Average Jane

Average Jane Has An Incredibly Puzzling Conversation

After the Chiefs game ended tonight my husband came downstairs and I happened to mention that we should watch the Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special sometime soon, even though I've heard it's pretty terrible.

Him: "Wow they made a holiday special. With the whole cast?"

Me: "Yes."

Him: "Except for the one who died. Sneep?"

Me: "What? Yes, all the characters who are alive in universe."

Him: "You know, the guy who played Sneep in Harry Potter."

Me: "Sneep? What are you talking about? Do you mean the guy from the Walking Dead?"

Him: "No, the guy who was also in Harry Potter."

Me: "There was no one from Harry Potter in Guardians of the Galaxy!"

Him: ...

Me: ...

Him: "I thought you meant Galaxy Quest."

Me: "Galaxy Quest?! Why would they make a holiday special now from a 23-year-old movie?"

Him: "I don't know why they do anything."

And...scene.

 

Average Jane Scales Back Thanksgiving

Guess who's still sick? It's me! And the spouse. Just phasing into a new stage of illness in the third week, still testing positive, and now dealing with sinus congestion and more coughing.

So, I'm obviously not hosting Thanksgiving dinner after all. Yet I have the food, so I'll have to at least cook the turkey so I can put the majority of it in the freezer for later. I'm actually leaning toward cooking the dinner on Wednesday because it sounds good and most of the meal is fairly easy to prepare.

I'll obviously make smaller portions of the side dishes - especially the dressing, which will now be a box of Stove Top. I might skip the dinner rolls because we will have plenty of carbs without them.

Mostly, I'm just looking forward to the leftovers.

In the meantime, I'm back to working from my bed with my trusty Snuggle Dog™. I'm taking off Thursday and Friday, but considering that I've basically spent the last 14 days in bed, I doubt that a four-day weekend is going to make that much difference in my recovery. At this point, I just have to be patient, I guess.

Average Jane Plans a Thanksgiving Feast

It's time to appease the algorithm deities by posting a fresh link to my Thanksgiving recipe booklet! It's a convenient, downloadable document that will walk you through the daunting parts of creating the traditional white people Thanksgiving meal, plus it has a couple of recipes for appetizers that everyone might like.

I'll be following it next week, with a couple of little wrinkles. Over the past several years, I'd gotten rather lazy and I'd been catering much of the meal and filling in with homemade rolls, pies, etc. Last year, I made an unfortunate choice of restaurant and our meal was so terrible that I went to the store and made the whole thing over again the next day from scratch.

That broke the spell of catering for me, so this year I'm making the whole shebang myself, including a ridiculously huge turkey that I bought well in advance because I was concerned about rumors of a turkey shortage. Today was the day to take it out of the freezer and put it in the fridge to start thawing, which I did this morning.

Also on the menu: stuffing, mashed potatoes and gravy, green bean casserole, my great-aunt's dinner rolls, and a couple of pumpkin pies. My aunt is bringing roasted sweet potatoes from her garden and I'm considering making 50/50 pumpkin/sweet potato pies this year to jazz things up a bit. I'll report back.

For an appetizer, I'll make the pomegranate salsa recipe from the booklet. Even if you're pretty confident about getting dinner on the table according to a strict schedule, it never hurts to have a little snack available just in case.

This weekend, I'll get my grocery shopping out of the way, then clean my house in fits and starts until it feels presentable. I'm only having three guests, five diners in total, so I really only need to worry about the living room, kitchen and bathrooms. We can close the other doors. Yes, I want my house to be clean but I also have a library book due on the 22nd. Priorities, you know.

The dog is guaranteed to be a pain in the ass the whole time because she is 100% pure chihuahua (did I ever mention that I got her DNA tested? Nothing but chihuahuas all the way down.) and she has zero trust in our judgment when it comes to letting evil strangers into the house. She will bark the whole time except when people are sitting quietly, and it will be annoying to all. But after nearly three years of houseguest-free existence, she's less socialized than ever, so that's just how it goes.

If I don't post again before the holiday, I hope you enjoy yourselves. If my recipes helped you out, let me know!

Average Jane Was Wrong

When I last posted, I had talked myself into believing that I was dealing with some fall allergies or perhaps a mild cold. So logic. Many delusion. 

That night - the night before I was supposed to work the election - I barely slept at all because I felt like absolute ass. Horrible headache, sore throat, cough, the whole works. I took another COVID test, went back to bed while I waited for my phone to announce that 15 minutes were up, and there they were: two lines.

I'd made it almost three years without succumbing to the 'rona, but I'd finally flown too close to the sun during some activity or other.

First, I had to call and leave a message for the election board that I wouldn't be able to work after all. I was supposed to be the assistant supervising judge for my polling location, but fortunately they had a spare ready to send in. If I'd tested negative, I might have been stupid enough to mask up and try to tough it out, but the test result saved me from myself. It would have been the most ill-advised decision I'd ever made if I'd really tried to go through with being on my feet all day.

I had already taken the day off from my job for the election, so at least I didn't have to worry about that. The day was largely a blur because I felt awful. But after a ton of run-around trying to get a Paxlovid prescription, my doctor called one in and a friend not only picked it up for me, but also brought me cookies, lemon drops, NyQuil, aspirin and Gatorade, all of which I am still enjoying at the end of the week. Getchu some friends like that.

The next day I felt considerably better. The headache has never returned, although I'm obviously still sick. I turned my bed into a complete squirrel's nest of cables with my work laptop and headset and my personal laptop and headset. Complete with snuggly dog, of course.

I ended up working a full day on Wednesday from my bed office and most of the day on Thursday before I got really tired and needed to stop.

Today I had some new symptoms that might be medication side-effects, and since I didn't have any meetings on the calendar it seemed like the ideal time to take a three-day weekend.

All this week I've mostly been consuming toast, oatmeal, soup and Sprite, all of which I got early on via an Instacart order. Yesterday I ordered a hearty and delicious comfort food lunch, but it may have overwhelmed my delicate system. I do truly appreciate all the offers from various friends to bring me stuff, though.

I sent the spouse to the library last night because my hold on N.K. Jemisin's "The World We Make" had come in and I was very invested to see how the story ended after having read the first book early this year while I was on vacation in Costa Rica. It can go back to the library tonight and I'll be moving on to my pile of other books between naps.

What have I learned from all this?

1. Keep wearing your masks! I'd recently upgraded to some nice 3M Aura N95s but guess what? They can't help you if you aren't wearing them.
2. Get Paxlovid if you can. It made an immediate, noticeable difference in how I felt. Yes, it makes your mouth taste horrible, but as long as you keep eating and drinking neutral things, you can make it dissipate. I know there's a risk of COVID bounceback after the treatment course ends, but apparently that's a risk with or without the medication.
3. Rest, rest, rest. Centralizing my existence on my bed was a great choice, not only to stay away from the uninfected member of the household, but also to force myself to take it easy. If I lived alone, I'm pretty sure I would have been overdoing things by now.

Finally, it's been terribly sad to have a first-row seat to the rapid breakdown of Twitter this week. If you're still there (I am, mostly to keep my account mine), turn on two-factor authentication, delete your DMs, don't provide any financial information, and consider restricting your account to your current followers. 

That's enough for now. I think I feel another nap coming on. See you here whenever you stop by!

Average Jane Is Sniffly

Ah, it's that wonderful time of the year when you get to play: Cold or Allergies? Except now it's: Cold, Allergies or COVID?

Last night I was leaning toward the virus theory because I was so tired, but of course I was tired! On Saturday I'd driven around all day leading a Caffeine Crawl and drinking entirely too much caffeine and sugar. Then I had to deal with the clocks being set back an hour. The wicked combination of my usual insomnia and the dog's breakfast time magically shifting to 5:00 a.m. meant I was behind on sleep and battling my own circadian rhythms. 

Yet somehow I woke up on Sunday inspired to actually complete my weekend to-do list, so I cleaned out my refrigerator, deep-cleaned the kitchen trash and recycling cans, and moved everything on the countertops to clean behind and underneath it all. Then I sat through more than two hours of election training, so I definitely came by my tiredness honestly. Ignoring the time change as I generally do at first, I turned in around 8:00 p.m. after loading up on remedies for post-nasal drip.

Today I took my umpteenth negative COVID test since 2020 and then had the wherewithal to cook myself a full breakfast, so I'm now betting on allergies unless something changes. 

Tomorrow I have 13+ hours of election work ahead of me, so I need all the energy I can get. Here's hoping a few more cups of cinnamon tea will put everything right.

Average Jane Plans Her Retreat from Twitter

You'd think that I wouldn't love a social media platform that helped make my own blog mostly obsolete, but Twitter has been my favorite online outpost since I joined in 2008. With it clearly circling the drain, I'm cautiously hanging on for now, but I can foresee the end coming soon, one way or another.

In the early days, local Twitter followers found each other quickly and if someone posted, "Who wants to grab lunch today downtown?" you could feasibly get a group of eight people together within an hour to share a meal. I made some great friends who turned out to live within a few blocks of me at the time and we still see each other regularly. I know people who found roommates, met spouses, and, like me, formed solid social lives around their "tweeps."

As the platform matured and I began following more people, it turned into an information firehose. I began deliberately shaping my feed to include perspectives from people in other communities, professions and cultures. I follow so many scientists, historians, activists and experts to learn interesting and inspiring things. 

Twitter has also been a vital source of news, from "on the ground" information when something is happening to filtered national news that surfaces the key stories of the day. I'm not sure what's going to take its place in that regard. 

More than once I've told someone, "I live on Twitter." It's been my hangout, my place to shout into the void when I'm feeling lonely, and a solid source of entertainment. I've been a small enough fish to stay off the radar of trolls for the most part. Plus, it probably helps that I also use it for the same kind of casual, everyday thoughts that this blog has always encompassed. 

Yes, many mornings it felt like doomscrolling was an unhealthy way to start the day, but I also know my own feelings enough to sense when to put down the phone and do something in the real world.

I've always been fully aware of the adage, "If you're not paying, you're the product." That's why I made sure I put in a ticket to get this blog back up and running after last week's outage. I am paying to be here, so I suppose this is where I'll plant my flag again. If nothing else, it makes me findable - and perhaps I'll start posting more regularly again to take the place of the 280-character running commentaries to which I've been so accustomed.

It's sad to see such a vibrant community deliberately destroyed. As much as I enjoy the Discord groups that have sprung up as an end run around the horribleness of social media moguls, they're too siloed to take the place of the Twitter experience. Fingers crossed that a good alternative presents itself soon.