As part of my 60×60 goals, I’m trying out a bunch of new recipes, and some of them are not going to be giant successes. I pulled one from “Air Fryer Meals in Minutes” by Elizabeth Caroline, and while it was okay, I got some of the quantities wrong, and the result was okay but not promising enough to be worthwhile correcting in the future.
The recipe basically called for a medium onion, minced. I didn’t feel like completely mincing everything, so I went with very fine dicing with some left over chunks, but I should have used the chopper. In addition, I used a medium-large onion, instead of a medium onion, and the quantity of onion to everything else was way off. I should have cut the quantity in half, but didn’t figure it would make enough difference, and I had no use for the extra onion in the immediate future. Another mistake.
I found it interesting that the recipe had me air-fry the onion and garlic together first; most of the AF recipes are one-shot deals so far. Anyway, you air fry it and then mix it in a big bowl with bread crumbs, milk, marjoram, basil and ground beef.
Because of the two onion errors — not chopping finely aka mincing and not eliminating what appeared to be too much quantity — I had trouble getting the meatballs to form properly. Too many large pieces sticking out, and more onions than I needed. I could have upped the quantity of meat to alter the balance, but it wouldn’t have corrected the size of the onions.
It worked, they tasted fine, or as Jacob decreed, “They’re not terrible.” But even with the right onion amounts and sizing, the taste wasn’t anything special. Which isn’t surprising…meat, two spices, onions, and garlic aren’t likely going to wow me. It was an easy recipe, and air-frying the meatballs was a new way to make them over baking, but in the end, there are better meatball recipes out there to try. I have a pic below of the bowl before making the meatballs, and you can see there is too much onion. As I said, we could have added more meat to alter the balance, but instead we’re going to mix it with more meat, add some taco seasoning, and use it as filling for fajitas later this week.
I’m doing “100 day” mandates for myself, figuring out what I want to accomplish in the next 100 days as I go through 14 “periods” until I retire, and another few after that until I turn 60 (for my 60×60 goals).
A while back, I looked at the “current” period i.e., between 1500 days and 1400 days, going back to July 19, 2023, and pulled out some ideas of what I could focus on. But I didn’t really have that many days until the milestone, and it didn’t seem right to try and squeeze a “full push” into a shortened timeframe.
So I didn’t. I ditched that commitment and focused mostly on just continuing what I was doing, making progress on 60×60 and my preps for retirement. And I’ve been pushing hard on getting my photo gallery embedded in my ThePolyBlog website. I’ve done a few old years, and then all of 2004 to 2007 in full. I have done “regular 2008” as well, which is basically everything except my wedding and honeymoon from that year.
Plus, I’ve been reading up a storm. Contemporary stuff as well as some genre fiction.
NaNoWriMo is about to start and Jacob and I are going to hit the writing table.
And I’ve been trying out some new recipes. Three in the last two weeks.
I need to do more on exercise and finish the setup of the basement.
Plus Christmas will happen in there, and some more “special projects” will get some attention. Stay tuned. The next hundred days has begun.
I mentioned in an earlier post (Hundred-day mandates) that I am doing a countdown to my retirement, just under four years away. And, as with most things in my life, I like to plan and prepare for them consciously, ensuring that I am mentally aware both of the passage of the event in order to celebrate it, see it for what it is, etc. AND to make sure that strange unexpected aspects don’t knock me on my butt.
For most people, they think being prepared for retirement is just about finances. And, of course, on one level, it is. But there are also the physical, mental, social and emotional sides too. Take social, for example. It is likely the easiest to see — many people have very active social networks at work; after all, they spend 1/3 of their day there, 1/3 commuting or at home and 1/3 sleeping. Lots of people suddenly feel very lonely in retirement as they lose that network and if they haven’t planned in advance, it may take them quite some time to replace it. Or there is classic retiree puttering around the house with nothing to do.
I’m not worried about the physical side, or the activity side. I have niggling worries about finances, as we all do, but I’ve got good options and with a dual-income family, we should be fine. But there is an emotional side that I don’t fully comprehend yet, and the social side actually worries me. I am not an extrovert who joins groups easily, nor am I one with a huge social network of friends to do stuff with regularly. There is a very real possibility that upon retirement, I’ll sit in my basement writing and blogging, isolating myself further.
So, as I said, I’m consciously preparing.
A hundred-day milestone — 1400 days until I turn in my ID card
I went through the calendar up to my planned date of retirement in August 2027, and used Excel to count backwards in 100-day increments. Today, October 27th, represents 1400 calendar days until my last day at work, where at “5:00”-ish, I’ll turn in my ID card and be done. I thought I knew where that would be already, i.e., which department and job, but I don’t. Things have shifted in the last six months, and my “last” job will not be my last job after all. I will likely be looking for something new in the near year. In the meantime, I’m counting down over in the sidebar:
Today was the first of the 14 milestones between now and my retirement. So I kind of took it for a test drive. I had originally thought about trying to do some sort of special dinner out with Andrea and Jacob to build momentum, but that’s not really what my retirement is about i.e., I won’t be going out for dinner all the time.
Equally, with my original plan a bit of a bust, I looked at other people’s ideas. But most of them were more about doing something “special” like a bucket list item, and that too isn’t really about my day-to-day retirement. The more I thought about it, the more I wanted it to be like an actual day of retirement.
So I didn’t rush getting up, nor did I loll around in bed. I got up, did some personal things around my office, and worked for a bit on a project. Then I had a hot shower.
Then I went out and ran a couple of errands for personal health stuff. You know, the types of appointments that you need to do, but scheduling them around your work hours is a bit of a pain? Well, I had some lab work to do, and I ran over and did it this morning.
Early afternoon arrived, and I had a massage booked. My lower back has been acting up of late, and while I mostly deal with the chiro side of things, I wanted a more nuanced approach. We have a good RMT for Jacob, and I have used her too, but it’s been awhile. She had managed to squeeze me into an hour-long session (there were only 45 on the schedule, but she bumped some stuff for me!). I may be dead, but hopefully my back will be better.
Then I headed out for lunch. I know, I know, how is this different from dinner? Well, the dinner was with other people. The lunch was just a simple treat for myself for making the effort to do all this when life is giving me lots of reasons not to bother, just to keep my head down and get through things.
While I won’t be able to afford regular lunch and dinner outings, nor breakfast, I do want to treat myself from time to time to a simple breakfast outing. Maybe once a month, I’ll go to a different diner or restaurant. I was going to go for breakfast this morning after dropping Jacob at school, but he wasn’t feeling well and didn’t go this morning; since I wasn’t already out, I just grabbed food at home and did other things before I went out for the massage. I prefer going out for breakfasts, but a lunch option was good too.
After the massage, I stopped at the nearby new Lone Star Restaurant out in Kanata. I hadn’t been to the new one, which seems more like a store than a restaurant, at the end of a small strip mall. But a bunch of the others are like that, too, I don’t know why it seems “different’. It’s bigger inside than I was expecting, but the food is the same — I grabbed steak fajitas today, along with a drink, and read a book on my Kindle while sitting at the bar. It was a pretty quiet outing for mid-afternoon, borderline perfect, to be honest. It isn’t a location I would go if I was looking for noise around me, the big TV can’t even really be seen very well from the bar (huh? who the heck designed that layout?), but I do like the one at Baseline. I feel the same about the Royal Oak near my house or the St. Louis Ribs on Clyde…I can go, sit and watch sports on TV, and hear the buzz of people around me. I rarely engage with them, but if I’m going stir-crazy, it helps.
Not all ran smoothly
One aspect didn’t quite run as smoothly as the rest. After I got home, I needed to put heat on my lower back as instructed by the RMT. Except, of course, I’m lying on a bed, all nice and warm, looking out the window on a rainy day…and…clunk. I fell asleep for an hour. While that doesn’t seem like a big deal, it IS something I’m worried about on the physical side. It is really easy for me to loll, and taking naps is addictive.
Just as you can train toddlers to stop having naps, it’s really easy to train retirees to take them. After all, almost anything can wait until tomorrow. And I am willing to let that happen for the first two months, but then, NADA. I want my retirement to be fairly active, not sitting around on a couch watching TV or sleeping before dinner.
On the positive side, the “test drive” approach seemed to be a good metaphor for my retirement preps. I’ve thought of a LOT of things I can do in future milestone days that “feel” right, and I considered a couple of them for today. Ultimately, though, I didn’t want to over-fill the day. I’m not retired yet. 🙂
One other thing occurs to me as I sign off. I have tended to think of these days as also culmination points i.e., what have I accomplished in the last 100 days, and I expected to cover that in my post. Taking stock of my progress on my various goals. And then I realized that while that is important, and I’ll write about that later, the milestone itself is not about what I did in between the big dates. It’s just about how I mark the day. That’s enough.
In my planning for my 60×60 goals, I wanted to try making some soups. This past week, I did. And while I often choose recipes well enough to add the result to my personal collection, this one didn’t make the cut.
I have a digital recipe book called The Teen Kitchen: Recipes We Love To Cook by Emily and Lyla Allen. As the title suggests, two teens made a book of recipes they like to cook, and the recipes are not particularly complicated. Even if they have a few extra steps, they’re all relatively straightforward. They fall in the easy to moderate range.
I found a recipe for Creamy Crunchy Tortilla Soup that sounded enticing and gave it a go.
For the main ingredients, it had a sweet onion, celery, carrot, zucchini, garlic, a can of diced tomatoes, and frozen corn kernels. Spices included turmeric, paprika, cumin, chili powder, and salt. Other ingredients included EVOO to cook the onions and celery, and vegetable broth.
You basically cook the first little bits, get them going, add in a few more large items from cans or bags, and then add the vegetable broth. After you basically cook it all together, you then have to use an immersion blender to get it down to a creamy consistency.
And I think that was part of my distaste for the prep side of the recipe. I do not like blenders of any kind (nor cleaning them), particularly if they are likely to fling stuff out of the pot, and particularly if one of the ingredients is turmeric. It wasn’t terrible, but was a bit finicky, and since I don’t do it regularly (come to think of it, this may have been the first time I ever used an immersion blender), I found it more work than it was worth.
Don’t get me wrong, it didn’t taste BAD or anything. Just nothing that special. It was nice for a meal, but nothing to write home about, so to speak.
I didn’t completely follow the recipe for one aspect. They have options to make your own tortilla chips. or use storebought, and we have some really high-end ones from a butchery in Bells’ Corners, so used those. They’re good quality, not too salty, and add some much-needed extra texture. The soup was definitely better with the tortilla chips than without, but as I said, not good enough to warrant the extra work to add it to the personal collection. Glad I tried it, and I can count it towards the goals, but not a keeper. FWIW, here’s a simple pic of the resulting soup:
In an earlier post (Hundred-day mandates), I talked about the idea of doing “hundred-day mandates” for myself. There are 14 groups of hundred days before I get to my likely retirement date, and I’m planning on using them as milestones on my journey to retirement. I was also hoping that I could add some “oomph” to them by kicking off each block with perhaps a special dinner out.
To be honest, I struggle with momentum on some of my goals as they have to be almost entirely about me. I try to get Jacob and/or Andrea interested, but the topic is more like a roll your eyes/grit your teeth kind of thing than something that either of them is really interested in hearing about from me. I have tried to commit to things together, like watching movies on a regular night or playing games, and well, they are interested enough to grudgingly agree until the first night comes along and they have something else they want to do instead.
It’s not surprising; for most people, the idea of talking about goals is pretty lame. This is a bit of a self-fulfilling situation, I suppose…I set goals for myself, and because no one else is really interested, they are only about things I can do by myself, which in turn means no one else is really interested. I blog about them, and I get enough insights from people sometimes to make it worthwhile to keep blogging, but I’m not really feeling the desire right now. I’m plodding through some photos, but that is more work than much of a reward.
I am a bit disappointed, though, on this one. I had hoped to do a special dinner out, a countdown from 14 to 0, leading up to my retirement. And I thought the dinners would be a way to entice Andrea and Jacob to get excited with (or for?) me for my retirement. I thought we could try a new restaurant, do something different, and make it seem that the countdown and goals were a little more “joint” than something I just do on my own.
But Andrea isn’t really interested and is going out with another friend that night, so I let Jacob off the hook, too.
Searching for ways to celebrate something alone
So I guess I’m looking for other ways to “celebrate” / kickstart my goals in some way, albeit by myself, and in ways that hopefully won’t be a trigger for some sort of pity party. I did a search to see what others had to suggest on the web, but I’m not blown away by the ideas. The following group of 8 were ones I at least found interesting.
A. Make a big change. Well, this isn’t far off the goal-setting, but it is often pitched as making a big decision that you’ve been holding off on, like moving or breaking up with someone or asking someone out, etc. Or something simpler like a makeover, or committing to a new mindset. It’s not terrible advice, but it’s not very helpful either. Another idea might be — do some serious planning with a vision board? That’s out of the box, for sure, but still kind of lame. I can do that any day of the week and twice on Sunday.
B. Create something. This is an interesting one of sorts, in that I could do something crafty that I don’t normally do, creating a physical reminder of the block of time I’m starting.
C. Tick a box. This one is intriguing a bit. The idea is that you take something on your to-do list or bucket list, often an event, and do it. So maybe go axe-throwing or bungee-jumping, etc. Something you haven’t done before that you can do and then afterwards, look back with a small sense of accomplishment that you “did” it. Of course, if it is something that involves others, not the best idea.
D. Pamper yourself. This is a fairly common one, whether it is a visit to a spa (or a makeover), getting a massage, going shopping, sending yourself flowers, etc. Some do it as “buy yourself a gift”, whether it be something simple or expensive. I do have a gift certificate for a weekend retreat away at a hotel, if they’re still in business.
E. Find a non-corporeal friend. No, nobody actually calls it that…but it’s the idea that you find a TV series that is a guilty pleasure, or your favourite book, and visit with it like an old friend while shutting out the rest of the world. It’s not a bad idea, and there are some series I could read, for example, that would fit the bill, even some newer ones, not just old friends. Still, not sure it feels quite right. It doesn’t seem quite significant enough.
F. Create a celebration playlist. Well, it’s intriguing. Partly as having it afterwards would be a way to revisit your “win”.
G. Laugh. Hmm, this is also a bit intriguing. Basically, trying to recapture the innocence of youth a bit through laughter, and releasing the energy and stress that goes with it. Could go to a comedy club or something. Interesting idea.
H. Indulge yourself virtually. I wouldn’t have thought of this one, not at all, but the idea is treating yourself to something like a virtual tour of somewhere amazing, like the Louvre, the Vatican or a zoo. I don’t know what it would be for me, but it is out of the box.
The new plan so far
I’m going to start by taking the day off work, I think. Maybe book a massage and treat myself to lunch somewhere interesting. There’s a Thai restaurant in Bell’s Corners that I’ve been interested in for a while now, and they’re open 11:30 to 2:00 p.m. so that seems promising. I think for creativity, maybe I’ll try baking something, nothing too elaborate, and perhaps get a nice steak for the BBQ. I could go out for that though, will have to think on that one. And for the afternoon, I’ll do some immersive reading, picking a good mystery to dive into on my Kindle. And then at night? Maybe a movie somewhere or the comedy club.
Although, if I do all that, I’m left with another question. What do I do for the next one? Should I just do 2 or 3 of those? I’ve got two weeks of squirreldom to figure it out. Feel free to share your views in the comments…
