Yesterday was a good day. It was nice, but nothing terribly remarkable happened. A lot of nice, simple things came together to make it a nice day.

I like when that happens. I feel like sometimes my days are full of all sorts of things to get done and I am rushing around like a madman. Other times, the day flies by and I have nothing to show for it. But yesterday was simple and busy and good.

I shovelled the driveway. We had lots of snow the night before, and it was warmish out and the snow was heavy. It was a real workout. But I plowed through it pretty quickly, and felt like I had gotten a big task out of the way. And I enjoyed being outside. I don’t mind winter when it’s warm.

I made a lemon meringue pie. My mom used to make lemon meringue pies, I recall, and my only foray into lemon meringue pie making was in my twenties, and it went… underwhelmingly. So I didn’t try again until a few weeks ago, and it turned out so well. Cooking the lemon filling makes the house smell so good. And when it’s done, and you have a big, fluffy meringue, just slightly pinky-brown from the oven… it’s just so pretty.

I did yoga… TWICE. I managed to squeeze in two power yoga workouts during the day. I like the morning one, because it makes me feel awake and gives me some energy for the day. But getting time to do a bonus one is really nice. It works out the kinks from the day, and helps me relax in the evenings.

I made a crock pot full of dinner. Yeah, it turned out slightly less perfect than I expected, but it was a fair bit of chopping and trimming and mixing that, despite not being picture perfect, still tasted good and was a nice stick-to-your-ribs kind of dinner for a snowy day.

I blogged. And one of my blogs, my volleyball one, got noticed by a few people out there in the world who are actually involved in some of the games and matches I write about. It’s kind of nice to get emails and comments and such, because it lets you know you’re not just shouting into the darkness. People are reading, and they’re taking the time to give you their input and comments and thoughts, and that’s cool.

So, yeah, it’s not an earth-shatteringly important chain of events on a grand and global scale. But it’s enough that, when you’re tired and winding down for bed, gives you a pretty fulfilling day to look back on. And some days, that’s all you need.

BDH and I are down with the flu. (NO, not “down with it” like the cool kids say. We’re actually DOWN. Like, HORIZONTAL.) So we’ve been sitting mostly like bumps on a log, in between napping, that is.

So I was looking for something to do that required zero thought and very little effort, since even looking at this screen right now makes my eyeballs ache and want to leap from their sockets and run shrieking from the room. Not to mention, everything on the screen has a weird orange shadow, kind of over to the right… So, YEAH. Little effort.

I decided to park my carcass on the couch and marathon my way through Pride and Prejudice. THE GOOD VERSION. With Colin Firth, OF COURSE. Who is, incidentally, my runner up in the “perfect man” contest. And I wanted something to do, so I dragged all my old knitting bags full of yarn (of which there is an astounding amount), and I’ve decided to roll centre-pull balls from all the busted-up and scruffy skeins of yarn living therein. Totally mindless job, that. Also lends to the “Victorian woman sitting around doing not much but likely something crafty” tone of the film.

This is in preparation for an attempt at — WAIT FOR IT — crocheting. Yes. I’m going to try to teach myself to crochet. Why, I have no frigging clue.

I am a knitter. I knit simple stuff, like dishrags and scarves and hats. I did sweaters, for a time, but found it tedious. I want something to relax with and keep my hands busy, and sweaters, big projects in general, just bore me to death. So I, Queen of Instant Gratification, like the simple, mindless, easily done projects.

So I have absolutely no idea what the heck I would possibly make with crochet. I am not your stereotypical doily sort of gal. No sirree Bob. But I am hell bent and determined I am going to learn how to do it. And when that time comes, I’ll have fifty-six centre pull balls of yarn to do it with.

Maybe I’ll crochet a nice something or other for Colin Firth. But not with the orange stuff, off to the right…

Routine can be a comforting thing. People need their routines. Even the most spontaneous, carefree people among us have little rituals and routines they perform during the course of a day, often subconsciously. A morning coffee. Brushing your teeth as the last thing you do when getting ready for work. Right sock, then left sock.

Babies need routines. They need to have structure to their day. They need to be held a certain way. They have certain toys to sleep with. Pets need routines. They wake up at a certain time. They get fed at a certain time. They have particular times and ways of exercising.

And I am finding, even though I don’t go off to work, I still need routines in my day. I noticed it this weekend. I had a full day, all to myself, and I planned to relax and do very little. And in the middle, I was peevish. I felt… kind of lost, kind of bored. I didn’t have a plan. So I got to thinking, what rituals and routines do I have?

• Morning coffee — I remember a passive aggressive manager I had at work commenting snidely on the fact that I had to have my coffee every morning. Well, it’s true. And it’s not necessarily the caffeine, but the warm beverage that I like. I don’t mind if it’s coffee or tea or decaf or hot chocolate — sometimes I change it up — but I like to have my warm beverage to get me going.
• My computer — Every morning after I have my coffee made and BDH’s lunch is packed, I come up and get on my computer. I check the weather, then my email, then I move across all my bookmarks on my browser (left to right), then I check my stats for my blogs. Then I open my news reader, which is a fairly recent addition to the routine. But every morning, it’s exactly the same.
• Housework — Laundry day is Monday. Tuesday I clean the downstairs. Wednesday is garbage day, and I clean the upstairs. Thursday is grocery day, and likely some baking. And when things come up, like meetings and errands and so forth, my whole week gets screwy. Even though there’s no FIXED schedule, I still feel like I am falling behind if something intrudes on the schedule I set for myself.
• Reading before bed — I have to read, even a little bit, before bed. Otherwise, it takes a while for my brain to unwind before I can fall asleep. I started that when I was on the road many years ago for work, and I spent a lot of time in hotels. When you spend half the weeks of the year in hotels, you tend to channel surf, and it plays havoc with your schedule. Or you do work, which is also bad. So, I kept the TV off, and read instead. Still do.

This week, I am trying to start a new routine: yoga in the morning. I have a Power Yoga tape (Rodney Yee. ROCKS.) that I’ve had for years that’s only 20 minutes long, but it’s a good workout. And it’s easier on my asthma than some other workouts I could do. I thought it might be a good thing to start my day, and help with my bad back. We’ll see. Conscious routines are often harder to start than the ones you fall into without thinking, so it might take some effort.

I know that these routines are all going to shift and change once we get closer to Mystery Baby, and when we actually have him/her home with us. His or her routines will become our routines. But that’s okay.

So what are your routines? Come on. Fess up. I know you have some.

It has been said that technological items and I don’t necessarily get along. Printers, in particular, and I have a long-standing mutual hatred, dating back to the days of dot matrix printers and certain students threatening to heave said printers off the balcony. And, I will concede, the use of brute force on technology is not necessarily going to endear me to most of these instruments of technological voodoo.

And yet.

Last night, as I emptied the dishwasher, I noticed the dishes were getting kind of cloudy and filmy. I’d been noticing it for some time, but last night I decided it HAD to be because the water softener was not working properly. Now, let me just say that since we got the water softener when we bought the house six years ago, it has gone through long stretches of not working at all, periodically interrupted by phases of working like shit, and the odd fits of working fairly well.

So, I loaded the dishwasher and ran it, and then went up and asked BDH when he was planning on heading to bed. If it was after midnight, I asked, would he mind going down before bed and setting the water softener to run a regeneration? That way, it would run while we were asleep and then be ready to go for tomorrow. Sure, he said. And as I was up reading when he decided to head to bed, I chatted with him briefly to remind him.

This morning, I slept in. BDH got up early and headed out to visit friends for the day, but I was tired and wanted to sleep in, so he did not wake me when he headed out. I woke periodically, you know in that way you do in the morning, and each time, I heard this mechanical fan-like noise. A hair dryer, maybe? Maybe BDH left the bathroom fan on? This sort of stuff bugs me, so I had to get up and shut it off, whatever it was.

I wandered out, following the sound. And then I heard it — the water softener was running. I thought, “Maybe BDH reran the regen before he left. What a good boy!” So I made my coffee.

Just then, the phone rang. It was BDH to tell me he borrowed my car keys. So I asked about the water softener. He hadn’t rerun it. It had been running since he set it to regenerate at 1 am.

Cue: me freaking out.

You see, given my relationship with technology, things like this running independent of instruction and reason just set me to panicking. I envision all sorts of bad things happening. Now, nothing catastrophic could possibly happen with a freaking-out water softener, but I imagine them anyway. Water running everywhere, motors burning out and catching fire, total anarchy. Sure, in the cool light of day I know this, but bleary-eyed and without coffee? Freaking. Out.

I ran downstairs. I pushed buttons. The only thing on the console was a little telephone symbol. AHA! Call for service! NO! IT’S SUNDAY! BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!

So I did what any rational person would do when faced with misbehaving technology. I tried rebooting it. Unplug, wait ten seconds, plug back in. Nothing. I tried it again. Nothing. I pressed more buttons. Nothing. I unplugged it for good.

But the most alarming thing? When you unplug a water softener, THE DAMN THING KEEPS RUNNING. Now I KNEW I was in trouble.

I ran upstairs. I got on the corporate website. I read manuals. There was nothing so complex as service instructions — that would eliminate their need for service calls — but there WAS a guide to what functions the thing had. GOLD.

I ran back downstairs and plugged it back in. I began resetting the clock time, the regen time, everything. Suddenly, the thing started grinding and churning. The little phone symbol went away. And after a few moments, it went silent. SCORE!

I have no idea whether I fixed it, broke it further, or whether it just surrendered and died. NO idea. But the damn thing stopped running, and that’s all I cared about. I’ll go down and try to run a regeneration later, but for now, it is quiet, so I know nothing bad will happen.

See? Sometimes it pays to manhandle your technology. AND, I’m guessing that from now on, that water softener is going to think twice when it sees ME coming.

I think I may be coming down with a cold. And I am the first to admit, I am very bad at being sick.

I am a very contrary sick person. I walk around mumbling and grumbling and complaining. I take being sick as some sort of cosmic personal insult. I will often tell people, “I am SICK!” so they can share in the indignance at this very stupid cosmic occurrence. So they can share in the disbelief that THIS would HAPPEN to ME.

BDH knows better than to try to deal rationally with me when I am sick. Mostly he just follows me around as I wander around the house, mumbling and grumbling and complaining, insisting over and over again, “Go. To. BED!”, and empathizing where appropriate. He’s a good boy that way. (Also, he knows that if he crosses me, I am liable to kiss him smack on the lips, and he doesn’t want to get sick.)

I think I am coming down with a cold. My throat has been hurting for about 24 hours now, back there (*points*) in the back, in behind where my sinuses drain. BAH. So, NO, it’s not Dengue Fever or Ebola or the Black Death. But it IS annoying. And I am PEEVISH.

So don’t cross me, or I shall KISS you.

Or, “trying to get everyone at our house up and functioning in the morning.” It’s a constant struggle, this whole “morning” phenomenon.

I am not a morning person (she said, stating the painfully obvious). I have always been a person who functions better in the evening and at night. Even as a very little girl, it was hard for me to wake up in the morning. I would wake up early to go downstairs and have breakfast with my father, and every morning I would go and get an hug and put my head on his shoulder and say, “Daddy, I am so tired”. He would come back with something, usually funny and sarcastic like, “NO! Really? I’m surprised!” but occasionally very sweet, just comforting and letting me wake up slowly. (When I moved away from home, it was the one thing he said he really missed about having me at home, that morning routine. So I’d call him sometimes from university or Japan or wherever, just to say I was tired.)

Nowadays, I struggle to haul my ass out of bed to feed the girls, and pack BDH’s lunch, and, if I am feeling particularly lucid, tidy up the kitchen. Mostly I just struggle to get the girls fed and the lunch made, invariably forgetting something. Routines are very important to me in the morning, or else I wouldn’t be able to function. I make a big pot of coffee and try to get my bearings and then make sure BDH gets up to get ready for work. When I was working, it usually wasn’t until 10 or 10:30 in the morning when I felt like I had woken up, and cleared the fuzz out of my brain.

BDH was always a morning person. He was always one of those people who wakes up happy, and liked to get up early and get things done. Well, maybe he didn’t LIKE to get up early, but he was never able to sleep late. But over 10 years with me has changed him — he’s been infected by the Living Dead virus. He stays up late and struggles to wake up. Weekends, he could sleep well past noon.

Even Opus is not a morning person. She wakes up — well, the only way I can describe it is “sweetly crabby” — demanding food and then attention. She needs a routine too — a big bowl of breakfast and a nice cuddle to start her day, and no deviation from the routine. Even if she’s not hungry, the routine must not vary. But, unlike me, she doesn’t need to clear the cobwebs out of her head. She can just lie down and nap after breakfast. The other two — well, they are morning people, so they just stay out of my way.

I’ve always said, if 9 am would just happen at noon, I’d be fine. And it’s true. When I lived in Japan, the workday clock was shifted to suit my internal clock — I worked from noon until 9 pm, so I woke up at 9:30 or so. It was the only time in my life I can ever remember getting up and feeling “normal”, not cotton-headed or exhausted. But most jobs, most lifestyles, don’t work that way, and so our morning struggle to wake up continues to be the Sisyphean task around here.

But I tell you, if reincarnation happens, I am SO coming back as a cat.

Sports Night fans, take note: it’s not just Dan that has hideous cheese blunders.

Last night, I was making homemade macaroni and cheese for dinner. Some easy comfort food, since the weather has been so bitter and cold, seemed like a good idea. And I was really looking forward to it, because I love a good mac and cheese. So, I went and picked up groceries yesterday and began to prepare. I prepped everything ahead of time, because I wanted to get a lot done yesterday (as it turns out, I did NOT, because Opus was seeming to be a bit off — but that is another story for another day.)

So I went down to the kitchen last evening to start making the meal. I got the macaroni cooked and in a colander, draining. I began the sauce with a roux, butter and onion and flour, and then added milk. I used skim milk (that’s all we drink ’round here) so it seemed like FOREVER for it to begin to thicken up, but eventually it did. So far, so good. I started adding in the shredded cheese by the handful, stirring and melting, stirring and melting. And then, disaster.

The sauce broke. If ever you’ve made a cream sauce and it breaks, you know what I am talking about. Your nice, creamy sauce becomes a sort-of-curdled-looking mess. So you stir harder, and keep the heat up. Still it was broken. So I did what every chef in a crisis does when something goes wrong — I called Mom.

With Mom on speakerphone, we tried EVERYTHING. More heat. Less heat. Whisking. Nothing was working. And then, we retraced my steps, and I realized: I had made a Hideous Cheese Blunder.

See, the recipe called for 1.5 cups of cheddar and 1.5 cups of American cheese. Well, here in Canada, we don’t have American cheese (at least, not that I know of). I needed something besides cheddar, because 3 cups of cheddar can get fairly oily. As I recalled from my days at university in the U.S., American cheese was kind of a smooth, bland white cheese. So it had to be the same sort of white cheese, not too pungent or anything. And I needed something fairly reasonably priced, because we’re on a budget and I didn’t want to spend tons. So when I was preparing the cheese, I thought, “Okay, what’s another bland white cheese I could use?”

Well, what’s the most common white cheese in most grocery stores? Of course. Mozzarella.

So I prepared 2, maybe 2 1/2 cups of cheddar, and about 2/3 cup of mozzarella. And when I started adding the cheese in, things were fine. Cheddary goodness melting and getting creamy. More cheddar. More cheesy goodness. Finally, the mozzarella.

And that’s when it broke. The whole thing bound up like a warthog after a cheese dinner. It became a gloppy, rubbery, congealed mess. Almost instantly, the mozzarella bound the whole thing up, and the liquid floated to the top. It was awful. Try as I might, there was no way I was working that stuff back into a nice, smooth sauce. So, I pitched the whole thing in the garbage, called BDH, and had him pick up subs on his way home.

The moral of the story? All white cheeses are NOT created equal.

I hate cooking some days. No, that’s not true. I enjoy cooking all the time, but sometimes, I hate the results of my cooking.

A few weeks back, BDH and his family and I were discussing the fact that our meals had become a bit predictable as of late. Now, before we had gotten really involved in our last infertility cycle, I had been trying to make a couple of new dishes each week, to expand our repertoire and keep mealtimes interesting. But once we got involved in our extra-long cycle of doom, and we were tired and emotional and everything else, cooking was the last thing on our minds. We cooked for sustenance, and that was about it.

So hearing BDH talk about our tasty-yet-boring meals, I decided to try going back to making new meals during the week. I thought it might make for some interesting time spent researching and shopping and cooking during my days, as well as give us some variety in dinners and in the inevitable leftovers BDH takes for lunch.

When things go well, we are able to enjoy a nice, delicious meal, and I feel like I’ve accomplished something in my day. But when things go poorly, like today’s “Italian Chicken” mess in the crock pot, I get really peevish. I have wasted time, and money, and food, and I have nothing to show for it. Plus, I have to cook MORE food to make up for the inedible crap that I’ve spent the day on. It annoys me no end.

I hate wasting food. I’ll eat some of it, because … well, I made it, and SOMEONE should eat it. You can’t just go throwing that much food out. But I’ll be peevish the entire meal. And, no doubt, I’ll suffer indigestion afterwards — adding insult to injury.