Cheese, please!

I was very happy to read this yesterday. It made my grocery shopping ever so much easier! I ran amok at the grocery store. Well, amok for me, but probably not for all y’all. And as I begin this post [late on Friday night], there is a pan full of twice-baked potatoes in the oven for the second baking.

[It is now Saturday morning. Very early Saturday morning.] I am feeding the elders tonight. Whether they get half of those potatoes, or half a pan of lasagna, or something else entirely, remains to be seen.

I had a bad case of the fidgets yesterday. So I napped. A lot. And I baked. (Quite a bit.) I did not, however, eat my feelings, preferring to pour them into the keyboard. And I did not indulge in retail therapy, preferring to pick up my knitting and make some progress on the sweater which began as Jessica’s/Grace’s/Eve’s and will now be Celeste’s. The skirt fits her like a charm, and more to the point, it suits her.

I was afraid the colors would be too subdued for her personality, which appears to be at least as feisty as my own. I do need to tweak the underskirt a bit, however. It is just that much too long. But now I can use my sewing machine to shorten it at the top in a matter of minutes.

I caught up on all my Bloglines. NonSequitur is excessively funny these days. Joe (the dad) and Victoria (the sister of Brenda, who ran the bait shop and had a crush on him a year or so ago) appear to be smitten with one another. She is doing her darnedest to run the show. I have no delusions that I am running the show with NintendoMan. And we are both far more wary than Joe in the comic strip. I am not sure if this is a case of life imitating art, or the other way around, but I am enjoying it [both the comic strip, and my own adventures in Datingland].

I browsed the November issue of Gourmet (again). I ate half of the leftover glazed carrots. I cut a reasonable portion off the rotisserie chicken and tumped the rest of it into the crockpot, where it has simmered overnight. Soon I will go into the kitchen and decant it into the colander over my stockpot. And while the meat cools sufficiently for me to pick it off the bones, I will peel the rest of the potatoes, rinse and slice the leeks, and prepare a ginormous batch of leek and potato soup.

The chicken will become pot pie, chicken salad for sandwiches, and extra protein in my ramen. (I can usually get half a dozen meals, sometimes more, from a rotisserie chicken.)

While I was out, I found suitable birthday cards for the Bitties. Sadly, they do not make cards for people in my situation. Maybe I should come up with a new line: Middle-Aged Crazy. Or Flirting with the Oldies. Or something. It is truly (if wonderfully) weird to be thinking about holding hands, at our age.

I realized one day last week that I have no idea what normal male behavior is. My girlfriends assure me there is no such thing, while my guyfriends [if I were to ask them] would counter that they make perfect sense, while it is we who are difficult to understand. FirstHubby was probably fairly normal, but that was long ago in a galaxy far away, and I was more than half a bubble off level at the time. The children’s father, even when he was healthy, was not a normal male. I do not say that in a critical sense; he was a thoroughly delightful human being and a dear companion who fit into none of the convenient stereotypes of masculinity that prevailed when I was younger.

Most days I have no idea what to make of NintendoMan. He is refreshingly candid; I am coming to trust that he means what he says. [I might appreciate this less were it not for the last man I dated, who was careful not to lie to me and also careful not to give a hint of what he was thinking or feeling.] He makes me laugh; he makes me think, and boy howdy, does he make me blush!

Which is not to imply that he says or does anything untoward; it’s just that when his forthrightness collides with my painstakingly-découpaged layers of neo-Victorian respectability, hilarity is the natural but disconcerting result. It appears to be doing wonders for my complexion.