1) As soon as I walked out of my room this morning I knew that today would be completely domestic. Cleaning, sorting, organizing, laundering, etc. This is motivated not just by the large pile of clothing on the small chair in my parlor that I use as a coatrack, or the dirty laundry randomly scattered throughout the house, but also the acquisition of a countertop convection oven (!) that will involve more than rearranging a countertop. All this is good.
1a) I never get new kitchen stuff - shucks, 95% of my pots, pans, and other things came from my grandmother’s house - but with the pandemic lockdown I bought a new skillet at the hardware store, and now this convection oven. And that’s nice, but oh! I miss restaurants!
2) Over the weekend a friend who reads Etiquetteer responded to the latest column and also said how much he enjoyed reading this blog (which I always think of as This Is Robert Talking and everyone else thinks of as The Dark Side of Etiquetteer . . . but both are valid ‘cause they’re both right there at the top). “I love the glimpses into your life!” he said. And it got me thinking about how this got started during a very dark period of my life. My father had died a few months before. It was the early days of the Trump administration. I was in the process of getting rid of a roommate and my home felt like a war zone. My work was not fulfilling. And I was deeply unhappy with ye Fycebykke. This blog started as an outlet for everything I wanted to post there, and gradually became something a little different, as blogs will.
2a) Fast forward three years, and a pandemic is changing everything in ways we can’t even predict. And for longer than the pandemic, I just haven’t felt the need to express myself here as much. And that’s OK, too.
3) Aside from cooking, the pandemic has forced me to get more comfortable with technology. Etiquetteer’s response has been to create the Saturday Night Dress Dinner Challenge, and for that to fly I knew I’d have to get on ye Instygrymme. And there’s a learning curve, but overall it’s been OK. Now, after a very fun but technically frustrating call on ye Zymme with high school friends and alumni, I am having to learn more about that technology, which their FAQ does not make intuitive. But I persevere!