Monday blues

 

Christian fixed supper tonight: snapper piccata, Louella's rice, and blue cheese salad.
With thanks to Marty and Mike Slaughter for the fresh-frozen snapper.
It was a good as it was pretty.

Mondays are always hard, even for those of us who work from home. I talked to a friend yesterday at church who told me she generally makes it to her computer by nine o’clock or thereabouts, and I thought that sounded perfectly reasonable—as long as I could still be in the clothes I slept in and I had a cup of hot tea in my hands. But today I moved slower than many Mondays, mostly because I don’t like what the week will bring.

It’s tax time, and I got my tax organizer the other day. I thought I could whip it out Saturday morning, but no such luck. It’s like following the end in a tangle of yarn--one knot leads to another. I went through my Discover bills item by item and found several that I didn’t recognize. So now I have to track those down, in a laborious process, even if they don’t matter to my taxes. And the phone/internet/access bill was absolutely out of sight and beyond explanation. Other things went amuck: I tried to order dog supplies from Chewy.com but had to enter a new credit card and they declared it was invalid. The bank sent a thick folder about a dispute—over a $29 charge that hardly seems worth worrying about, except that I don’t want it to repeat. In going through online orders, I found an email from Written Word Media thanking me for ordering books from them and paying for them—but I didn’t do that. I think it’s phishing, but I am keeping it just in case some books show up uninvited. So tonight I am exhausted, and Irene will have to handle her affairs without me.

Yesterday, however, was a good day. In the morning, I went to church—actually went to the building, and the walls did not cave in. They were having an event called “Author! Author!” and those of us who write were encouraged to display our work. I took five books that I thought were representative of the things I’ve done. When someone asked, “And these are all your books?” Christian laughed aloud. “A fraction of them,” he said. I saw people I hadn’t seen in a while, and I met new people. One incident stood out. A man walking by held out his hand, saying, “We haven’t met.” And he gave me his name. I immediately said, “We’re Facebook friends.” He grinned and said “I read everything you post.” That really made me smile, because I often defend my heavy presence on Facebook to friends who are scornful. That demonstrated my point. A number of my Facebook friends are from my church. I did not go to a service, because there was enough traffic in the hall that I thought I should stay and represent my books. But Christian went to the service right by us—the nontraditional service called “Ten: 10,” and enjoyed it. One of my favorite ministers conducts that service weekly and a wonderful young folk singer holds it all together.

I had great plans for Sunday supper—meatballs and spaghetti. But I discovered that the 2 lb. package of ground meat I thought I had was really the one lb. package I couldn’t find earlier in the week. And it occurred to me that I don’t have a large enough, oven-safe pot. So I filed the recipe away for another time and made hamburger sliders and bean salad. Jean came by for a drink, and Renee joined us for supper. Lots of laughter and good times—and it may not have been meatballs, but the dinner was good.

Speaking of food snafus, it occurred to me today that Jordan has invited anywhere from nine to thirteen people for Easter brunch—at a compound where the only working oven is my toaster oven. She immediately began to think of creative ways to use the air fryer, the crockpot, the stove, and even their smaller toaster oven. This should be fun. Fortunately she is the one in the family who inherited my plan-ahead gene.

Not my favorite week. Tomorrow an ophthalmology appointment, which I always dread because they take so long, and the vision test makes me feel like an underperforming teen. Then Wednesday, the dentist, which I always dread just on general principles.

And the final snafu: I just discovered that I loaded my personalized mailing labels into the printer, thinking they were part of my stash of printer paper. So I printed tax info on the blank side of pricey labels. When I do things like that, I always fear that I’m losing it and senility is creeping in. It reassured me, however, about my brain this morning that I inadvertently caught myself quoting lines from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Perhaps all is not lost after all.

How about you? Do everyday dumb things that we all do make you worry? Or are you that rare person who doesn’t do them?