It’s snowing today, the second day of spring. Whatever, I don’t care because Daylight Savings Time is back and no matter how much snow falls, it clearly feels like spring. For us it will be one last day off from school (maybe two?), and definitely a day to bake.

The other week, I used pineapple from two fruit baskets I received post-appendectomy to make a delicious pineapple butter cake. I also pureed and froze a bunch of the pineapple. Hopefully I use it soon and it won’t turn out like most of the frozen cauliflower rice, which I just composted after realizing it was a year old.

I just finished making cookies from a yellow cake mix — just combine the mix, 2 eggs, 1/3 cup of oil and 1 tsp baking powder. I added sprinkles as well. I made a small amount of frosting with the little bit of powdered sugar I have, but it tastes a little off — too buttery. Nevertheless, Aidan gave the cookies a thumbs up. He wanted sugar cookies, Sebastian and Gemma wanted chocolate chip cookies, so I will probably make them later on today. I did some grocery shopping at Target yesterday and bought a semisweet bar of Ghiradelli chocolate for about the same price as Target brand chocolate chips. So we’ll just have to chop it up.

To go with these goodies, I have homemade hot cocoa mix. I followed a Martha Stewart recipe for the ratio of cocoa to sugar to salt. It doesn’t quite taste like my favorite, Swiss Miss, but it works. At least, it works for my homemade coffee. I haven’t yet tried it to make actual cocoa for the kids… maybe in a little while.

Another homemade hack I’ve been doing lately is tartar sauce. For seafood, I am tartar sauce all the way (never cocktail). I bought sweet pickle relish, and it just takes like a tablespoon of that plus a half cup of mayo plus a tablespoon of lemon juice to make it. (OK, don’t quote me on that. My computer’s slow, otherwise I’d look it up.)

Last night for dinner we had whole wheat pumpkin pancakes, which were perfect for a snowy evening. Monday was the ubiquitous chicken nuggets and broccoli, plus some Italian bread with butter. One night recently I had my sour cream enchilada leftovers out of the freezer. Damn, they were good. That might be a good thing to make a whole tray of and freeze. Oh wait, I mean if anyone would eat them besides me.

I can’t think of anything else interesting that I’ve made lately. Speaking of food though, I just finished It Was Me All Along by Andie Mitchell. She’s a food blogger and this was her memoir of growing up obese and getting back on track. Good, quick read. I’m going to look up her blog. Her rapturous descriptions of fast food and birthday cake and all kinds of things were killing me though. Made me want to run right to Dunkin Donuts. The best/worst was her talking about ordering food in college. OMG, the days when we used to order white pizza at 1 am from Campus Corner! So good.

Next up on my Overdrive app is a Phillipa Gregory book about Katherine of Aragon and the Tudor princesses, and I guess also Henry VIII. I’m just a chapter or so in.

Speaking of books… I’ve been slowly giving away my books through a local Facebook “free” page. If we are going to move, I don’t want to take them all with me, and many of them I haven’t even cracked in years. I pulled a box together to keep (Jonathan Lethem, Sylvia Plath, Liz Rosenberg, Edna St. Vincent Millay, The Age of Innocence, The Great Gatsby… congrats, you made the cut.) It’s been fun to basically adopt the books out to new owners who are eager to read them. Some people just pick up from my porch, others come in and browse. Preferable to just dumping them at the library or Goodwill.

Sebastian and I have been enjoying this book that I’ve had on the shelves all these years and just rediscovered:

It was a gift to me from my cousins back in 1982 and is in amazingly good shape.

Besides getting rid of books, I’m still slowly selling off all my other stuff. Keyword: slowly. Recent sales include a pair of pants on Poshmark, perfume on Facebook Marketplace, and a bathing suit on eBay. My two big lots of infant girl clothes are finally up on eBay and Facebook. I’m also helping my husband list some of his stuff.

Thankfully, I have a working laptop. Mine died completely shortly before I went in the hospital. Because I was smart for once, I reupped my Carbonite subscription in the fall and was able to get all my files back and put them on this laptop, which is hubby’s old one. It has some issues but is right now working pretty well, and most importantly, the H and G keys work!

I do all my sales listings on my phone, but I’m on all the laptop all the time looking for jobs. I haven’t been able to return to Instacart because I’m not supposed to lift heavy things… long story but basically that’s all up in the air. Also need the laptop to do all my wrangling with insurance companies, CVS and doctors… grrr.

It looks like we will be renting out our garage to someone, so that will be some helpful income. More on that later. I’m actively debating getting rid of the house phone, but it does come in handy for the aforementioned insurance wrangling. Right this second I’m about to go undertake a sweeping change — moving the TV from the family room to the living room. The family room is proving really difficult to heat lately for various reasons, and I’m thinking we will be more comfortable if we shut that room off and heat the living room instead (normally, all these years, we’ve done the opposite).

I’m sad that I don’t have any seedlings started, but it’s just not in the cards this year. I’ll probably get something planted eventually, but no dining room greenhouse.

Welp, kind of a boring entry. But technically I’m still in recovery mode and have been laying kind of low. Maybe on the other side of this snowstorm things will liven up.