Well, here we are. My Monday morning has not been a “pull this piece of writing together” as I had hoped but more a “Make All of the Appointments and Answer All of the Emails” kind of situation instead.
But. At least the appointments are done!
I was derailed right off by a meeting with a potential tutor in one subject area for my to-be-homeschooling high schooler for next year. It went well and got me psyched, so then of course I got back home and re-immersed myself in that. And any homeschooling parent can tell you about that. That being the endless rabbit hole that is “homeschooling tips and ideas!” offered on approximately two million Pinterest boards.
So: homeschooling high school update – almost everything is in place. Science, math, Spanish and Latin all present and accounted for, with the humanities to be handled in-house and probably most ad hoc.
Now for some digesting:
Cooking: Since we last spoke of such matters, I’ve not done a tone of cooking, what with work and other activities keeping people busy in the evenings. This week will be more of the same. But I have, so far, avoided cheese pizza on Lent abstinence days, I’m please to announce. Ash Wednesday, we had spinach and cheese ravioli (BOGO at Publix) and salad. Friday was macaroni and cheese and salad. (I have never in my life done boxed macaroni and cheese. The one valuable thing I learned in 7th grade home ec was how to make a basic white sauce (My mother was a good cook, but didn’t teach me a thing. She really didn’t appreciate other people being around when she cooked.) So yeah, that’s all you do – flour & butter in equal parts, cooked together for a few minutes (to not roux-like darkness of course), then milk (added some cream that was about to go bad), then grated cheese – the cheese I used was a combination of a hunk of cheddar, which was not quite enough on its own, so I added, er, two cheese sticks and some Parmesan. You’d want to use some parmesan or romano anyway because it adds a bit of bite to the mildness of even a sharp cheddar. Salt, pepper. For those cooking for those with bolder palates, you might want to use put some onions with the flour/butter base, and perhaps add some more interesting heat. But yeah, it’s easy.
Made fresh pizza dough yesterday. I usually like to make it at least 24 hours before (the best window for flavor, I’ve found, is 48 hours – it’s perfect at that point – but I got lazy Saturday night and….didn’t.) Made pizza last night – the working man wouldn’t be getting back until 7:30 and the other kid wanted pizza on which he could actually have meat, so it seemed like a good choice.
Tonight will be chicken fillets (pre-prepped by me, frozen. Filleted chicken breasts, pounded, dredged in milk, flour, eggs then panko crumbs. Freeze, separated on baking sheets, and then gather together in packs. On a busy night, you’ll be glad you did.), brown rice and some vegetable or other, maybe salad, plus bread that I need to remember to put in the oven in a minute.
Watching:
Still working on Better Call Saul. We finished season 3 the other night, and – without spoiling it – I’ll just say, it had an impact. People kept wandering in my room every few minutes afterwards muttering things like, Well, that was depressing.
I watched the Original Cast Album: Co-op episode of Documentary Now!
It’s a meticulous parody of the 1970 documentary Original Cast Album: Company (Steven Sondheim musical). It’s short, amusing – perhaps more so to theater nerds (as I read in an article about Documentary Now! – something like “It’s a show designed to make small groups of people very happy.”), but not super-hilarious.
Reading: Am just about finished with Put Out More Flags by Waugh. I was bound and determined to finish it last night, but the time change did me in. And I suspect I’m going to have to re-read the last twenty pages I “read” because I doubt the content stuck in my brain. I will write more about it tomorrow, but while it’s enjoyable and thought-provoking, I’d say it’s almost ultra-Waughish in that the frivolous, superficial characters are so lightly drawn, even as they do serious things, that it’s been quite a challenge to keep everyone straight. I thought it was a book I’d knock off in a couple of days, but having to go back and retrace my steps and re-read to get characters straight has slowed me down.
Listening:
A lot of Bartok piano last night, for some reason.
Also listening to our great Cathedral music staff meet the challenges of this:
That is, our Cathedral floor is being stripped and refinished this week, with new pews being installed the next. Two weeks of Mass in the “Great Hall” with an interesting musical set up of a keyboard hooked into some kind of computer program that filters the keyboard playing through sampling from specific pipe organs. Amazing!
For more on the Cathedral project, go to the Facebook page.
Now to work!