Monday, January 31, 2011

Getting More Creative

Day 31: Because I'm short, I frequently need to hem-up new t-shirts several inches. Usually it takes me forever because I use a ruler to measure and mark it. This time I got the bright idea to hang an old t-shirt over it, and then I eye-balled it and cut it without measuring.



Day 32: Rob is always trying to get me outside to look at little light specks in the sky that he claims are satellites of some sort, and I always pass. Today, at 6:59am, I went out with him to see communications satellite Iridium 97 pass by for several seconds. I did it the next day, too.

Day 33: I haven't had my own checking account since I got married 25 years ago. Now that I'm rolling in dough (hah!) with my new part-time job, I opened one up at a local bank.

Day 34: My towel shelf is always a mess, and I thought I'd try out rolling them up the way we do at the Y. Will it stay neater this way? So far, so good.






Day 35: I watched an interesting video about a guy who hunts fish on the sea bed without any equipment; he holds his breath for over five minutes! I wanted to see how long I could hold my breath. My first try was a pitiful 36 seconds. I did it a couple times a day for a week, and was able to improve my time to 80 seconds. I don't think I'll be diving down to the sea bed anytime soon.

Day 36: I walked to work backwards, about 1/4 mile. Didn't look backwards, either. I couldn't have done this one without Rob as an escort or I would have killed myself. I got some weird looks from people driving by!

Day 37: I don't usually eat at work, but I'm working extra hours this week, so I made myself lunch.



Curried tuna, cashews and raisins to put on a bed of mixed greens, along with a few of Averie's almond meal/flaxseed balls.

Day 38: A work haiku:
Working the front desk
Quick bursts of frenzied madness
followed by dead calm.

Day 39: I usually scribble out quick, messy notes to my son, but today I wrote out a very flowery message in cursive, with lots of swirls and little hearts to dot the "i"s.

Day 40: There are some jobs that always fall to Rob. Changing batteries and fixing things is one of them. Today, I actually opened up a kitchen timer and changed the batteries by myself. (Rob says this one is pretty lame, but, hey, it's definitely a routine-breaker for me!)

Day 41: OK, I'm really proud of this one. The front door of the Y is a pain in the butt to open because the automatic door-lock above the door needs to be deactivated by pushing two buttons that are in these big recessed holes way up high. The tool they use is a long allen wrench, and you need to fish around with it to find and hit the buttons. I figured out that this would be much easier with a thicker tool, so I brought a chop-stick to work, and it worked like a charm. One woman I work with has struggled with this for years, and she is very happy.

This incident led me to realize that I now have a fourth type of routine-breaker: Breaking OTHER people's routines!

Day 42:  Last week Rob and I took a bike ride to a cafe, and I had a delicious pastrami-melt on rye. I got the idea to recreate all the crucial flavors without the bread, so here's what I did.


In a shallow baking dish, I layered pastrami, swiss cheese, thin-sliced red onion, yellow mustard, mayonaisse and a sprinkle of caraway seeds. (Rye flour really has no special flavor; it's the caraway seeds that give it the distinctive taste.) I repeated this in three layers. While this was all melting together in the microwave, I shredded up a bunch of spinach. Then I slid the pastrami layers out of the dish on top of the spinach. (No photo; couldn't find the camera!)





1 comment:

  1. heheh. I love how you're blogging all of this. You're entertaining me, woman. Keep it up... and how to go roll some towels....

    ReplyDelete