the deep moans round with many voices

This Sunday I:

1. Ushered at the church service, which was in-person but masked and socially distanced and we checked everyone's temperature as they came in. Hopefully that was enough precautions. We have regretfully cancelled our Tuesday night Solstice ceremony, but the Christmas Eve afternoon pageant and evening candle services are still on for the moment.

We may have to swap back to virtual-only services in January, depending on how the Covid situation progresses.

2. Changed my linens and prepped for laundry, which I will deal with Monday night after work.

3. Bought groceries, including various baking supplies and some cheap plastic plates with a reindeer on them to serve as packaging. While I was at the grocery store, I found somebody's EBT card on the floor and turned it in to the customer service desk. Hopefully the person who lost the card was able to retrieve it!

4. Took a 1-hour nap.

5. Baked brownies, almond cake bars, and snickerdoodles, and then made up five plates to take to work tomorrow. They are for Mom Boss, Aunt Boss, Miss California, the Maintenance department at large, and Ms. Expansive (one of the concierges; the other, Ms. Fretful, is on vacation until January so I shall have to think of something else for her). Tomorrow I'll take in five more plates, for Mr. Geniality, Ms. Random Numbers, Ms. Rise-and-Shine, Lawyer Man, and the downtown Maintenance crew.

6. Collected my trash, took the bag to the bin, and then took the bin to the curb for pickup because it was finally full.

6. Made a list of people to whom I need to mail holiday cards. I will write the actual cards Monday evening, because I ran out of time today.

And now, bed!

I have had a very strange week, by which I mean I have spent since Wednesday the 13th effectively going through what feels like the excruciatingly prolonged recovery from a bad bout of flu (exhaustion, general aches, tendency to overheat or freeze at the drop of a hat, no reserves whatsoever) without actually, you know, having had the flu. The first two days I also had a godawful headache.

It's not Covid -- I got a test first thing, to be safe -- so I am just left with general ?????

Bodies make no sense.

Anyway, I was out sick from work for four days in a row, which is less than ideal. Still, I have been getting a tiny bit less drained and achy every day, and today I hauled myself back into work where I valiantly managed not to fall asleep on my keyboard, nor sway too alarmingly when standing up and walking over to the package counter. \o/

(I did some work from home, since I could still type and answer emails fine. I just couldn't, you know, guarantee not to disappear for a three-hour nap at random intervals. *sigh*)

Then I sat through a Zoom Board of Trustees meeting for my church (and managed not to fall asleep! ...though I think I lost some potentially important points a couple times as I drifted near the edge, blargh), and now I have eaten dinner at last and will go fall into bed.

Tomorrow is for groceries and cooking. I have a chicken stir-fry recipe I want to try, and I intend to make a batch of bean-soup-with-ham-and-veggies as well. I have set the beans to soak overnight by way of forcing my own hand into productivity. *wry*

And so I bid you goodnight. :)

I did not get around to making the scallop chowder yesterday -- I caught up on some lost sleep instead -- but I tackled the project tonight.

I kind of mashed five recipes together and made vague gestures in the direction of measurements, so I don't know how usefully I can reproduce my process. It went kind of like this:

---------------

Liz's Half-Assed Scallop Chowder

1. Chop 1-2 onions (depending on size) and some celery. Sauté in butter along with some minced garlic and bacon bits.

2. When that mix gets clear-ish and soft (5-10 minutes), dump the results into a pot along with 1 to 1.5 lb of cubed potatoes (unpeeled because vitamins!), a bunch of seafood stock [or clam juice and chicken stock, apparently? I have no idea where one acquires clam juice], some white wine, ~1 tsp salt, ~1 tsp black pepper, and some chili/cayenne pepper to taste.

3. Bring all that mess to a boil and simmer until the potatoes are cooked -- minimum of 20 minutes, probably. Add flour if it looks too goopy. If you have some pre-made mashed potatoes, you can also dump those in as a thickener!

4. While the potatoes are cooking, rinse and drain 1 to 1.5 lb scallops and sauté in butter, sprinkling with some flour as you go to absorb excess moisture. Season with salt and black pepper to taste.

5. When the scallops and potatoes are both ready, pour ~1 pint half & half into the soup and stir until creamy. [This should probably be more like 3 cups of half & half, or maybe use heavy cream instead.]

6. Chuck the scallops into the soup and cook until flavors meld. Sprinkle/sift in flour as necessary to thicken.

7. Serve and/or package for later.

---------------

Somehow, despite simmering them for well over half an hour, my potatoes did not cook all the way through. :(

Also I think I needed more half and half -- I got the broth to thicken tolerably well, but it's less creamy than would be ideal. :((

This took for-freaking-ever to cook, but I now have five tupperware containers of about 1.5-2 servings each chilling in my fridge, in addition to the bowl I ate for a very belated dinner, so it produced a good amount of soup. :)

Tangentially, I discovered I do not have a large enough pot to cook a standard batch of soup. So I had to split between two saucepans, which was... um... an interesting experiment in slight variations on the same recipe, I guess?

But hey, it's a pretty tasty soup, and it definitely has more vegetables (onion and celery) than are in a lot of commercial chowders, so all in all I will count this a success. :D

I am attempting to keep myself engaged in life, rather than sleep forever. Here are some recent things I have done/am doing:

1. I kind of accidentally acquired half the necessary ingredients to make scallop chowder (I occasionally impulse-buy seafood, it's a Thing) so I looked up a couple recipes and bought some of the other ingredients this evening. Except I forgot bacon bits, goddamn it. Ah well, that's a Thursday project in any case.

2. I am apparently in a salad mood, which is interesting. I don't eat much salad as a general rule -- partly because greens go off quite fast, partly because I cannot be arsed to assemble them, and partly because I am always slightly wary of raw vegetable matter (hi, allergies!) -- but now and then I find myself in a salad mood. My go-to salad is spinach, feta crumbles, and craisins, with balsamic vinaigrette dressing, but this time I bought a 50/50 mix of spinach and random greens, because variety is good for the soul and also apparently spinach is a food one should be wary of eating in bulk if one is prone to kidney stones. Anyway, I had salad as my vegetable for dinner tonight, and it was good. :)

3. I have scheduled a rehiring interview for Not the IRS. I have also started on my continuing education, blargh. I still need to look up the office hours so I can go in and A) renew my current level certification and then B) test up to the next certification level, which I have been forgetting to do for about three years now. *headdesk*

(This is all internal company certification, btw. The IRS wanted to run a tax preparer certification program at one point, but that got shot down in court so now they just enforce standards of professional conduct, insist you get (ie, pay for -- they won that court case) a PTIN number, and limit what a non-enrolled practitioner can do in terms of representing a client. But I have had a mismatch between the kind of client complications I can handle and the kind of client complications the system will let me handle without throwing up "ack! skill mismatch!" flags for a couple years now. *sigh*)

4. I signed up for a webinar on how to be a good church Board of Trustees member, run by the UUA. A bunch of my other BOT members are also participating, in hopes that this will give us a shared sense of what we can do, what we should do, and what we should NOT do.

Also we have a meeting tomorrow evening and I have done like ZERO of the prep, because I did not have the spoons. Ah well, I expect most of what I'll be doing at work tomorrow is editing photos, so I can probably slip a bunch of reading and such in and around that nonsense.

5. I don't think I mentioned this here, but the Kindle app on my phone has successfully gamified me into using it daily, by keeping a running tally of how many weeks and days in a row I have read something on any iteration of Kindle. I have decided I will rack up a 365-day streak, after which I will... either deliberately break it on January 1, 2022, or just keep going but with less drive.

It's a little annoying to me that it specifically counts reading from my Kindle library rather than reading in general, because I read stuff in physical books as well and feel I should get credit, but that's capitalism for you. *wry*

And on that note, I am going to finish my current tax ethics CE course and then go read a bit more of Medieval Maritime Warfare. :)

Things I have done today:

1. Sent an initial inquiry email to Excellus about my borked health insurance situation. (Namely, I enrolled in a new health insurance plan for 2021! Unfortunately, so far as I can tell, that enrollment never made it from the NY state health portal site to Excellus, since my new plan isn't attached to my Excellus account, and I have not received either new insurance cards or a bill. This is a problem.)

2. Sent the agenda and the draft minutes of last month's meeting to the other Board of Trustees members. Also sent a screenshot of the agenda to the church office manager to post on our website, because communication is a good thing.

3. Baked almond cake. I think I will take some in to work tomorrow for Mom Boss, Aunt Boss, and the two concierges.

4. Baked banana bread. I already had the oven heated so why not?

5. Paid Nick back for my portion of Aunt Cara's Christmas gift. (We usually go halves on a gift certificate to a local restaurant or set of restaurants, because a large gift certificate is more useful than a small one.)

6. Watched a couple random The Joy of Painting episodes to stop myself from doomscrolling.

7. Took my recycling bin to the curb for pickup.

8. Changed linens. I changed my hand towels in addition to my bath towel this week, because of the lovely new hand towels I got for Christmas. The old ones worked all right, but they were getting threadbare in patches and frayed in other patches, and were always a mismatched collection of assorted hand-me-downs. It is really nice to have soft, thick new hand towels in matching pairs. Not essential to life, sure, but fairly cheap considering, and they just make me feel good. :)

And now to bed. :)