Talk About Tuesday

 

In Which I Am A Melty Birb

Well, summer has well and truly hit my hometown. It's HHH - Hazy, Hot, and Humid today, and I cannot believe how awful it is out there. Anyone from the US South can make fun of me all I want, but I'm a Yankee tubbins who can theoretically walk into the sea from my house in an hour or less, so I'm never going to be accustomed to such a wretched triple threat.

For reference, today's high was 90℉/32℃ with about 58% humidity. It feels like about 92℉/33,3℃ in the sun, but I'm not going outside. You couldn't pay me to be out there today. I'd die.

I'm not being dramatic, I know enough about the way my body traps heat to know that this is deadly weather for me. Pathetic? Eh, it's just life for me. I'm not 12 anymore. I can't just melt in the sun without consequences.

So what am I up to today?

I've... not been doing much. Most of my efforts are focused on not exhausting myself and not overheating. Water has been chugged, coffee has been drank, a shower was taken, and the massive AC we bought a few years ago has been dragged out of the basement and set up downstairs.

Which is great for my mom and the cat, who are downstairs, but upstairs is a good 10-20 degrees warmer!

I try to stay upstairs, even on hot days like this. It's not just my stubborn, hermitlike nature, though. I like to watch videos and read and write, and those are not easy to do when the tv is on and playing Price is Right reruns lol.

Popping downstairs every hour or so for more water, a bathroom break, a light snack, etc is how I tend to survive hot days like this. No one is expecting me to be silent and hidden in my room tonight, thankfully, so I'll be roaming the house after the sun goes down, pulling the shade in my room, switching the window fan from exhaust to intake, and again, seeking water.

For the most part, today has been alright. I've reached my limit a couple of times and had to retreat downstairs, but mostly I've been able to stay up here and blog, wind some yarn balls to get them out of the tangle, and listen to some N64 tunes.

The tentative plan for this week (in spite of the heat wave) is thus:

• Art on Thursday - I've had no suggestions yet, so if you're interested in buying me a coffee with your choice of category (Animal, Vegetable, Mineral, Location, Geometric, Word) please do!
• If the weather is good on Saturday, I'll talk about a game I've been playing!
• Next Monday should involve some more updates on the Secret Project, but if not, I've got other things I could talk about (like this massive yarn tangle I've been working on...)
• Next Tuesday I'll be back to blather and probably whine and cry about the heat lol

I'm excited to see where this sweaty week takes me, but hopefully if you're also enduring heat, you're taking care of yourself, so here are a few words of advice from one wilting wallflower to others:

• Your home should be as cavelike as possible during the day. Hide from the sun like a vampire. The sun is your worst enemy now. Close all blinds and shades and curtains!
• If you open a window for ventilation, find another window to open as well because otherwise it will do nothing - you must cross-ventilate!
• There are many instructions for a "swamp cooler" available on the internet. If you don't have an AC unit or any other kind of aircon, please build one. Heat kills.
• Hydrate or diedrate. I'm not even being funny - you must replace your fluids. Constantly be sipping clean water. If you bought bottled water, freeze some of them and use them as ice packs. You can also drink from them as they melt and refill them to replace the water you drank.
• If you have frozen treats, enjoy them. Slowly. Don't give yourself brain freeze!
• Damp washcloths on the back of the neck, forearms, and feet can help you cool off, too, if you're in front of or underneath a fan. This is evaporative cooling. Take advantage.
• Don't move if you don't have to.
• Stay out of the kitchen and block it and any room you won't be spending much time in off from the rest of the house, if possible. Believe it or not, your toilet can help keep your bathroom cooler than it otherwise might be, but your kitchen will always be hotter because of your refrigerator.

I think that'll do it for my advice. Hopefully you're already doing a bunch of this, but if I've given you any ideas that help you, that makes me happy.

Go Enjoy Something, fellow Toasted Marshmallows!

FC

Filmic Friday 312: Social Distancing And Film

In Which I Talk About COVID-19 and Movies

It's fun to get together and watch movies with friends and family. Movie theaters are great for dates and just to relax and enjoy yourself. Hitting up a RedBox or other rental kiosk can be a great choice for a night in.

But now there's COVID-19 to be concerned with, and with cases all the way up here near Nowheresville, it's time to think about some changes.

I'm already a fairly antisocial person - social distancing won't be as big a change for me as it might be for some social butterflies - but this will still change how I view movies.

It's unlikely that I'll have the option of a movie theater soon (hopefully it waits for after tomorrow, though, there's a 35mm print of In The Bedroom I'd like to see with my partner...), and I'm already paranoid about the disease-slicked screens of the grocery store kiosks.

So how do we engage in the social behavior of movie-watching when we're all freaking out and don't want to get sick?

Well, there's a few options, in my mind.

There's streaming, which most people have or have access to (and if you have family with Netflix or something, now might be the time to beg for the password, tbh).

There's also cable tv, but fewer people have this, now, and companies like to make it hard for you to share this experience outside your home.

You could also make sure your fellow viewers have a copy of your movie of choice in their own homes.

These three solutions are great for being housebound.

Except that you're still sitting in a room alone watching a movie and having no one to talk to.

Well, chances are, if you're 30 or younger, you're on your phone anyway, so hook up a group chat or a multi-person Facetime call or something and get to sharing your experience digitally!

To be honest, if movie theaters and production companies want to really make bank, they'll run Pay-Per-View-style movie streams under their branding with built in conferencing to make groups more interested in streaming these shows from home. It could be on an emergency basis, running when there are natural disasters or plagues or just really bad air quality.

This is a scary time. Yes, it's unlikely that most of us will catch this disease (I think. I hope.) but it pays to be cautious, especially with an illness like COVID-19.

Here's a few bits of advice from my heart to yours:

• You're allowed to be anxious about this. It's scary. Anyone telling you to stop worrying is either worried themselves and trying to keep you from heightening their anxiety or they just are not paying proper attention. You can be worried. Just use that anxiety to prepare in sensible ways. Which ties into my next point:
• Stop buying toilet paper unless you actually need it - there wasn't a shortage before the panic because every continent except for Antarctica makes their own TP. The US imports a very small amount from Canada, Mexico, and yes, China, but we're not going to miss the Chinese imports that much because guess what? We make our own TP. It's going to be okay in this regard.
• When selecting a movie, try not to pick anything that will keep you up too late! Your body needs proper sleep, and spooking yourself out by watching that extra-scary horror movie might not help. I'm not saying you should switch over to all kids' movies, but now is a good time to pick up some things that won't give you a heart attack. If you're looking for scary but not too scary, I recommend The Lost Boys.
• I'm sure I'm about to piss people off but here's some mild medical knowledge that's easily accessible by laypeople like me:
• Homeopathy is not medicine. It's literally just placebos. It's pseudoscience and should not be confused with medical science.
• Naturopathy is also not really medicine. Yes, many medicines are derived from nature, but please remember that by definition, literally everything is natural. If it exists, it is in nature, and therefor it is natural.
• Antibiotics cannot cure viruses because antibiotics only fight bacteria, so if you're talking to someone who claims they're on antibiotics for their "cold", they have misunderstood the situation and do not have a cold. They have a bacterial infection. Also, COVID-19 is a virus and thus is immune to antibacterial materials.
• You cannot cure this with honey. You cannot cure this by drinking bleach. One is tasty on toast. The other will literally kill you.
• Remember, if it has "alternative" in the title, unless prescribed by an actual straight-up medical professional, it is not medicine and it will not work. Our great grandparents used this stuff because there was no medicine.
• And finally, if you are going to be around people you like and you have allergies, please consider dosing up on your allergy meds, despite the grogginess. Try not to sneeze too much.

We'll get through this, guys.

We're all in this together (ish).

Seriously, though, this week's recommendation is The Lost Boys, which I only saw about half of because I kept falling asleep (I was super tired), but if I ever see the whole thing? I'm blabbing about it on here. Promise.

Also, uh... I need to start working on a list of movies as I watch them because... my memory? She is the suck.

That'll about do it for me, guys!

Stay social from a distance and take care of yourselves!

Go Enjoy Something!

FC

Thursday Art Walk 312: Art Block And Overcoming it

In Which Sometimes Everyone Gets Stuck

Art block can happen to anyone who makes art at any point in their careers/hobbies. It can happen multiple times. It can persist for an exceedingly long time, but the important thing to remember is that, despite what your self-doubt is telling you, it's not because you're a bad artist. Maybe you've run out of ideas, or your ideas are bigger than you think you can handle, or maybe you're just not motivated, but none of this makes you a bad artist or a bad person.

Sometimes it's just procrastination because you fear failure - spending hours on a piece only to hate it to death once you've decided you're finished is excruciating, but it's part of making art. Sometimes we don't like what we produce, and it can make us very prone to giving up or not wanting to try again.

But that's not how art works, right? You know that!

Art is 100% practice.

It's a secret that no one likes to believe because we've all had that one classmate or relative who puts pen to page and produces beautiful work like it's second nature (and it may be!), but here's what that person likely never told you:

They have Art Block and Self-Doubt, too.

Unless they're a narcissist, then it's just not fair to everyone else :|

But yeah, everybody fails sometimes, everyone struggles to see the worth of their art, and everyone stares at a blank canvas or page or notebook, or through the viewfinder of their camera or GoPro or whatever, and has no idea what to put into it. Everyone is out here fighting to pour out their art into the world.

And sometimes it's a slog.

Art isn't always fun. Sometimes it's fighting the urge to break your pencil in half because it's your last one and the sketch is just not coming together. Sometimes it's staring down at an entire day's effort and realizing you have to do it all over again because something is fundamentally off. Sometimes you're bored to tears because this is the 80th time you've tried to draw that damn penguin and it's just... it looks like a panda and a peanut had a very productive New Year's Eve or something...

Sometimes, the joy of creation is actually a miserable wallow, and it can be hard to come back from that.

And sometimes you just... don't feel like making art. Even though you know you should (or you need to for a class or your job or something).

If you don't feel the art, then how do you make it happen?

You follow the advice of those dumb Nike ads, is what.

You just... get it done.

How do you start? Well, for me, I just... doodle. I start sketching out vague shapes on the page until I can start filling in the details into something more picture-like.

Sometimes that's enough.

Sometimes, I'll just find a poem and break it down into coordinates, then have the internet give me a random pallet of colors and make a bubble art from that. It's not always pretty, but at least I've started something!

Today, I did the doodle shape approach and came out with something that I actually think is adorable:

"Radbert"; permanent marker and ballpoint pen on printer paper; 2020

It's a blurry photo because I had a cat on my lap (she's still there, guys, she won't move, I have to pee so bad...), but there's my little dude pulling some (I'm sure) sick tricks or something on a skateboard. He also found a clip-on earring somewhere lol.

The shapes I started with were a long horizontal oval and a circle (the board and his body). From there, I started filling in Dedbert's recognizable features and suddenly I knew what I was drawing. At first, it was going to be a surfboard, but I think Dedbert is feeling more 90s than 80s, so skateboard it is!

Fun fact: I can't skateboard. I've never had the balance.

But yeah, doing something artlike while you're not feeling the art can absolutely help trigger your creativity, so I recommend arting when you don't want to art. It can be as simple as sketches or as silly as just mushing up some Play-Doh while you're staring into space, but creation begets creation, and there's very little better than that feeling of accomplishment when you've wrestled something from nothing.

I hope you all have creative days!

Stay safe out there.

I love you all.

Go Enjoy Something!
FC

Survival Sunday 250: Your First Solo Christmas

In Which I Give Festive Food Advice

So, you've decided to host Christmas this year.

Whether you've started out on your own and want to see if you can do this for yourself or you've simply decided to host your family for the holiday, you've come to the conclusion that you've got this and you're gonna make it a Christmas to remember! Congratulations!

Except you can't cook.

Well, you can, but not like on tv. Not like your parent or guardian growing up.

You don't have Aunt Ethel's buttermilk biscuit recipe. You have no idea how Nana made that pie you had over at her house in 98. All you have is the internet and a sneaking suspicion that you've bitten off more than you can chew.

Don't panic. You've got this.

The first thing you need to do is figure out how many people you're feeding and whether or not there are any dietary restrictions (rolling your eyes at Uncle Jim's Keto diet is one thing, but Cousin Rick's diabetes and your sister's nut allergy are no laughing matter!)

Next, figure out how many meals/snacks you're going to be expected to provide. If everyone's coming over in the morning, you're gonna want to make some breakfast or brunch, but that's pointless if they're showing up around 3PM or later. At that point it's snacks and supper!

Once you have your servings and timeframe figured out, you might begin to have an idea of what you want to feed everyone! But, oh no! All of these recipes on the internet are super confusing and/or complex!

Don't go for the twelve course Christmas Dinner on your first go, friend. It's just not going to do you any good to completely lose your mind before anyone shows up, hustling around, desperately trying to bake rolls and a turkey at the same time in your dinky apartment oven. Just don't. If they really expect that kind of masterwork from you they should have taught you how to cook everything before now.

Enter this venture with realistic (and merciful) expectations.

If you're doing breakfast, there's no shame in sneaking in those cinnamon rolls from a can. There's no law against serving a simple oatmeal for breakfast with slices of spiced apples (literally, just slice up some apples and toss the slices with cinnamon and sugar, maybe with a touch of nutmeg and/or ginger).

Some relatively simple recipes you might want to try for breakfast are:

• the clafoutis I made early on in this blog
• French Toast
• Pancakes (buy a mix - they'll have the instructions right on the package!)
• Muffins (you can make them from a mix, or if you're feeling ambitious, I also did muffins!)
• The aforementioned oatmeal (or grits, if you're southern, or cream of wheat if that's your thing)
• A box of festive donuts you picked up last night for just such an occasion

Once you've finished planning breakfast, you can think about snacks - everyone likes to nosh, right? Well, it's a good thing there's so many options out there!

• Ye Olde Vegetable Platter may be much-maligned in some circles, but I for one adore the simplicity and ease of baby carrots and chopped up broccoli on a plate with some cucumbers, celery, and if you've got some freaky people with you, fresh cherry tomatoes. Okay, so maybe I'm the freak for not liking tomatoes...
• Utz makes some insanely good white cheddar "Snoballs" this time of year. If you can track them down, they're an addictive little treat!
• For that matter, just grab some tasty chips and dips that you know everyone likes!
• If you've got some serious snack on, then I can suggest a simple chili dip that'll have everyone going back and forth:
• Take some bricks of cream cheese, let them get soft, then put them in the bottom of a baking dish (or one of the small, cheap foil brownie pans you can get at most Dollar Stores). Smooth everything out so you have a nice foundation layer of cream cheese. 
• Dump a can or two of chili on top of that cream cheese. If you have leftover chili in the freezer, you can thaw that out and use it for this, but canned is way more convenient. My dad hates beans in his chili so we usually do one pan with beans and one without.
• Dump a bunch of shredded cheese on top - we usually use a Mexican blend from the dairy case, but you can use anything you like.
• Pop that sucker in an oven at about 350℉ (175℃) until the cheese has melted and maaaaaybe developed a bit of browning. If you're using a foil pan, put a cookie sheet underneath it in case it warps!
• Take out and cool until you don't burn your mouth on it when you scoop it up with a corn or tortilla chip.
• Fresh fruits, pickles, and nuts are all also great ideas (just be mindful of any allergies!)

Great work - you probably have your snacks all figured out by now! But what if it's lunch they're after?!

• If it's just you, why not buy some really nice cheese and meat (or your favorite substitutes) and make yourself the sandwich of your dreams?
• Buy some frozen meatballs, cook them in a slow cooker with some pasta sauce. Buy some provolone cheese and some sub rolls - make meatball subs!
• Make a festive Christmas pizza with ham and pineapple! *dodges haters* or if you're not into hot fruit, may I suggest using red and green bell peppers instead? An excellent source of veggies and festive to boot!
• ... That chili dip is really good as a meal, too...
• You could just make chili?

To be honest, we usually have a big breakfast at my house and then just graze on snacks until dinner/supper time. My mom usually cooks a ham or a lasagna (which, yeah, that's way easier than you might think!) or something like that, but sometimes she'll shock us with a brisket or something else intense and rich and crazy.

But, again, if this is your first time? No one has the right to expect you to cook them ham or brisket. They can't even demand a turkey if you've never roasted one before. It's your rules this year, my dude(tte).

So what do you make for your final meal?

• Again, pizza or chili are perfectly acceptable options, provided you aren't just reserving lunch.
• Spaghetti is a fantastic first Christmas dinner - it's simple, relatively inexpensive, and then you can have garlic bread, and who doesn't love garlic bread? Vampires. That's who.
• I'm planning on doing my own version on here eventually, but a shepherd's/cottage pie is always a hit! Layer some browned meat and onions on the bottom of a baking dish (one with nice, high sides!), then put some veggies like corn and/or peas in the middle, then top it off with some delicious mashed potatoes (and yeah, you can use instant, and if anyone complains, tell them they can peel the potatoes next year if they're so offended). Pop that puppy in the oven at 400℉ (200-205℃) until the top gets a bit browned et voila, you have a fantastic meal for the whole family. Pro-tip: when you're mixing up mashed potatoes, you can add a dollop of cream cheese to them to make them even richer!
• Chinese Food is great if all else fails and/or your oven dies. This has happened to many a first-time-Christmas-Host. Takeout is there to save you.

Wonderful! Now that everyone's all doped up from your feast, there's probably at least one greedyguts (usually me) who is looking for a dessert. Cue the record scratch.

Oh yes. I'm bringing up dessert, too.

• Guess what? Half the "home-made" cakes my classmates would bring to bake sales were made from boxed mixes. Follow the directions on the box, and let Betty Crocker save your bacon.
• Guess what else? Those frozen eclairs and cream puffs? Those are great. Bam. You didn't have to cook, but everyone got something amazing.
• Hot Chocolate Minibar: Get together a bunch of weird hot chocolates you bump into at the grocery store - you know the ones. They'll have weird flavors or they'll just jump out at you with packaging. Pick up a bunch of those (and some plain hot cocoa if you're worried about the less adventurous guests). If I'm coming over, grab some instant coffee, too. You'll also want
• mini marshmallows
• candy canes (you can go pretty wild with these too)
• small flavored creamers
• a ton of spray whipped cream
• Don't want the stress of measuring out cookie making materials? Don't fret - let the experts help you and either get some nice cookies while shopping or get premade cookie dough
• It's cold outside (maybe), but ice cream never goes out of fashion
• Love your child relatives but mad at their parents? Leave out huge bowls of candy - M&Ms, Kisses, Reese's Cups, etc.

So you see, there's nothing to be afraid of. Don't overstress yourself this holiday season if this is your first time having people over.

I have only one other piece of advice for you:

Actually invite the people you're planning to invite. Don't just say "yeah, I'm having Christmas at my place", actually call them (or if you're like me and hate phones, message them) or send them a card or something. Heck, messaging and/or cards both involve writing, so you can make darn sure they know what's up.

And that's where your secret weapon comes in.

If you are broke. If you are completely incapable of cooking. If you have no access to groceries or restaurants.

There's still hope.

Make it a potluck. Make them bring their own food!

Go Enjoy Something!

FC