MB got a last-minute gig and so has been away all week. In addition to trying not to go crazy with worry over random things, as I’m wont to do when MB is away for an extended period of time (call me needy but there you have it), I’ve done some other stuff.
I went back to work. Hurray! Last week I wrote about how I like to work the week between Christmas and New Year’s, and while I did work from home, I really missed going into the office. (It helps that I go in just three days a week, getting a reprieve every other day.)
I cooked. When MB’s around, we normally eat out or he cooks. I don’t feel confident in my culinary skills so I refrain. But when MB’s away, I get back into the mode of mostly eating at home.
My new attempt this week was stir-fried shrimp. We had some in the freezer that I wanted to use up. As I started to prep them (peeling shrimp is a pain in the ass, by the way), I realized I had no idea how to cook them. I went with the usual suspects: soy sauce, rice vinegar, a little sugar, ginger, garlic. The shrimp had NO FLAVOR. While the snow peas I threw in turned out awesome, the shrimp themselves tasted like almost nothing.
Yesterday I felt like having shrimp again so I called up my mom – which was what I should done in the first place – to get her recipe for her tomato-y shrimp. The secret ingredient? Ketchup. Also, rice wine, corn starch, and a little salt. And guess what? The shrimp tasted so much better! The minute I started frying them up, they smelled good, ie, like my mom’s shrimp. The ketchup we have is a spicy gourmet kind, which may not be as sweet as regular ketchup, and plus I put too much. But otherwise the shrimp were tasty. I bought an economy size bag of frozen shrimp so I’m trying the dish again tonight.
I watched Downton Abbey. I had been hearing people rave about this show so I decided to check it out. It’s really good! I caught up on the whole first season on Masterpiece Theater’s website. The show focuses on a wealthy family and their servants in 1913 England. Everyone is awesome in it, but Maggie Smith especially cracks me up. Also, they spent a hell of a lot of time getting dressed for dinner! I mean, every night, not just special occasions. That would get tiresome, right quick.
Tonight is the premiere of the second season, which I believe has already been shown in the UK.
I got my hair cut. I’ve been trying to grow my hair into a bob, but my hair is so thick and coarse, it grows out rather than down. Recently I decided I had had enough and chopped it all off. It’s short, like Emma Watson pixie cut short. I do like it, especially since it’s so much easier to care for, and I’ve had it this short before, but it will take me some time to get used to it.
I cursed out then apologized to my printer. MB needed my help copy-editing an article. I did what I always do when I’m copy-editing something: print it out. But for some reason (maybe because it was a text document, rather than word processing) it started printing out one sentence per page. WASTING PAPER!!! In a panic, I turned off the printer, and also emptied the paper tray. Then I canceled the print job from my computer.
The problem was after I turned the printer back on, it kept blinking its red Error light. We have a basic printer so it doesn’t tell us what that error is. I kept turning it off and on, hoping it’d fix itself. But it didn’t. I Googled “HP printer error” but didn’t find shit, except for one person who did the same exact thing as I did (turning off the printer, taking out the paper).
“Goddamned printer!” I kept muttering. “Stupid fucking printer, I hate you.”
Then suddenly it occurred to me that because I had stopped a print job right in the middle, that it might have been in the midst of printing as I did. Hence, paper jam.
It took me another million years to remember how to pull out the toner cartridge to check inside, and lo and behold, there was a paper jam.
Sorry, printer.
You’d think I never lived alone before.