I'm not one to spend a lot of time in the kitchen or do anything elaborate, but I don't actually mind cooking. What I really don't like is having to think up what we are going to eat. Like everybody, I have about four old reliable recipes that I use over and over, and I get just as bored of them as everybody else in the house.

So I tried Hello Fresh (a couple of years ago) and Blue Apron (last year), and I liked them. A lot. Somebody else thinks up what you're going to eat, sends you the ingredients, and then you just cook it up. The recipes from both services were simple, but they had sauces and marinades and sides that I would never have thought of. It was great. 

(It wouldn't have worked when the kids were still living at home, though, even if I ordered the family box-- it wouldn't have been enough food for MadMax in his Teen Eating Phase, which was astonishing. The boy can eat.)

But there are some problems with the whole system. One, of course, is the massive amount of packaging. You get a big cardboard box that is tightly fitted with another big styrofoam box, and then everything inside is individually packaged. And there are several fake ice packs. The only thing we can recycle around here is the cardboard box. The services go to great lengths to remind you that you can reuse the ice packs, but still they pile up. Who needs thirty ice packs?

The other problem is the same problem you get with any subscription service: the weekly shipment comes unless you remember to cancel it. With Blue Apron last year, you could schedule (or cancel) your shipment up to five weeks in advance (if I'm remembering right). I knew I wouldn't want any shipments in the summer when MadMax was home, so I went online and cancelled five weeks out.

Then of course I forgot all about it. The five weeks happened to run out while we were out of town for two weeks, so when we got back, there was a food box that had been sitting in our garage for a week, and another one that arrived the day after we got home. And then, because you have to cancel about a week in advance, we got ANOTHER box the next week. I used some of it, but most of it just went in the trash. *fume*

Now I'm trying something else, and so far I love it. It's called PrepDish, and instead of getting actual food, you get a weekly menu, with recipes for four dinners, a breakfast, a salad, and a snack. You also get a beautifully organized shopping list and a prep plan. The idea is to spend two hours one day per week doing all the prep work for all the meals--chopping, making sauces, baking potatoes,etc. Then most of your work is done and you can throw dinner together in 20-30 minutes. 

Honestly, I have yet to do the whole prep day thing, but it's worth the price (less than $10/month if you get the annual plan) to have someone send me menu ideas and organize my shopping. The meals are good ones: simple but different than the kinds of things I normally think of. I've modified them some-- we don't get good seafood in land-locked Montana very often, so sometimes I sub in chicken instead of fish or shrimp--but usually I just need the ideas. So far, thumbs up.

Oh, and one other thing-- she has three menu choices: paleo, gluten-free, and keto. We don't need any of those diet options, but it's easy enough to modify to suit yourself. Paleo is low carb, so I use that one and add a side of rice or whatever. 

Have you tried a menu subscription service? What did you think?

As always, this is not an ad, I don't get anything from it. Just telling you my experience.

Less is More

You gotta feel for the Pulitzer Prize committee. Everybody knows that the one inescapable, inarguable contribution that the US has made to the global scene is entertainment-- and especially, that glitzy, slick, nine-figure-budget that is the summer blockbuster movie, the superhero extravaganza, the self-defined epic space opera. (And I'm a charter member of the blockbuster fan club so no disrespect meant.)

But this doesn't exactly sit well with those who are concerned with the higher echelons of American ART. What are the judges for the Pulitzer Prize for fiction going to do? They can't just throw up their hands and hand the Pulitzer to James Patterson (with apologies to the prolific Mr. Patterson, who successfully writes more novels in six (three?) months than I have written in my entire lifetime). They must feel the need to recognize something or someone that lends some gravitas. Some credibility. There's a certain need to prove that American capital-A Art isn't all about the glitz, the latest advances in CGI.

Unfortunately, that means the Pulitzer prize-winner often ends up being a book I don't want to read. It's not that I'm a literary idiot. I have my cred. I wrote my master's thesis on Ulysses, which I have now read four times. I somehow managed to maintain a 4.0 en route to my master's degree, which I finished when I was 52. But at this moment in my life, I don't want to read dense, difficult, existential plodders, or atrocity-filled horror stories, even if they do accurately portray the dark side of the USA. I know horrible things have happened and are happening, but reading fiction about them gives me nightmares. Literally.

So you can imagine my happiness while reading Less, by Andrew Sean Greer, which won the Pulitzer in 2018. It's the story of a middle-aged gay man who is escaping the country so he has a legit excuse for missing his long-time now-ex lover's wedding to someone else. It's poignant and literary and erudite (air-you-dite or airoo-dite, which are we choosing?), but it's also witty and absorbing and even outright hilarious at times. I started giggling so hard about something or other while reading next to sleeping Dean the other night that I was afraid I'd wake him up. Less is actually fun to read. Highly recommended.

p.s. I wonder how much push-back they've received from people who think the Pulitzer winner should always be serious. Hmmmm. I don't follow that stuff enough to know.

Fwd: 7ToM: Things you do. As one does.

Lily pads in bloom at the pond near our house

1. In the early Facebook days, I had a set-in-stone rule for myself that I would never click on the ads. It was pretty easy to follow because there was rarely anything I was interested in. I'm not on FB very often anymore, but I have to say their ad-targeting algorithm is a lot better than it used to be. I'm often tempted to click these days, they've got my tastes nailed. (So far, if I'm really interested, I leave FB and google it instead of clicking on the ad, but I'm not so naive as to think that FB isn't figuring that out.)

2. I'm less good about clicking on things in my Google news feed. Partly this is because it can be hard to tell when something is an actual news story and when it's an ad. I try to always notice the source of the headline and only click when it's a source I recognize-- Reuters or AP or CNN or whatever. 

3. But I'm not sure about Buzzfeed. Is it real content, or is it just fancied up ads? (Is there any difference?) I click on their stuff all the time-- 27 highest rated Amazon life hacks, 18 best YA books of 2018, 21 Things Europeans can't believe Americans Do (one of them is wear white sneakers (trainers)-- and I'm having reverse disbelief that this could be a problem. Why wouldn't you?) I've learned about some great stuff from them, like my current favorite gizmo, the Smart Funnel, which makes it easy to salvage the last few drops of your shampoo. Makes my cheapskate little heart go pitter-pat.

4. Here is my favorite Buzzfeed article so far, though: 27 Things Everyone Over the Age of 40 Does For Absolutely No Reason At All. It's my favorite because I am proud to say I only do three of them, maybe three and a half, so it makes me feel not quite so irrelevant. And I'm OK with those three because they're wrong-- why does everyone over the age of 40 think having holes in your jeans is so funny? Because paying for jeans with holes in them is ridiculous. I mean, if you get an artistic rip or hole in your jeans due to wear and tear, of course you wear them. But to PAY for jeans with holes already in them is silly. Amiright?

5. Or #24, why does everyone over the age of 50 hold their phone with two hands? Because aging wrists, obviously. The dang phone gets heavy after awhile. 

6. But I don't love coleslaw, I don't double-click on links, I use my thumbs for texting unless my thumbs are getting sore, and I never dictate my texts (although I confess that is mainly because I have tried and I can't get it to work).  In fact, Siri never works for me. I've always blamed this on MadMax. Once not long after I got my first smartphone, I came upon him and his friends making rude 11-year-old jokes and fart noises to an increasingly confused Siri. I don't think she's ever forgiven me. The only response I ever get from her is some variation of "I'm sorry, I didn't understand that."

7. Here is one thing you should never do: shop for underwear online. My sisters and I have a long-standing tradition of restocking our underwear supply at our every-other-year family reunion. It's in Destin with its enormous outlet mall, and we go to the rhymes-with-hockey outlet and stock up. But for some reason this past year I never made it to that store, and a couple of weeks ago I noticed that my underwear was in tatters. So I went online to the rhymes-with-hockey website and ordered more. Now everywhere I go, my browser is plastered with underwear ads. Just what I wanted.

I'll get back to the mental health topic later. Have a great mental health Monday!

May is Mental Health Awareness Month. I know. I'm late.

Years ago, I said to Dean how lucky we were that we have had no major health issues in our family. He looked at me blankly. It took me a few minutes to figure out what he meant-- at the time, I was having chronic migraines (according to my neurologist, more than 15 migraines a month="chronic"). For some reason I don't think of migraines as a health problem, they're just something I deal with. It hadn't even occurred to me that from the outside, chronic migraines would seem like a major health problem.

(The migraines are way better now-- I've had only two in the past month, and since I have meds that mean I can still be up and about while I have one, it's not a big deal anymore.)

But I've discovered a similar attitude in myself about mental health. I have intermittent draining-but-not-devastating depression. We've talked about that before. I also have problems with paranoia (more about that in a minute). But I've never thought of myself as someone with mental health issues. At all. Never crossed my mind.

But last month on Instagram, there were a zillion posts about May being Mental Health Awareness month, and people were posting about their mental health issues, and suddenly some of them sounded pretty familiar. OH. I guess I have mental health issues. And then suddenly, everywhere I turn I've encountered people, books, blog posts, and conversations about mental health. I'm trying to pay attention.

I seem to be immune from the national-level conspiracy obsessions (how in the world would Hillary have had time to run a pedophile ring out of a pizza parlor while she was campaigning sixteen hours a day and was one of the most watched people on the planet? it doesn't even make sense) but I can drive myself pretty nuts with paranoia in my personal life.

Part of it stems from being A BIT hypersensitive-- a small unexpected reaction from one of my friends can lead to days of absolute certainty that I've offended her and now she's turning all our other friends against me. Dean has a new job as of a year and a half ago, and his enthusiasm and new-found absorption with his new responsibilities has on two different occasions led me to confront him with his supposed affair, because why else would he suddenly be so happy to go into the office on weekends? (and half-a-dozen other perceived certainties).

And I am not just suspicious. I am dead certain. To the point where I was already thinking about how we would tell the kids and where I would move and what furniture I would take with me. It's, if you'll pardon the colloquialism, CRAZY. I'm discovering that I'm a little nuts.

Hmmmmm. I haven't even made it to what I set out to say but this is already long and I have other things I need to do today. To be continued. Maybe. Do I even want to get into this? I will hit send before I have a chance to second guess.

We're gonna party like it's 1979

So guess what? My 40th high school reunion is this summer. FORTY. How the hell did that happen? 

You may remember me freaking out about my 35th college reunion last fall, but let me tell you-- that freakout was minor compared to what I'm going through now. For one thing, I was a junior transfer to the school where I received my undergraduate degree, so I didn't really expect to see many people that I knew. And for another, my follow undergraduate alums are such a distinguished group that there was no way that my life as a mom and an occasional part-time office worker was going to measure up. So instead I could take a perverse pleasure in under-selling myself-- little ol' me, just a bottle blond doctor's wife with no career. HA!!! 

But high school. I could completely lose my mind over this. It's casual, thank the lord, and not formal, so I can get by with capris or a t-shirt dress (I think). But how nuts should I be? 

I thought about dieting, but then I ordered Spanx instead. And I thought about getting a facial and my eyebrows done and my teeth whitened. (I might still do all that.) But I'm pretty sure no matter what I do, I'll still look like a chubby, 57-year-old version of my formerly teenage self, and there's not a single damn thing that can be done about that. 

I keep reminding myself that everybody else in my class is also 40 years older than they used to be, but I went to high school in the land of discreet plastic surgery and botox. Doubtless there will be quite a few who are considerably better preserved than I am. 

Getting there is going to take a feat of insane air travel logistics, since it falls the weekend between two other reunions of the family type. But since reader Laurel will be there, and our mutual dear friend Kim, and maybe  few other people that I truly am looking forward to seeing, I pulled out the credit card and threw caution to the wind. 

And since it's not till mid-July, I've got plenty of time to stress.