The new refrigerator

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The new refrigerator arrived today. We ordered it 3 months ago and it finally made its way through the supply chain to our house. The thing about refrigerators is that they’re not exciting. They’re utilities. When they don’t work right, they’re horrible. When they work right, you don’t even know they exist.

Getting a new refrigerator sounds like a simple task. It’s not. Before it arrives, you have to clear the furniture to make a pathway for the delivery guys to carry in the huge machine. You have to empty the old refrigerator and stash the frozen food into ice chests. You have to move the the unfrozen food to your tabletops and counter tops or put it in the empty dishwasher.

When the burly hipster guys carry out the old ice box, you see that it was covering 10 years of dirt, dust, and grease. The wall and floor are filthy. You scramble to wipe away what you can with paper towels. What you can’t wipe away, you’ll just cover it with the new box. If you ever sell the house, you can give it a real cleaning then. You’re thinking these thoughts when you see they’re coming right back with the new box.

After they leave, you have to reassemble everything you’ve disassembled. After you do that, you start putting all of the food back into the box. That’s when you realize the the new box is smaller than the old box. Easy solution — you throw away food you know that you never intended to eat. That does the trick.

Then you go take a one-hour nap.

Getting back into photography, film photography, that is

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May 30, Memorial Day, 2022

I started the day by making our lunch. I made a savory sauce, roasted sweet potato cubes, smokey collard greens, and barbecued tempeh. All plants. Not a single animal product. Nobody died for my lunch.

In the afternoon my beloved partner and I walked Nacho in the hills above our house. She brought her Polaroid SX-70 camera and took a few pix using 5-year old film. Surprisingly, some of the pictures demonstrate the dreamy Polaroid glow. When you shoot Polaroid, you are sometimes blessed with happy accidents. That’s life with a 50-year old camera.

In one of the pictures, I’m wearing a new pair of glasses that I bought online, from Zenni. I’m using a temporary prescription for the next few months until my cataract surgeries heal up.

I’m going to get back into photography, in a small way this time. I’ll be putting some photos here from time to time.

Brand names I mentioned in this post just because I like the products. Relax — there’s no kickback coming my way.

Just checking in...

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Today I worked late. I’m cleaning out my desk, so to speak. Tomorrow is my final day at my part-time temporary substitute position. Rather than work over the weekend, I worked late tonight (Thursday), and I’ll wrap it all up tomorrow. Starting Saturday, I’ll be a full-time artist/illustrator for the next three months, at which time, I’ll be a part-time, temporary substitute again.

That’s it for today.

May 15, Also a chore day

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The diners, Willy and Nacho, admiring the chef’s Michelin star technique

Lots of chores this week. Because I’m having eye surgery tomorrow (Monday), I have to get a head start on the workflow of my part-time job. I spent most of this morning loading two days of work into the system so that it can be released automatically Monday evening and Tuesday evening. I should be able to work by Wednesday, if all goes well.

Besides preparing stuff for my job, I did some cooking for next week’s fine dining. The main dish was a vegan “loaf”, what some vegans would call a “no-meat loaf”. I prefer to simply call it a loaf. My loaf is actually a kind of moist bread made with oatmeal, walnuts, quinoa, and kidney beans. Beside the loaf, I made a tomato sauce and a cheese-y sauce. There I go — breaking my own rule. I use cheese-y because it’s a lot easier than saying onion, red bell pepper, and nutritional yeast based sauce.

May 14, Chore Day

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Today’s chore were:

  • weeding the backyard “lawn”. I call it a “lawn” because the ground is covered with weeds that look like grass until they become obnoxious weeds. Today we used brute force to dig them out. My fear is that all of the billions of tiny roots they left behind will have their revenge next spring.

  • doing laundry

  • washing clothes

That’s it for today.

Cooking day, April 17, 2022

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I love pen and ink. This was a seven-minute sketch. Get a load of those ears!

Today was a cooking day: mushroom and barley soup, peanut butter cookies, and polenta crust pizza. All went well but the polenta doesn’t make a convincing crust. Let’s call it a mush pizza and be done with it.

All in all a refreshing day.

Chore day April 10, 2022 --- Life hands you a lemon and you feel gratitude

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Not a life-shattering lemon. Just an annoying lemon. This time the unsavory fruit is a refrigerator that won’t refrigerate. The buggy machine has been a hassle for years, and now it’s just giving up being useful. I spent most of the day trying to get the defroster to work. I learned about arcane error codes and about pressing two buttons simultaneously for three seconds, and when all of the magic incantations had been studiously applied, the refrigerator still wouldn’t refrigerate.

So now I’m scouring the Internet in a mad dash to learn about refrigerators so that I can buy one that won’t torment us with annoying antics. And guess what! Every refrigerator that fits my requirements is out of stock, back ordered, or not available for delivery until August (it’s now April 10).

Then I think that my problem is trivial. It’s annoying. It’s an inconvenience. It’s just a matter of waiting a few days and all of my petty irritations will evaporate. It could be so much worse. Then I begin to feel gratitude for all that I have, my family, my dogs, my friends, my job, my health. And I send out a few words of kindness to all the suffering people and animals I will never meet.

May you be happy and content. May you be safe, protected and free from inner an outer harm. May you be healthy and who to the greatest degree possible. May you experience ease of living.

Almost Al Fresco Art Club day

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Today was and extra chore day. I baked to vegan peanut butter cookies that actually turned out to be delicious. Besides the cookies, I baked some tempeh buffalo wings, which also turned out delicious, thanks to the vegan ranch dressing. I even had a few moments to move my book one inch forward buy correcting the color or my floating volcano demon, who happens to be a tabby cat.

An my partner, who a professional book compositor, looked through my two books and found that I got the ISBN numbers all wrong. Oh well, rookie mistakes.