Satisfaction (AM)

*

The beauty of having low expectations is that it is easy to feel like you nailed the shit out of a day without having to have achieved much at all.

Take yesterday for example. Woke up in the morning with no milk or bread or yoghurt in the house. But I did have the ingredients for ricotta pancakes which I made and served with berries and lemon and sugar. Sunday breakfast - nailed the shit out of it! 

After breakfast and putting the dishwasher and washing machine on (!) I took the kids to the park before the rains came, then sent Baby on a play date and did painting with Newbie. Parenting - nailed it!

I maintained a fairly clean house and put the laundry away. Also because there was left over pasta sauce in the fridge I didn't have to spend anytime cooking. Housekeeping - nailed it! 

I washed my hair. Grooming - nailed it!

I sat around and looked at dumb shit on my phone when LB and the kids went to the supermarket. Relaxing - nailed it!

I even had milk and bread in the house by the end of the day. Sunday - fucking nailed it! 

Seriously you guys, if you set your sights low enough you can achieve anything!!!!

*I guess you could say Mick Jagger has nothing to do with this post. And you'd be right, but why not, ay?

Disappointments (AM)

Life is full of disappointments (see the Marky Mark remake of Planet of the Apes and also Snow White and the Huntsman - but only after watching the awesome trailers for each). It's expectation that does it. Without expectation there would be no disappointments, only appointments. Wait...what?

By far the greatest disappointments are food-related ones. Oh sure there are professional disappointments, like when you apply for a job, are given the impression you will get it only to be told they decided to hire from within despite their better judgement. There are romantic disappointments, like the decade of my life from the ages of 13-23. But really does anything compare to food disappointment? No matter how you look at it, it's the worst.

Say you cook something, you spend time thinking about how it will taste, preparing your taste buds, preparing the food, and then when it doesn't work out...UGH! It's the worst.

But for me the very, very worst is bad takeaway. This is worse even than the disappointment of a bad restaurant meal, because at least if you go to a restaurant you've been out, probably socialising, you are in it for the experience. If you get takeaway you have basically decided to spend a bunch of money for a meal of minimal nutrition and maximum calories. And the pay-off is that you don't have to cook and you get to eat some kind of delicious food. Maybe gross delicious, maybe delicious delicious, but whatever it is you want to enjoy it, otherwise you are basically eating an expensive, nutritionless, tasteless meal. Oh, its the worst. Moreover a person can't get takeaway all the time and if you've had a shit takeaway meal, that's it. You still have to cook and eat your own food again night after night after night after night until you feel like enough time has passed that you can get takeaway again. And then all you can do is pray your next takeaway meal is going to be more satisfying than the last. But how can you know? This week I was disappointed by a place that usually satisfies but the meal was a total dud. Is nothing sacred?! And to make things worse I watched most of The Green Hornet last night. And right now, I'm hungry! This week is not working out as well as I'd have liked.