Tuesday night when we finally just went upstairs and lay under the air conditioning vent.

As I write this, I am very much looking forward to walking up the road for fajitas and margaritas. We will be sweaty when we get there, but it will be worth it.