Safety!

In the interest of normalizing safety, I took a selfie in my new skiing helmet and posted it on Facebook:


I figure skiing with a helmet may well be like wearing a face mask during a pandemic. If enough people do it, it will seem normal. I got a lot of "likes" and encouraging comments. I'm not the picked-on little kid I was growing up. People actually kinda like me, so I have some social capital. :) I hope it is enough to make me someone to emulate!

Look how sweet these girls are though!

This photo was taken before our skijor! They don't jump up and down the way sled dogs do in teams. They are my little guardian angels on earth. :)

I also got kneepads, but much less admiration for those. But hey it hurts to fall down on ice!


They are really disciplined pullers!


And here is the last of our cheese from our Montana trip in January:


We will have to visit again when this coronavirus mess is over. They got a new puppy we will have to meet!

Look how cute she is! She is a German Shepherd, and her name is Echo:


She's got little bitty toe beans!

Food Photos, interspersed with Dog Photos

Oven-barbecued chicken:


It came out just like the recipe photo! :)


Braised collards:


All with mashed potatoes (I add carrots to mine):


Breakfast the next day then has fried potato cakes! Yum!


Breakfast on another day: a veggie scramble (bell peppers, onions, tomatoes, and cheese) with refritos and tortillas:


Salmon from the local seafood dealer, from whom we purchase in bulk:


I cook almost all of them the same. I pour on whatever sauce (e.g. barbecue, teriyaki, garlic and lemon, or this simple soy and vinegar), wrap it in foil, and bake it in the oven:


So easy:


Kale:


With mashed potatoes (again, with the carrots):


Those fillets are always too much for one meal, but not enough for two, so my household classic the next day is mixing the leftovers with black beans and queso fresco, and making enchiladas. But we were out of queso fresco, and I am limiting trips to the store in the Age of Coronavirus, so this time I substituted cheddar and mozzarella:


And these cheddar-and-mozzarella-topped salmon-and-black-bean enchiladas represent my first actual coronavirus-induced privation. I am definitely, amazingly blessed (and also good at planning, if I do say so myself!):


This does not feel like privation. Nor does it feel like leftovers:


My kitchen supervisors! Thistle will accept veggies now, but she chews them up and spits them out; then Cricket vacuums up the bits. Whatever. Dogs!


Tomato-beef chow mein:


Cricket loooooooves her daddy:


Thistle is so sweet and gentle and smiley:


Do you think they are comfy? I sure hope they are comfy:


Oh, here is another breakfast photo. Breakfast enchiladas with leftover pico de gallo and guacamole from the previous night's tacos:

The Working From Home Life

Like many people around the world, DL and I have been working from home. Like many dogs around the world, the dogs are really happy about this. Do they not look comfy?


And sometimes they get multitasking cuddles!


As academics, the lines between "working hours" and "non-working hours" have often been blurred for us. I almost always work part of weekends, and often after dinner on weeknights. But I often take long lunches to run errands, or go in to work late some days to go skiing in the morning, as well.

Now that we have no physical office, it'd be easy to blur those lines even further, so, paradoxically, I am making more of an effort to make sure that work is confined to work times, and to NOT TOUCH IT after dinner. It's hard! It's hard when I could just do this one little thing and then not have to worry about it! But academia is endless, and there is always one more little thing I could do. The thing is to remind myself that that one little thing can just as well be done tomorrow. I have a pile of leisure reading, and there are more walks to take now that the daylight lasts until 9 p.m.

I believe last weekend was our last time skiing for the season. Despite a recent storm that dumped over a foot of snow, it had been so warm that the snow promptly turned icy, and I was frightened! I had recently purchased knee pads and a helmet. Thank you to Sister for the recommendation on the helmet! When I googled helmets, I found TWO HUNDRED AND ELEVEN MILLION of them and panicked. But Sister is such a thorough researcher that I could just buy that one immediately!

That 211,000,000 is not an exaggeration. Look!


Ah, capitalism! Without Sister, I'd definitely have been drawn down a spiral of Choice Paralysis (a terrible susceptibility I have that once almost led me to purchase an Amish-made fly swatter made with a leather flap and wooden handle, and please don't ask how I ended up there!)

But anyway, even with knee pads and helmets, it was a bit too fast for my taste! Friends, these are the times to be extra cautious. We do NOT want to go to a doctor, or heaven forbid, the ER! So I don ice cleats and run with the girls.

Every time I boil fresh water to make more tea, they wonder whether it is suppertime. I have to tell them that, sorry, 10:30 a.m. is not suppertime. And neither is 1 p.m. And neither is 3:30!


Here is another Exciting Thing. Every time I get up, they ponder:


The Human Got Up. It:
[ ] Is
[ ] Is Not

worth getting up to see what she is doing.

She:
[ ] Is
[ ] Is Not

doing something involving Food.

Good Eats

I have not shared food photos in a while and have a backlog!

Fly lice! With Chinese sausage (lap cheong):


My pi from pi day!


Apple-cranberry!


Crabcakes (with cheesy mashed potatoes and broccoli!):


Tacos!


Chicken pot pie!


Topped with biscuits from a pop-can!


Mmmmmm!


Super tasty!


Start of lasagne--I use lots of veggies.


The veggies shrink quickly.


Then I add premade marinara from a jar:


Assembly:


Yum!


But then I put it under the broiler for 5 minutes to brown the cheese:


Mmmmm lasange!


Salmon with black beans and sautéed spinach over rice:


Leftover lasagne with cheesy kale soup: