I decided to tackle two weeks worth of sidequests this week. They incldued taking a walk, going out to see a movie or watching a favorite at home, stretching for 10 minutes, practicing mindfulness or a meditation exercise, cleaning a room in my home, and trying a new restaurant or recipe.
I stayed fairly busy through the weekend. Our town has an International Festival annually this time of year so I went to go check that out, and counted that toward my walk. I was planning to eat at a new pizza place in town for the new restaurant, but they were closed on Sundays, which is when my friends and I had arranged to have lunch. Instead, we decided to try the Junction Remix. The Junction is a Korean restaurant that is a local favorite and has been around for years. Junction Remix is their new location on the other side of town that also serves as a breakfast/brunch spot. They have the usual brunch favorites of pancakes and waffles, but also serve the Junction’s original bulgogi recipe and a few fusion foods that looked interesting. I really wanted to try their breakfast kimbap as soon as I saw it on the menu, because my mom makes her Americanized kimbap very similarly. My mom uses hotdogs, carrots, and eggs in hers – theirs had spam for the meat instead, and included spinach and radish. It was very good.
Sunday was also National Coffee Day, so after lunch, my friend and I went to Starbucks and got ourselves some drinks.
As mentioned before, I clean every week, so I cleaned every room in the house pretty good this weekend. I also washed all the blankets and bought some clips to hold the fitted sheet in place because it always pops off lately. So that was an easy task to complete for me as well.
After the day of lunching/coffeeing with friends, and cleaning, I had to attend a work meeting. I came home and relaxed by decided to watch the original 1986 Day of the Dead. I love zombie movies, and I revisit that entire series quite often.
For the stretching, I did some basic physical activity that I felt counted, and for the meditation I used the Headspace app again. Admittedly, I haven’t used it much through this year, so I needed to get a bit more out of the subscription.
And in doing all of that I completed two weeks worth of sidequests and made up for my earlier indicretion! Now to stay on top of it through the rest of the year!
The sidequests for this week were to pick out my best pair of socks and wear them, to write a story for 5 minutes, and to have my favorite meal.
I decided to use a foot mask at the beginning of this week, and while the skin is peeling afterwards, it’s usually a good idea to wear socks. That way you don’t leave large flakes of dead skin everywhere you walk. It’s super disgusting, but the process does leave your feet very smooth! So I pretty much went through all of my socks this entire week. In fairness, I don’t own a lot – I own some nice cushiony cotton socks for work, and I have some kitty ankle socks I had received as a gift, so I wore those to bed.
I also filled the week with quite a few of my favorite meals. I had pizza, and chicken, and made cinnamon rolls. Then to finish out, I made a soup I enjoy a lot. It makes a lot, so I’ll be able to eat it for dinner through half of next week.
The story that I wrote yesterday was the result of writing for 5 minutes. In truth, the entire story took me closer to 15 to write and post, so I exceeded the 5 minute mark, although I did do it fairly last minute (Sunday.) Sometimes these cards get put off for the weekend though.
My sidequests for this week involved trying a new food or drink, learning to make something with origami, and spending time out in nature.
So, Friday night I decided to doordash some food from a local Indian restaurant. The extent of my forray into Indian food has mostly just been curries, which I love, but there’s a lot that I’ve simply never tried. I ordered samosas, korma, and a few different desserts, gulab jamun, rasmalai, and kheer.
I’ve heard of samosas before but have never had them. The website describes them as lightly spiced turnovers stuffed with potatoes and green peas. They were bigger than I had expected, and came with two different dipping sauces – one kind of sweet, and the other a spicy green sauce. Whatever spices they used inside the samosas made everything look green, and was kind of similar to the green sauce. It was really good.
The korma was described as being cooked with exotic spices, herbs, cashew, almonds, and raisins in mild cream sauce. It came with rice, and I chose lamb for the meat (the option said lamb or goat, and I was thinking I might try goat as part of “something new” but then it didn’t present it as an option and the description says lamb. I have had lamb before, but only a few times – so new’ish?). It had a bit of a kick, but was still fairly mild – the first impression once it was inside my mouth was that it was very fragrant, so I’m a bit curious what the spice combination is. It was also really good, even though I’m not the biggest fan of lamb or the style of rice they use (being half-Korean, I definitely prefer my rice stickier).
And then there were the desserts. Rasmalai is made of cheese patties cooked in condensed milk with pistachios and rose water. It also had raisins and rice. My first impression of the texture of the cheese was kind of coconut’y because it was rough and crumbly. Kheer is a rice pudding flavored with cardamoms and garnished with pistachios. It was actually very similar to what the rasmalai was soaked in, and despite being described as a pudding it wasn’t very thick. Both were sweet without being too overwhelmingly sweet. The gulab jamun was described as condensed milk and homemade cheese balls deep fried in butter and dipped in sugar syrup. For something that was described as deep fried, it was very soft textured. I also would not have guessed it or the rasmalai were cheeses. They were all good, but I wouldn’t seek them out as my new favorite desserts.
This wasn’t a very hard task for me because I don’t mind trying the occasional new food.
The origami one was a little harder because I wanted to try to find something that could be made with lucky star paper strips. I bought a whole bunch years ago when I was really into folding the little bastards, but I never got around to using all of them. There was an intriguing rose design that someone had, but it was so intricate and tiny that in my ripe old age of almost 40, my hands are just arthritic enough to go, “Ha, fuck that.” So I decided to make lucky hearts – the only downside being that apparently you have to cut the round edges on them, so it was going to be very annoying to do.
Also wondered if I could cheat and just make more lucky stars because I forget how to make them easily and have to look up the instructions each time? It doesn’t say to learn to make something new with origami – just learn to make something with origami. If you know but forget, and re-learn… does it count?
So I did initially start with hearts, but the strips I have are too thin and long to make nice looking ones, so I opted to cheat and re-learn the stars. Once I followed the directions the first time it came back really easily. I decided to go ahead and make 100 and put them in a jar, for one small wish. But I didn’t really keep count and made 210.
I decided to use the nature card as an excuse to visit the Wichita Mountain Wildlife Refuge, which I don’t do very often despite living quite near it. Unforunately I did so on Saturday, which had some nice weather, so the result was that everyone else was out there too and every parking spot for every hiking trail and picnic space was packed. In fact, I’m pretty sure I drove in on someone’s family reunion. So I didn’t find a spot to actually get out of the vehicle and enjoy anything up close. Still, I did spend a good couple of hours simply driving around and enjoying the view, which was nice.
The Wichita Mountains in Oklahoma aren’t very impressive as far as mountains go – there are many ranges that have taller mountains, and you don’t have to travel far before they’re out of sight. But it is a very very old mountain range. So old that it is more accurately described as the skeletal granite remains of a mountain range. As such, they mostly look like clumps of crumbling rock formations dropped on top of each other. A lot of people like to visit the Wildlife Refuge to fish or hang out at some of the ponds or campsites, or to go hiking along some of the trails there. They’ve also got bison, longhorn cattle, deer and elk, and a prairie dog city.
mehryment 