Random Monday stuff

[selenay]

- My radio alarm clock refuses to hold its tuning. This morning I was awakened by a very quiet fuzzy noise. Again.

- Yes, I also have a beepy alarm that I can put onto snooze in my sleep. I tend to wake up better if there's something that I want to pay attention to, like the news and weather. Hence the radio.

- One or the other on their own doesn't work. I need beepy plus radio to have half a hope in the morning.

- Tonight, I am giving in and replacing the damn thing. I want something with a digital tuner. If it can also dock my iPod, that would make me super happy.

- My colleague who is getting rather militant about my needing to have some children suggested that children being a good alarm clock is a point in their favour. WTF?


- Apparently the weather forecasters forgot to mention "chance of thunderstorms" in their forecasts this morning, although Environment Canada has it. Argh.

- I had a nice, quiet weekend. Why am I still exhausted?

- I totally did not spend a lot of the weekend reading Glee Santana fic.

- Well, maybe I did.

- Doctor Who was insane. More on that in its own post.


- Mum and I may have some issues with menus while she's here. Chicken is insanely expensive here (and also contains very little iron). Most of my meat intake is beef or pork, which is cheaper and also better for my anemia. Plus I like it better :-)

- Don't worry, I eat fish a couple of times a week and try to have a veggie day or two each week as well so my meat nights are maybe three or four times a week. Well under the maximum recommended.

- Mum doesn't like beef or pork much, she far prefers chicken or turkey.

- We may be purchasing our meat separately a lot of the time. Which could mean separate cooking. Waah. We're going to need to set some ground-rules, methinks.

- My vegan father and vegetarian sister actually backed me up on the whole "red meat is a good plan for me" thing rather than trying to convince me that I could get all the iron I need from plants. I'm both impressed and slightly bemused, because they normally try to point out the many benefits of an entirely plant-based diet.

- Mum may not have a leg to stand on anymore, now that Dad and Sis are on my side, dietarily.


- My boutique/import grocery store had a delivery from England this week. I saw the meaty multi-pack of Walkers crisps and for some insane reason, did not buy it. What the heck? My three favourite Walkers crisps flavours (roast chicken, smoky bacon, steak and onion) in a multipack for a decent price and I didn't buy it? So totally going on the list for next week.

- For some reason, I thought buying a couple of small bags of Worcester Sauce French Fries and a couple of small bags of roast chicken crisps was a better plan. On reflection, at two thirds the cost of the multi-pack, it was not.

- Definitely buying the multipack next shopping trip. You never know how long it will be there! Some things sell out so fast and they only get an England delivery every couple of months.

- I've been such a klutz this weekend. There is not a single thing in the house that I have not at some stage walked into, tripped on, dropped or knocked over. A few things have been walked into multiple times. Argh.

Comments

[fyrdrakken]

I've had the alarm clock issue myself. The one time in my life I've been able to set the alarm for "when I need to be up and moving" (rather than for at least an hour beforehand so I could repeatedly hit the snooze button while my brain was coming back online) was my freshman year of college, when I was on the top bunk and my clock was plugged in across the room and I had to climb down a ladder to reach it (and also was sharing a room with someone else who liked an earlyish bedtime, so I was getting the right amount of sleep). For about the past ten years I've had the alarm clock across the room so I have to actually get out of bed to hit the snooze, but it's still too easy to drop back into bed after that. More recently I've been grabbing my phone off the charger and reading Twitter and Facebook and my e-mails after I've hit the snooze a few times, which lets me still hang out in bed and get used to the idea of getting up eventually. One downside is that it's been hard trying to find a balance of how many I can follow on Twitter without it eating up far too much of my time catching up. Another is that with a Blackberry in my hand it's far too easy to find other things to look at as an excuse not to get out of bed just yet.

Glad to hear two out of three family members are backing your current dietary needs. Hopefully the multipack is still in stock when you get back to the grocery store.

[selenay]

I know that if I had the clock across the room, I'd just lie there hiding my head under the pillow until the damned thing turned off. I have my iPod next to my bed and never even think of turning it on to check Twitter/emails etc. until breakfast time. Having the news and weather, either from a radio or TV, tends to get me awake enough to get up after the third pass of the snooze button because I start paying attention to it and then I can focus enough to go "Huh, it's time then". With just a snooze, I can hit the damn thing in my sleep!

Mum and I have never really agreed on my diet :-) She maintains there is no such thing as too little sodium and fat, I maintain there is a happy medium and too little of either is as bad as too much. This is just the latest in the ongoing battle, although at least this time I have dad, sis and my specialist on my side about needing all the iron I can get!

[fyrdrakken]

I've got an alarm I can't sleep through (unless I'm absolutely, terminally exhausted, which has only happened a handful of times), though I'm definitely capable of losing complete track of how many times I've hit the snooze button (and after I think 90 minutes of hitting snooze, the alarm just shuts itself off). There have been some occasions of reading during breakfast (I think before I really got into the e-mails/Twitter-in-bed routine) but nowadays I'd much rather have that free hand to spend petting the bunny between my feet while I'm eating breakfast.

Happily my mother and I buy our own food separately (though we've started sharing a frozen pizza once a week), so there's not any debate over a shared menu. (She pretty much gave up cooking while I was in high school and I never started, so we tend to eat a lot of pre-packaged stuff. Our oven went out years ago, and our stove a few years later -- cooking for two isn't really even an option anymore. When our microwave went out a few years back, we bought a new one within a day or two. And she got a toaster oven with her latest tax refund, hence the shared pizzas.) So I don't know what to tell you about compromising on a grocery list if the two of you are expecting to share meals.

[gmul.livejournal.com]

Surely posting a stout box containing some packets of crisps can't be beyond the wit of the various postal services? OK, so probably about £1 p&p per packet but surely that's not the point... Well maybe it is. Hope they still have some in the shop when you get there!

[selenay]

Heh, I think it would a week bit more than a pound postage and packaging! :-)

Hopefully they'll still have some of the multipacks. On reflection, the price was excellent (not horrendously more than the same costs in England) and I was not thinking clearly when I weighed up my options :-)

Normally he only has the standard multipack, which includes that spawn of Satan the cheese and onion flavour. It's hard to predict what he'll have in each delivery so I was crazy not to jump on a pack of 12 that contains only my favourite flavours.

[gmul.livejournal.com]

I was surprised actually. Shipping is more based on weight than volume so crisps don't come off too badly! :-)

[fahrenheit-f430.livejournal.com]

It might cut your one-pot meals, e.g. lasagne. BUT if you line a grill/roasting pan with foil to create 2 compartments, you can roast/grill chicken and pork** at the same time without giving yourselves food poisoning. It won't get you over the cost hurdle, but it will get you over the separate meals one. :)

** As a precaution, I wouldn't recommend you trying it with beef if you like it medium/rare.

[selenay]

Mum will, at least, eat chilli so she's not "oh, no, beef shall never cross my lips!" but her favourite thing is very plain, grilled chicken. No flavourings or marinades. It may be why my opinion of chicken is fairly low and I know that I won't get her to be very adventurous.

I've done the two compartment thing frequently with my little roasting pan so that I can bake fish and little baby potatoes without creating extra washing up. It's an option that I'll have to remember when we're planning menus. We'll work out something, but I suspect that I'll end up eating more along her lines than my chosen diet most of the diet.

I am a heathen and like my beef well done. Please don't hurt me.