Another SIck Day

Another day of being home sick. Gray is home, too, and we're spending the day in separate rooms like the old married couple we are, sniffling and coughing and largely ignoring one another except for the occasional "bless you!" when one of us sneezes.

At least it's a good day to be home sick. Gray and drizzly, with more gray and drizzle in the forecast. I heated up the last of last fall's frozen stew for lunch and it was perfect. This weekend, if I'm feeling better, I'll begin my annual fall mass cooking and whip up another big batch.

I don't actually hate cooking, by the way. I'm not even really bad at it. But I hate thinking of things to cook. I hate meal planning, that's all. It's virtually impossible to cook something that all three of us like. Grayson is limited pretty much to fish sticks and macaroni and cheese. Gray doesn't seem to like anything made all in one pan or with rice or pasta, which I live for. I just can't get my mind around the idea of meat and a vegetable. What kind of meat? How do you cook it? It's just so boring.

Soups and stews are another thing. You make an enormous batch and split it up and freeze it and voila, you have desperation dinners for a year. Fall is always my time for busy, hopeful cooking and baking. Like spring is my time for busy, hopeful gardening. By October I'll be so carried away by fall that I'll be optimistic enough to take on baking bread again. Maybe even pie crust. Hope springs eternal, after all.

My bread always tastes okay, it just never rises properly. My pie crust, on the other hand, is a sadly different story. It's pitiful because these are two things I would really like to be able to do well.

I've spent a lot of my day online putting out minor fires at work. Fortunately, my fabulous assistant Krysten is there to run the ball for me. I haven't been able to send email to my mass press release lists, so I send them to her with the list and she sends them out. I swear I've done nearly as much from bed this morning as I would have done from my desk at work. It's amazing what we can accomplish from a computer keyboard. And how completely dependent I am on it now.

Mainly I've spent the last two days reading. I read two books by Susan Beth Pfeffer. They're young adult novels about apocalyptic events on Earth. I read both of them over the past two days. I've just started The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, which is excellent, so far. I have a whole stack of other books to work on when I'm done with that.

The one book I can't seem to get my teeth into is the one I was supposed to read for Book Club. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. It's just dry. And perhaps a little strident. I'm way too lazy to get into organic and local food, or to get het up about how many gallons of petroleum go into getting me my blueberries or mushrooms. I'm doing pretty good to get to the store and home with them without troubling over their itineraries prior to my meeting them. Yes, I know, I'm going to recyclo-vegetarian hell for that. I do recycle my plastics and junk mail, and grow my own peppers and tomatoes in the summer, so I feel redeemed somewhat for the sin of getting my apples from Washington in the winter.

I had a brief reprieve with the book because Book Club was scheduled for this past Friday and Brooke got sick, so it was bumped to the 19th. So I still have a week and a half to read the book. But honestly, I can't seem to do it. And at the moment, I don't even know where it is.

It's boring being home sick. Gray's jacked in to World of Warcraft. It's not like he's going to play checkers with me or anything. Even the dogs are asleep.