Locktown: Leftoverture

At the beginning of each month at work, usually the first or second, I go through all my emails from the month before. The immediate reason is to compile my monthly report, a list of the writing and editing stuff I worked on, the campuses it was relevant to, and its status at the end of the month.

The other reason is to make sure I haven’t let anything fall through the cracks. I’ve always let something fall through the cracks. It’s embarrassing.

It takes time in a normal month. In a recent month it takes a lot of time, since almost all my communication is in email now. Tuesday it took even more time because holy cow: there was a gap in my inbox between August 2019 and May 13, 2020. I would usually assume there was a problem with the indexing, especially since my wifi is super unreliable, likely to break connection when the computer’s in the middle of something. There could have been a signal drop while Outlook was fetching my inbox.

Except that late Monday, I deleted my deleted mail folder. Had I been careless, accidentally selecting a wide swath of my inbox to move to the trash, and then deleted the trash? Ugggggh.

I’ll save the problem-solving routine for someone who wants to read about it, but it turned out my usual suspicion was correct, and the stupid trash-deletion was just concidental timing.

Still, it added quite a bit of time to an already time-consuming task.

I submitted it and worked a bit on the cancer center outline, which I still didn’t finish. It’s going to be my main thing Wednesday.

I reeeeally wanted to make another pot of angel hair and just eat it all day, but those leftovers scolded me everytime I thought of it. So breakfast was a couple of hot dogs with sauerkraut, mustard, and ketchup. That Costco sauerkraut is really very good. I haven’t done a cost analysis, but now it doesn’t matter. Whatever it cost me is worth it.

I didn’t have enough of the leftover stir-fry to make a meal, but I had some leftover watercress from when I made the stir-fry. So I threw that in some oil with some kimchi, fried it up, added the leftover stir-fry, and put that over warmed-up leftover brown rice. It was delicious. I was so happy munching on it while watching an episode of Orange is the New Black season four.

I’ve done very little cooking with kimchi. I invented kimchi pizza when I was in college, and it’s still one of my favorite things. I played around with a kimchi spaghetti dish and even got advice about it from a Korean chef-owner at a local trendy restaurant downtown (it’s a one-word French name, to give you a clue). She said I was onto something but was making things far too complicated. She suggested I just make my usual pasta-and-sauce dish, but chop up some kimchi and throw it in the sauce while it’s cooking. That was a couple of years ago and I haven’t tried it but I think I will, now that I have this very good kimchi in my fridge.

So yeah: kimchi in my stir-fry was great.

Dinner, which I just had after coming home from my walk, was the last of the off-brand Cinnamon Toast Crunch.

I did well cleaning out the fridge. At least enough room to feel okay about a nice pot of angel hair sometime Wednesday. Maybe I’ll add some kimchi to the sauce.

I had such difficulty getting out the door Tuesday evening. It wasn’t until midnight that I was finally out on the street. I kept thinking it was too late — that I was going to get back so late that I’d be miserable at work Wednesday, but I just really thought I needed the fresh air and circulation.

I think it was a good call. Man, I moved pretty dang slowly. I didn’t even go all the way up Liliha to Wylie. I only went up to Judd, then across to Nuuanu and down to School. And there were a lot of people out — I crossed streets many times to avoid them, especially coming back home on School.

I walked 15,000 steps, though, and while my feet and legs are really achey, I’m mostly glad I went. I’m breaking in new shoes and they are not making my feet happy right now.

There was even less connection Tuesday than Monday. AJ in San Diego let me know her book review is ready for me to take a look at. Sylvia sent me a random message about walking past some young asian people who smelled like artificial strawberry smell. JB let me know he was making bagels for the first time.

None of it turned into much of a conversation, but it’s cool.

Wasn’t in the mood for music Tuesday for some reason. I tried, spinning a few different things, sticking longest on some Talking Heads stuff, but even that didn’t last long. Just wasn’t feeling it. During the walk I listened to podcasts only.

I’m tired and it’s past five in the morning. Going to bed.

Yesterday I forgot to end with my usual invitation to connect. Here it is now. If you’re having difficulty finding connection, please reach out. I don’t know what it’s like where you are, but I’m still working from home until the end of June at least, and although things are opening up around the island, I’m not planning to make any changes just yet. One more month of locking myself down. So I’m here if you need a little two-way interaction.

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