A Quiet Weekend

Whenever I'm away for more than a couple of days, Tony loses his mind and grows fat. I think he's a stress-eater. Anyway, he is usually delirious with delight when he sees me again, which means that I put up with several days of poor sleep, because a hysterical Tony likes to butt my face and paw my face and lie on my face to show he cares. To combat some of this, I've taken to stalking him a little bit during the day and prodding him awake when I see him sleeping, in the hopes this will encourage him to sleep through the night, the way I would like to. Yesterday I gazed around the apartment to do just this and spotted him comfortably napping in my dirty laundry. It was too cute; I gave him a couple of minutes of respite and then whipped out my camera to wake his ass up.

It's nice to finally be home for a spell after being away on so many trips. I did a lot of cooking and grocery shopping this weekend, mostly because I've missed it. It sounds weird to a lot of people when I tell them I have happy dreams about grocery shopping (wandering down the aisles, contemplating different brands, planning menus in my head...) but it is quite true. Despite my love for wandering aimlessly, when I do go to the store (Safeway these days), I do tend to be pretty disciplined. I have my list and only pick up little extras if my load doesn't look too heavy. Ok, whatever the load, I usually end up snagging one off-list item at least. Today for example, I saw a couple of lamb shoulder chops on sale and snatched them up for my freezer. And I bought an extra bottle of wine because I'm an alcoholic. One note: all wine in Oregon appears to be perpetually on sale. Why is that? And doesn't that just make it the regular price?

Yesterday I was all kinds of productive and did out-of-home types of things (lab, movie, grocery, coffeeshop) so today I was a vegetable at home. I don't think I changed out of my pjs until about 4pm. I DID however, make 47 more pork and leek dumplings and baked a loaf of bread (ok my bread machine did it, all I did was measure out ingredients. That counts!!) and then I made this delicious delicious dish. It's a chicken and chorizo rice dish and the recipe is from Ferret's Lydia. So easy and quite good. The recipe can be found at the database, I completely recommend squeezing a bit of lemon over it all, nom nom. A glass of white wine made everything go down quite easy...

Now I have some Chinese style soy sauce beef cooking away in the pressure cooker so I think I'll be pretty well stocked for the coming week. I notice I am better able to stay at work if I have something to eat at around 5 so I did a lot of cooking this weekend with this idea in mind. Should be good for productivity and general emotional well-being. Cooking is an act of love, even if it's just for me!