Queen Mediocretia of Suburbia

Putting the TMI in absentminded

Month: April 2025

  • TWIL: How to bake a Tres Leches cake

    I went to a party yesterday at Friend #2’s home. The theme was Mexican. They served carnitas, also known as pork deep fried in lard. The suggestion of trefe cooked in a bubbling vat of trefe caused Friend #3 to bring the matzoh ball soup of her people as her Mexican dish. I wanted to…

  • Nightmares

    Gary has lucid dreams every night (hence this blog category devoted to his Big House dreams). I, on the other hand, have had no dreams since I stopped using an alarm to wake up. I have REM cycles, as documented by the Apple Watch. It’s just I wake so slowly and gently now that I…

  • Freudian slip

    I was trying to tell someone that in about eight weeks I will have been married forty years. I said — and see if you catch the mistake — “In about eight weeks I will have been buried forty years.” No way to walk that back.

  • Weekly Paint Progress: 4/17/2025

    This week the Book Cover went from this: … to this. I discovered my remaining canvas and the book were the same size, so the only way to go was carbon paper, or, as some might say, cheating.

  • New pet peeve

    We watched a few episodes of Your Friends & Neighbors (the new series with Jon Hamm) and now I have a new pet peeve. Theee times in the pilot — if not more — they show Jon Hamm watching black and white movies. Vaguely familiar movie with vaguely memorable dialogue. The only reference I caught…

  • After the waiting, the wondering

    Good news came in the morning. Liver is unremarkable, just as a liver should be. No stones or lumps or anything. There is a wee gall bladder polyp: o.5 centimeters. I understand that to be the equivalent of one ladybug. Pancreas could not be seen in the ultrasound due to — and this is embarrassing…

  • Waiting

    I still remember when my parents went to Hawaii in the 1970s. My Dad wasn’t feeling great. Figured he needed a rest. Went to see the doctor a few weeks before. The morning before they left, Mom asked, “Did you ever hear from the doctor about what you talked about at that visit?” “Nope,” Dad…

  • TWIL: Apollo 1

    So, while worrying about space in the early morning, as you do, I wondered if I remembered the names of the Apollo 1 astronauts. (I Googled. Turns out I did.) Among the other related searches Google recommended was, “What happened to Apollo 2 to 6?” “Well they were boring,” I thought. “Unmanned.” I had no…

  • Medical advice from my husband

    In an effort to waste yet another Saturday, I was scanning through old texts and found a message from Gary from last October. Evidently he wanted to express some reservations he had that I was entertaining myself on the side, with an emphasis on the root word “enter”, as it were. He was fine that…

  • ChatGPT gets all excited

    We had our physicals yesterday, so of course that means today was all about the text alerts. Boop. “You have new test results. Click here to go to MyChart.” It really should say, “Click here to go to ChatGPT with a brief layover in MyChart where you copy any abnormal high or low numbers, then…