Sunday Round-Up

Since we still hope to go out of town at the end of the coming week, today was a Big Shopping and Baking Day.

I started my morning by doing a little writing while sipping Sumatran coffee. I suspect I’ll be going down to the wire on my draft, but I do think I can make my target of finishing before Thursday.

Then I went out and ran a few errands, came home and started cooking:

• cornbread with cheese and black pepper
  
• pumpkin bread (2 loaves)
  
• hard-boiled eggs
  
• curry zucchini
  
• curry chickpeas and potatoes (using remainder of pumpkin from the pumpkin bread)
  
• fried rice
  
• steamed rice (mix of brown and jasmine rice)
  
• humza bread
  

For anyone curious, the humza bread was at one time touted as some sort of miracle diet food. I don’t believe in “miracle foods” and my weight is just fine, thank you. But any sort of food that travels well and packs a lot of hunger-reduction in a small package is good road trip food, especially for the long stretches of West Texas, where you can drive all day without finding anything better than a gas station convenience store selling hours-old fried chicken from under a heat lamp. So rather than take a chance of starving, I’m giving the humza bread a try. It’s quite tasty in its own right, so I may make this a regular thing.

I now have a refrigerator packed to the gills! Later this week I’ll be making some more cornbread and some carrot or zucchini bread. I also want to try my hand at spinach frittatas. I saw a recipe for some that are quite small and I think they would make good road trip food. One of the great things about hours and hours of driving in the western sun is that if you wrap a food item in foil and set it on the dashboard for a couple hours, it gets nice and hot. Try it yourself if you don’t believe me! You’ll never think of travel food the same way again.

So I’m envisioning stopping for picnics that consist of frittatas and grape tomatoes or curry chickpeas and zucchini. And in between stops, well, there’s that humza bread.

After I did all that cooking, there wasn't much time left in the afternoon and since this is my last week on the job, I did the performance appraisals on my staff instead of a bike workout. I'm running out of time to do all the projects that need doing and it doesn't help that I've got short-timer syndrome pretty bad. But not in regard to my staff. I'm trying to do everything I can for them before I go.

I’ll be getting an update on Tidbit tomorrow. For those who have asked, Tidbit is about five years old. She was a shelter rabbit, so I don’t know much about her history before I got her four years ago. She’s under the care of a vet who specializes in exotics. She has been checked for issues with her teeth and she’s had an x-ray. The diagnosis is hypomotility, likely due to hair ingestion (although we suspect her love of chewing on sheets is also a factor). She has been alert and responsive throughout her ordeal, so hopefully this is just a simple hairball situation and not symptomatic of some obscure and expensive rabbit disease.

Her situation as of last week was considered urgent but not immediately life-threatening, but going without an update all weekend is nerve-wracking. She went from doing binkies on the bed and begging for food to refusing all food within twenty-four hours, so my mind comes up with awful scenarios of what could be happening over the weekend! I hope they call with good news on Monday!

And finally, tonight we mourn the passing of one of our dear little blog-bunnies, Archi Ann. I will so miss “your” posts and visits, sweetie.