I am thinking that I may be getting a bit better.  Not just limp all the time.  Monday I roasted a chicken. That was exhausting, I will say.  Get the iron skillets out of the oven, turn the oven on, make sure the sink is clean, wash 4 whole carrots and put into big iron skillet, unwrap chicken take out giblet bag, drain chicken (never wash poulty), put it on the carrots, lift the massively heavy skillet and put it into the oven, take it back out 45 minutes later and fail at turning it breast side up,  let it finish cooking, lift massively heavy skillet from oven onto stove, break down chicken to get it in frig NOW to keep Miss G from messing with it, get out foil, tear some off, cover chicken pieces loosely and put plates with chicken in frig.  Pour pan juices from heavy skillet into pot.  Put that in frig.  Put heavy skillet and other utensils into sink, wash stove, collapse onto couch,  too tired to eat chicken.  Left dishes for homemaker to do Tuesday.  It’s her job, thank goodness for that.  Been nibbling on chicken ever since, and today I am going to make chicken salad, I hope.

1 pound cooked chicken breast, shredded mixed with 3/4 cup mayo, 3 T each finely chopped celery and onion, 1T brown sugar, garlic powder, s + p.  This is from a local place that sells tons of this chicken salad and chicken pot pies, etc.  Yum.  I probably won’t do the onion and celery, because standing and chopping things is tiring and painful.

Another salad I’ve made and really like is cubed cooked chicken, seedless grapes, drained pineapple chunks, chutney (I freaking love mango chutney) chopped celery, toasted nuts of choice and chopped candied ginger.  Mix 1/2 cup mayo, dash ginger or curry powder, lemon or lime juice and maybe some shredded peel.  This is so good, and amounts are up to the maker.

With the carcass and all the bits from the breaking down and the pan juices, I make soup.  This works for turkey carcasses, too.

Saute  a chopped onion and a chopped carrot, celery if you want in a bit of olive oil or butter on med high for 10 minutes, til golden  Add 1/4 cup flour, cook and stir 2 minutes or so,  Add 4 cups store-bought chicken broth and 4 cups water, or just use 8 cups water.  Add 1 cup white wine.  Bring to boil. Add carcass and bits and juices, 2 sprigs parsley, 1/2teaspon thyme, 1 bay leaf, 6 peppercorns.  Simmer partly covered 90 minutes.  Remove bay leaf, strain,chill overnight, defat.  Cook whatever veg you like in the broth and add noodles or dumplings if you like.  I like a variety of root veg, parsnip, carrot, a bit of turnip or rutabaga, carrots, whatever sounds good.  I like dumplings, so make them with Bisquick, and I have actually at one point made noodles, but I like wide egg noodles in this. I’ve made my own Bisquick before, too. You can find recipes on line. Also, I usually don’t measure everything, just eyeball it as far as herbs and seasonings go.

I miss cooking sometimes.  Even when I am well enough to attempt it, it involves doing one thing, resting a while, doing another step, resting awhile, etc, and cutting corners wherever possible.  Less work is better.  I only have a galley kitchen and my table is in the carpeted living room, so I do not do food prep on it.  I miss when I had a dining room/kitchen combo.  I did everything on the table then.  Anyway, recipes, readers.  What?  Whatty what what???

Seriously.  It was twelve degrees earlier, and now it’s around 20.  But it’s a bright sunny day, so that’s a good thing.

Checking back through blog to see if I missed any comments I want to reply to.  Saw where I went wrong.  Back on November 26, I posted that I was getting better all the time.  Yep, skip to December 11th, and I had been sick for two weeks, and am still not breathing all that well even now.  It does seem that whenever I say something is going well, that’s when it stops going well.

My Christmas cactus, which was blooming madly in November, finally stopped about three weeks ago, and started budding again a week or so later.  Not as lavishly as before, but still.  My old one bloomed for six months straight one year, but neither has ever bloomed, stopped, and started again so soon. Til now.

I don’t know how the impeachment is going, or even IF it’s going, because no tv, just streaming services.  YES!!!  But I hope he gets put away.  Except with him gone, who takes over, and aren’t they even worse, because they may have actual working brains?

I need more tea.

Verizon came yesterday to upgrade my phone wire.  They had said I have to have a battery backup installed or have my phone disconnected.  Turns out you only have to have the wire upgrade, and do not have to have the backup, which requires twelve D batteries, which when one dies you have to replace all twelve. Thank you, but no thank you.  Anyway, asked the guy about the internet being a piece of crap, and  he hooked up a laptop to the wire, and it works much better.  Said I may need a new router and possibly a new base, but wasn’t too  excited about doing that work then and there, so I have to call and set it up. The other thing is, I had to move my base phone into the bedroom, where the Verizon base is, and put the extension hand set in the main room. At least Miss G can no longer unplug the phone from the jack.  I always say, good comes out of everything.  See, right again.  LOL The other other thing is that now my preferred laptop is in the bedroom, and I really want it in here in front of the freezing cold at the moment windows, so I can see outside. Rats.

I am going to uninstall McAfee, which came free with the new (HA!) laptop.  Someone told me I have to download something to uninstall it because you can’t just do it like you’d uninstall anything else.  Does that make it malware?

I am seriously going to make more tea.  Unlike coffee, two cups of tea won’t keep me awake half the night. WooHoo..  Which is another thing.  (Man, I am on  a roll today. Yes, I like parentheses, even if they are not socially acceptable, or whatever.) I was doing so well, falling asleep at an early (for me) time and waking up as early as 7:30.  Now I am back to can’t sleep til 5am if I’m lucky.  Oh, well.

Okay, I think I have rambled all I’m going to for now.  It’s going to be a great day, she said hopefully.

This is not the tea I’m having, but it’s one I love.  Can’t find it anymore.  Drat.

Trying to check bank account on phone, Gertrude decides it’s a great time to wreak even more havoc than she already has today.  Had to play through the thing twice.  Sometimes she is just so….  is there even a word?  Annoying doesn’t do it.  Good thing she’s cute.  Good thing she’s cute.

I have been still struggling with getting back to some semblance of functionality since I was sick, but it is just not happening,  I give up.  I am buying frozen meals, because cooking is just not going to happen.  Did you know there are some really good frozen meals that aren’t those dreck Lean Cuisine type crap, but real food?  Trader Joe’s has some really good stuff, and now Shaw’s does, too.

I am really frustrated with being exhausted all of the time.  I know it’s part of my illness, but it’s not always this bad.  I cannot seem to come back from being sick.  I am taking B-vits and D3 and eating protein and drinking a lot of water and nothing is helping.  I slept pretty much all day Thursday and all night Thursday night.  Better yesterday, not so good today.  At least the pain is not so bad.  My first rheumatologist told me that if you have more pain, it’s fibromyalgia, if you have more exhaustion, it’s Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. It’s two sides of the same problem is what he said.  I started with CFS, morphed into fibro, and have waffled back and forth over the twenty  years.  Right now I seem to be in the CFS phase.

Hey, at least I am getting a LOT of reading done.  Read a book called Longitude, which was very interesting at first, explaining how dangerous sailing was before they figured out how to find longitude, which took centuries.  Lots of lives lost because they really had no idea where they were.  The second half of the book was just not my thing.  It was mainly about how horrible people can be.  I already knew that.  Read another good book, but for the life of me, I cannot think of the name.  I just read it yesterday.  Sheesh!

Still no luck with getting laptop to actually work like it should.  It is so unbelievably slow and frustrating.  Things just don’t load or take ten minutes, when they used to take ten seconds.  I need to call Verizon, but I just don’t have the mental energy right now.  I know. Whiny Jean is whiny.  Oh, well.  🙂  This is not Gertrude, btw.  🙂

How To Be A Better White Person

I have to agree with the comment that says we are all racist, because having been saturated with tv shows and news reports all my life in which the black person was almost always the bad guy, or maybe he was a pimp with a heart of gold, how can you not be brainwashed into being racist?  My mom worked hard to  make us understand that it’s how you treat others that matters, not what you look like on the outside, so I do have an advantage there, but the underlying white experience is that the black person is the one to look out for.  My country is a disgrace, don’t you think?  The American Dream was a lie, and us being the light of the world was an even bigger one.  It is very disheartening to have to acknowledge that to myself.

I get a Goodreads newsletter.  (Oops.  It’s a BookRiot newsletter.  Sorry about that.) The latest one has an article on how to compare your reading with a friend’s.  There are articles here and there online about not reading a book a week, how to get through you TBR list, etc.  Why?  Reading is not a contest or a  competition, is it?  Why do I care what a friend reads compared to what I read?  Or how many books anybody reads in a week, a month, a year, whatever.  Unless you are reading because you have to, for work or school  or whatever, reading should be a fun and relaxing enterprise.  Making it into a competition, contest, comparison, seems to make it into something completely NOT what I want reading to be.  I don’t keep track of every book I’ve ever read, although I used to keep track of books I wanted to read and look for in the library.  Is nothing just fun anymore?  Am I crazy to be bothered by this anyway?  IDEK Puzzled Jean is puzzled.

December was not the best month ever, and January wasn’t looking good either.  But I finally got an antibiotic and a maintenance inhaler from my doctor, and almost immediately started to get better.  I can breathe.  I may not have had pneumonia, but by the second day of the antibiotic, I was doing pretty darn good.  Started the new inhaler today, and hope it helps, too.  Not happy at all with my doctor’s followup to the chest and foot xrays.  “No pneumonia, no broken bones”  Well, fine, but I still can’t breathe and my foot is still swollen and painful.  Two phone calls and a call to the pharmacist later, I get why the new inhaler, but the foot advice was just ‘wear good shoes’.  No explanation originally about why a new inhaler and how to use it, what it is for, etc.  Medicine is NOT what it used to be.  This is one of the better doctors I’ve had in the past ten years, too, since my really good doctor left to do hospital admin.

Miss G is doing great.  No probs from getting spayed, only calming down a teeny bit, still Miss Destructo. She weighs 5 and a half pounds, so has gained quite a bit since last time, in spite of not eating a lot and running around like a maniac a good deal of the time.  Took a vid of her yesterday watching it snow.  Snow did not stick and I miss winter, darn it.  Cold, clear, sunny is fine, but snow please, Mother Nature.

Cannot figure out how to post the video.  Oh, well.  🙂

A new year, a new decade, a new hope, a new favorite quote:

May the best of this past year be the worst of the year to come.

Don’t have an attribution.  So I was trying to think of what was the best of this past year for me, and I think it might have been when my friends came and did a lot to make this place more user friendly.  Or maybe it was the weekend I spent at their house with the perfect weather and the fun and the tacos and the chat.  Or maybe it was just everything I did with my friend Tess, who has never failed to make me laugh.  If you skip the fibro crap, it was a good year.  So hope for more of that.  Yes.