Often, Tuesday is my day to catch up on emails and errands and such. Since Monday is a very busy day (basically I teach from 9:15 am to 7:45 pm, and that includes some driving) I have a bunch of emails left to respond to on Tuesday. I got most of them done pretty quickly this morning. Wednesday is another good catch-up day, and then Thursday and Friday are very busy teaching days again, most weeks. This semester I have a couple “every-other-week” students so that means every other week is slightly busier.
Last week I had a little free time, and I’ve been mostly reading during my free time. I had a few craft projects I had been avoiding so I thought, well, why not. I made a little felt hedgehog and started a needlepoint project.
It was nice to do something different! I’m farther along now on the needlepoint, but I already had that picture and didn’t want to get up, find the project, and take another. I spend too much time scrolling my phone when I have a short break, instead of doing something more productive. I try to keep magazines with me while I’m off teaching so I have something longer to read, but sometimes something more mindless is better. We’ll see how this goes.
The other thing I’ve been doing is making one meal over the weekend to have for lunch about 3 times during the week. This past weekend’s was fantastic! I made this recipe for red curry lentil stew with butternut squash and kale. My only “beef” is that the recipe says 5 minutes prep time…what’s with recipes underestimating the prep so much? It took me about 30 minutes to prep…probably that was longer than it should have, but there’s no way one can gather all the ingredients and chop everything in 5 minutes. Blue Apron does a similar thing: they will advertise that their recipe takes 30 to 40 minutes, and I’ll look at it and notice that one step requires preheating an oven to 450 then roasting something for 30 minutes, which is already MORE than 30 minutes. Or they’ll say 20 to 30 minutes, but then tell you to cook one thing for 12 minutes and then follow that with another 10 minutes of cooking, which adds up to more than 20 off the bat, not counting prep! I’m aware that recipes always take longer than they say, but it doesn’t mean I’m happy about it. Nonetheless, I am happy with that recipe, which I put over rice, and also added the entire bag of kale I’d purchased which might have been double what the recipe called for.
This is the last calm week for awhile. I’m looking forward to this weekend as well, which contains a DAY OFF. (You all know how I love my days off). Next week is a crazy mess of work so I’m trying to embrace today by catching up on busy-work and find time for relaxation as well. After this I plan to go for a run, then maybe do a load of laundry and make arrangements to go to see the Symphony this weekend (we subscribe but I always end up having to move our tickets to different dates, which is easy to do but requires a phone call, and I’m close enough to being a millennial that I try to avoid phone calls) and also figure out if I need to do anything to prep dinner tonight. I’m also considering making banana bread (we have several frozen overripe bananas…it happens so quickly) and of course, practicing.
How is your week going?