Menu Plan Monday (Sept 3, 2012)

I love summer vacation, and I love having the kids home with me all day for 2+ months, but those 2 months pass so quickly, and I find myself unwilling to pass up a trip to the farm, zoo, or park to run errands (not to mention I'm a much happier mama with two happy kids at the farm, as opposed to two bored ones grabbing boxes of Dunkaroos to toss into the cart when I'm not looking).  As a result, over this past summer vacation we ran out of milk, eggs, bread, fruit, or vegetables more times than I care to admit.  

To prevent this pattern continuing even with the kids back in school (albeit the boy only goes for the mornings), I'm back to a weekly menu plan.  I've done it off and on in the past, occasionally wrote about it on my other/old blog, and it really helps me feel more organised.  

Here's my first week, starting small.  Just the weekdays, and I'm going with all my easy, tried-and-true recipes that I go back to again and again (usually in my first week of menu planning):

Monday:  Lemon Dijon Chicken (I use thighs with this marinade) with broccoli, rice, and corn

Tuesday:  Vegetarian Chili with salad and crusty bread (this will depend on my morning allowing me to prepare this - if it doesn't, I have some chicken in the freezer that we need to eat soon anyway)

Wednesday:  I'm out, so I'll just set up G and the kids with leftover from Monday/Tuesday.

Thursday:  No sit-down dinner, due to after-school activities.

Friday:  Easy Garlic Broiled Chicken with roasted potatoes (might try these Hasselback potatoes, if I have the time and energy) and a side vegetable.

One sad winter

This is the girl's snow bear, sitting in a lake of muddy slush. Wearing her hat and mittens because, of course it was warm enough that she didn't actually need them herself. This photo pretty much captures everything about the winter of 2011/12.

Thrilling Saturday Night

Well, the kids are asleep, and you'd think the adults would be doing something at least as thrilling as watching hockey with a bowl of popcorn, but G's on his computer, mumbling about printing something or other, and I'm on mine, ignoring him.  But at least we're in the same room.  That counts for something, right?  It's downright romantic, in my world.

I'm about to continue this wild and crazy Saturday evening by going upstairs to finish cleaning our bedroom - a job that I started at 11am today, about 10 hours ago.  Yes, my progress is slow, and I'm now in trouble because G just commented that he's not feeling well and may go to bed early, which means I need to run up and move the massive piles of clothes off our bed, and make pathways through the disarray so he doesn't trip.

Disarray? What disarray?  No, in fact, there's an organisation to it all.... if organised = various piles that take up every available space, piles that I've mentally labelled with names like "Not Sure What To Do With," "Keep or Not?" "Clean Laundry that Has Taken Me So Long to Fold that I Now Consider it Re-Dirtied, So I'm Washing it All Again," and "Random Items That Go With Something Else, But I Don't Know What."

Now my challenge is going up and actually dealing with some of those piles, rather than adding new ones.

My pinterest brain

I've never really understood Twitter, despite trying a number of times to get involved or have it explained to me by Twitter devotees, but I've always thought (without a lot of confidence, since I'm reluctant to define something I don't think I fully understand) of it as news, information, and personal sharing for our busy, fast-paced, ADHD-sort of world.  As in, "no, I don't have time to call you, or even email you, but I can update you on my life in 140 characters," or "reading an entire newspaper article (newspaper? what's that?) is passe; I can get an entire day's worth of news with 5 minutes of reading on my smartphone." 

I write these things as if I'm derisive or judgmental of Twitter, but I'm not - I myself don't bother to make phone calls or read newspapers, either, and I can't even say that I at least get my information or social interaction via Twitter.  I just think it's a bizarre phenomenon, and I'm fascinated by it.  I feel almost defective because I can't get into the flow of it.

I'm reminded of Twitter because I recently re-discovered Pinterest, and have been pinning things there, in an alarmingly obsessive manner, for the past few days.  Some of the pins are useful: I have a board called "Recipes to Try," another called "Things to Knit."  However, other pins are useless at best, self-indulgent at worst:  Why do I need a board titled "Things I'm Loving" with an image of my coffee cup, or Ryan Gosling's baby blues looking right at me?  (Even weirder, why does said board have 16 followers, even though I only have 7 friends on Pinterest... this means that complete strangers are tracking the things I'm loving. Do they really care about my soap dispenser or what tv series I'm enjoying these days?)

The point is that I see at least two similarities between Pinterest and Twitter.  They both require very little time (not to say one can't, and I haven't, wasted plenty of time on both), and almost no attention span whatsoever.  Considering how long it's been since I've written a blog entry, but how many things I've pinned in the past 5 days, I'm really starting to think that Pinterest is blogging, note-taking, and scrapbooking for our busy, ADHD-sort of world.  I get the satisfaction of putting up something pretty on the web, even if that pretty thing happens to be something pretty that someone else with much more talent, energy, and intelligence than me, worked on, photographed, and put on their website.  I get to partake in a bit of self-expression, since even though they're not my things or photographs, they're things I like or even that reflect me in one way or another.  I even get the strange (and completely undeserved) mix of pleasure and curiosity when random people I don't know "like" my pins, or better yet, repin them on their own Pinterest boards.  

No point to this lengthy ramble, but perhaps you won't notice the pointlessness of this post if I share one of my "things I'm loving" pins that I tend to suspect got me most of those 16 followers.

Find me on Pinterest