Author Angel Ackerman

Monday successes (kitten!) and Dollar Tree finds

Angel Ackerman Leave a comment

So I had my annual physical today. I adore my physician. I’ve struggled to find a doctor that, honestly, gave the impression that he cared whether I lived or died.

I got my flu shot. Better late than never, right?

We interrupt this blog entry to say… I just got a text from my teenager who disappeared while I was on the phone… Misty’s final sibling has been trapped.

Sardines.

But I get ahead of myself.

I went to the doctor this morning and apparently they have a calculation for your risk of heart attack, stroke or other heart disease or something like that in the next ten years. Mine was 0.5%. But my blood pressure was also super high due to stress. I need to keep an eye on that.

And today I went to the gym. Did ten minutes on the treadmill. Did 15 minutes worth of weight training. Really I could do the weights at home and walk around the neighborhood… and if I don’t start working out in earnest I may do that. Cancel the gym and use what I have at home.

In other updates:

I made an Asian-inspired chicken for dinner that was amazing.

I put the candy the teenager bought me in a pretty jar. Ate some yesterday. Have been good today. I don’t think this is what they mean by eat your colors.

And we stopped at the Dollar Tree to get sardines to trap Misty’s siblings and I got groceries. And not processed junk either.

They had lentils, cheddar cheese and riced cauliflower in dollar-sized portions. I forgot to check the sodium on the cauliflower… usually riced cauliflower is plain. The cheese is real cheese. They had a big bag of shredded cheddar cheese, but it turned out that was cheddar cheese food.

We reunited Misty and her sibling, but that will be a story, with video, for tomorrow.

For this week, we now have:

  • 1 dog
  • 1 cockatoo
  • 2 kittens
  • 2 cats
  • 3 budgies

Heaven help me. I have the start to a petting zoo.

No More Gordon Ramsay for me

Angel Ackerman Leave a comment

Just kidding.

I’ve been binge-watching Gordon Ramsay. Thanks to snippets I saw on Facebook watch, I started watching Kitchen Nightmares on Hulu. I got through about 3 seasons, and starting checking out a few other television programs featuring the chef.

I love food. I love men with accents. And I like to cook. The more I watch the more I am drawn to his two sides, Gordon inside vs. outside a restaurant kitchen in the middle of service.

I admire Gordon’s marketing and business acumen, and the food always looks beyond amazing. How does it make it look so easy?

After a day of much laundry, dog-sitting (perhaps literally, if you take a look at the photo) and a church service to represent the office… Gordon might have gotten into my head.

I don’t have many groceries left in the house and the budget is a tad tight right now. (The extra mammogram and ultrasounds my doctor ordered in October ended up costing me, as the first bill rolls in, $500, thanks to my old high deductible medical plan.)

For supper I started with some potatoes getting very old, cut them into wedges and seasoned. I sautéed some leftover ham and some peas in a skillet, sprinkled it with some grated Parmesan and served plated to the best of my ability.

Maybe I should lay off the Gordon Ramsay programs.

Housework Saturday

Angel Ackerman Leave a comment

I woke up at 6 this morning, but laid in bed for a while afraid to wake the birds.

I opened the curtains for them slightly before 8. Here is a glimpse of them in the pink nightlight. Good morning, Birds

I fed the cats, the birds, made coffee, put in laundry and hung wash before making a giant hot pocket for breakfast.

Ham, spinach, scrambled egg, homemade mozzarella.

I cut some cantaloupe. The teenager had a mango.

Then I did dishes. A second load of wash. Vacuumed the kitchen, living room and half the dining room. And the furniture.

I washed the living room and kitchen floor.

Picked up the teenager’s stuff and moved furniture.

Then I stopped to visit the kitten. Which the third kitten has returned. If the neighbors catch it, we have a former neighbor interested in it. But she is going on vacation with Sobaka’s mom so then we would get to foster Misty’s sibling!

Sobaka might be here in as little as an hour. I need to shower but I also need to rest.

I watched an episode of Gordon Ramsay’s The F Word last night and an episode of 24 Hours: To Hell and Back. His original BBC show and his current one.

Perhaps one day soon I’ll do an essay on my new obsession.

Happy Friday!

Angel Ackerman 5 Comments

I think I might have said two or three hundred times that this week was hard.

But there was some goodness between all the hard.

  • Our CEO got my department a mentor. Someone we all love and trust, though I am the only person in the group who doesn’t have a pre-existing relationship with this man.
  • My coworkers are all so super nice. My former office mate makes the Folgers in the kitchen palatable and I normally hate Folgers. He makes the coffee so strong it tastes like chocolate.
  • My new development partner and I are getting along great and I love her energy.
  • My other colleague invited me out for a drink after work. She was meeting some friends and wanted someone to keep her company so I had a lovely oatmeal stout at Pearly Baker’s.

At home, I watched the episode of Kitchen Nightmares that was filmed in Forks Township, “Bella Luna,” and saw some nice shots of Easton:

And tomorrow our favorite little dog, Sobaka, is coming to visit so for the next week we will have…

  1. One Yorky Maltese
  2. One kitten
  3. One cockatoo
  4. Two nine-year-old cats (with seven legs)
  5. Three parakeets

And for your viewing pleasure, here are Nala and Opie: Nala and Opie check each other out

[Do whatever it is] everyday

Angel Ackerman Leave a comment

Good morning, world. I love morning, as long as dawn is breaking. Every morning is a clean slate.

I’ve been thinking about my efforts recently to blog regularly, which reinforces to me my own voice as I deal with various struggles but it also attests to the power of habit.

Exercise: same thing. It doesn’t matter how ‘hard’ you exercise in the beginning because the true goal is to incorporate the habit as an automatic part of your life.

Same for artists that paint everyday. Same for meditation.

Life is about discipline as much as it is about improvement and skill.

That constitutes my philosophy for the day.

Update on Nala

I originally would wake Nala shortly before 6 a.m. when I turned on my pink bedroom light and started getting ready for work. I would bring her downstairs while I fed the cats and made coffee.

As a working bird mama, I wanted her to have time with me.

But since she refuses to close her eyes at night unless I am in the room, I want her to sleep in. So I’ve been creeping out of my room in the dark every morning and returning when it’s time to clean cages and feed birds.

So far this appears to be good for both of us.

Stress

Angel Ackerman Leave a comment

I’m exhausted.

Obviously stress is in the air today. Nala ate through her perch in her cage. She has two, but only one runs the whole length of the cage and she ate the end off it.

She played with a bunch of her toys, so I don’t know whether to chalk it up to boredom, anxiety or rambunctiousness. But she’s been here about 16 days and she ate her perch.

I guess I need to find her some more toys. Although she does have a bunch.

She seems to be talking more and dancing more. Her favorite song is Angelina by Harry Belafonte.

Today I went through some medical bills, tax paperwork, a school fundraiser and some band trip stuff with my soon-to-be ex-husband. We all had dinner together. He brought a pizza.

Then I finished my chores. Laundry. Bird cages. Some vacuuming. The roomba would not go to home base. After an hour and with the battery almost dead I discovered why… the roomba had unplugged its own base while vacuuming.

And to make my day a little more demoralizing, I tripped over my own two feet walking between buildings at work. The administration offices and the literacy center are a block apart. And I just fell. I was hungry, probably worn thin from too much stress.

Someone across the street saw me, and yelled to see if I was alright. She was walking a very large dog. I got up and said I was fine. Barely even scraped my hands.

“Darn ice,” she said.

There was no ice. Just me and my faulty legs.

Sometimes I feel so healthy and strong.

Some days I feel so broken.

That is what it feels like to have cerebral palsy. Sometimes your body works, sometimes it doesn’t.

Matcha Quark

Angel Ackerman 2 Comments

So when I still worked retail, and walked more than 10,000 steps a day and put away about 1,000 pounds of frozen food in addition to other physical stuff, I ate a big breakfast. Eggs, avocado, toast, fruit, vegetables.

For that decade, I worked hard and often didn’t know when I’d have time to eat. Big meals were a must.

But now I’m sedentary (and losing my will to go to the gym) and I’m just not as hungry. And I’m back to my bad habit of not having a proper breakfast.

Luckily, there are a lot of hearty yogurts out there and protein granola bars for a particularly rough start. Trouble is, I bore of food easily.

So when I see a new intriguing, protein-dense breakfast product I try it.

And the Grocery Outlet allows our household to try such things very inexpensively. That’s how I ended up with vanilla Farmer’s Cheese. Now, that was gross. But if I were hungry enough, I could have eaten it.

I also ate it a few days past the expiration but from what I knew about Farmer’s Cheese it is a cross between yogurt and cottage cheese so doesn’t that mean it’s already rotten? It certain had that exact texture.

Next I saw Quark.

Now, it was grass-fed Matcha Quark.

I have no idea what Quark is.

To me, Quark is the software I learned graphic design on nearly 25 years ago.

But I’ve loved matcha since before it was trendy.

Today I saw I had left it in the work fridge. This was good.

It stirred like yogurt, but pulled out of the cup like soft serve. No butter, acidic tang like yogurt. No bits or weird texture like the Farmer’s Cheese.

Organic Black Bean Pasta

Angel Ackerman Leave a comment

It’s certainly not pretty, but it tastes better than it looks. It looks like a pile of slip.

I bought this gluten free black bean spaghetti at Marshall’s. I don’t usually shop there as my soon to be ex-husband worked at Marshall’s and I didn’t approve of their practices as employers or their merchandise.

But I am always looking for trendy forms of protein.

I got inspired (I blame too many episodes of Gordon Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares) to make Asian-inspired glazed chicken meatballs with pineapple and the black bean pasta with a cheater method peanut sauce.

The sauce is an easy 30-minute meal starter, and vegan. See the recipe on my old cooking blog where I chronicled every meal for about seven years: Peanut Butter (Thai) Noodles

The chicken meatballs turned to mush in the pan. It’s my own fault as some of the ground chicken was still frozen. I don’t know why I thought I could work around that.

Flavor was fine, but texture was like scrambled eggs.

As for the pasta, I liked it. The teenager didn’t like the texture of it, but I did. If anything I would call it a tad sticky. The teen referred to it as gummy.

Mini road trip

Angel Ackerman 3 Comments

Today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day and for the first time in more than a decade, the teenager and I both have “off.”

We had originally planned to go to DC, visit friends, renew the teenager’s passport and plot an African vacation.

But with a Goffin’s cockatoo still getting adjusted and a new kitten in the house, a three-day weekend away sounded disastrous.

My daughter complained that she was feeling the need to get away, so I suggested a day trip this weekend. I even offered to let her pick and plan it. She declined.

With the snow forecasted for Saturday and the pets already in a semi-routine, she suggested today, Monday, for an outing.

Of course, she didn’t wake until almost 11 (which gave me time to do dishes and a load of laundry). She did her chores and I offered her a choice: a childish little mini-road trip or a girls day out at the mall as we both need a few things.

We started the trip at the ATM and then Dunkin’ Donuts for egg wraps. Imagine the teens surprise when I accidentally ordered her TWO hot chocolates.

The surprise option was the Pocono Reptile and Animal Farm, which the web site said had special hours for the school holiday. When we got there, the door had a sign saying it was closed due to cold.

So I mapped a route to House of Candles in Henryville on Rte. 715, where my mom used to buy her candles.

The teenager is knee deep in my old witchcraft books. She’s reading a lot of Scott Cunningham books. She loved the shop and forgave me for making roads where there were none.

On the way home, we stopped at a different Dunkin’ to use the bathroom and ended up with sour cream doughnuts to finish the day.

Eating Polish Things

Angel Ackerman Leave a comment

For Christmas, I got the teenager a subscription to Universal Yums, a snack box that send food from a different country to your door.

This month featured Poland.

We plan to do an unboxing and a tasting with every box.

This box featured a lot of chocolate. The three items that weren’t chocolate were pretzel sticks covered with poppy seeds, a milk caramel coconut candy and a potato chip called Monster Munch that was the same product as Frito Lay’s Munchos in a different shape.

For our review, visit my YouTube channel:

Universal Yums from Poland part 1

Universal Yums box from Poland, part 2

And for the initial box, the multicultural holiday box, see here:

Universal Yums holiday box