Do you think I can leave work with the excuse that everything sucks?

Everything sucks, including the .dll I just made.

Which doesn't have anything to do with anything, but if I can fix it, then not everything will suck!

There's this notification sound my computer makes every once and awhile and I have no idea what it is. It's not mail, it's not IM, no dialogs come up, I suppose I could go into the sound settings and figure it out, but that would take away the mystery.

Maybe Gud's computer has suddenly evolved sentience, and it wants a cookie.

How do you put together a menu for the week? How do you keep from buying stuff at the store that goes unused, and how do you know what you'll want to eat a week in advance?

I don't do an explicit menu for the whole week (flea, I am as always in awe of your organization-fu!) but I have a whole freaky set of rules designed to force more variety than just getting home late and eating something packaged, viz:

• we can eat out on our dime once a week (this is almost always Friday because we have a whole post-fencing group ritual thing going on.)
• we do one big pot-o'-food a week (stew, chili, chickpeas, lasagne -- weekend cooking that's designed to cook slowly and feel homey and last a couple of days). I try to bake bread the same day, but that's because it's the day I have time and kitchencentricity to do it.
• at least once a week, we have a meal made entirely of stuff we keep on hand as staples (yes, this means that the staples have to restocked, but it's a meal we can always call on rather than having to plan and shop for it specifically. A lot of pasta meals in this category. You'll work out what you need for your pantry as you get in the habit of eating at home more.)
• at least one other time, we have a non-cooked meal: sandwiches, a big salad, hummus-veg-bread-cheese etc, something like that.
• ... but prepared food doesn't count for the above rule. We also plan for one (only one!) night of frozen pizza or similar because we know there's going to be a night when we roll in at 10pm and we're too fried and hungry to even think about it. Better to plan for it than let it fuck the whole plan and induce guilt.

... and a couple of others that are maybe more specific to our budget/habits/schedule/nutritional desires. But the point of it all is to allow flexibility around our way non-standard dinner schedule, while not falling into day-to-day eating out or processed food, and still squeezing in some real cooking on the days we do have time.

Also, do you like leftovers? For the most part I hate them, and would either like to avoid or know the difference between what will make crappy leftovers and what will make good leftovers.

Soups, stews, chili, etc. are all better the next day. Or they can be what you make your leftovers into. They're kind of like leftovers coming and going. Other than that, I second the notion of making something different out of what's left -- meat into pot pies, leftover grains as the starch part of a soup, etc. I dislike most leftovers in the sense of "eat the same plate of food as yesterday", but repurposing makes them more interesting and less likely to sit in tupperware until they're nailing theses to the cathedral door.

repurposing makes them more interesting and less likely to sit in tupperware until they're nailing theses to the cathedral door

::burns with love for amych's brain::

Bring The Horror Home With Life-size Twilight Body Pillows

Oh! And the other thing wrt leftover-hating: I don't know if you're cooking mostly from recipes our out of your head, but you're two people and most recipes are for 4-6. Until you get more used to doing it routinely and thus being able to eyeball whether a given recipe is going to give you the desirable kind of leftovers or not, just make a habit of halving all your recipes and filling in with (salad, bread, whatever your diet supports) if needed, rather than getting leftovers every day.

This morning when I got to work all of the power was out. The elevators came back, so now I am upstairs in my office, but I guess that was an emergency generator or something, because the rest of the power is still out. No computers, no lights, and no ventilation.

It's the last one that might send me home.

I am not really on top of dinners, but I've gotten pretty good at breakfasts. Once a week I make 4 or more servings of muffins, pancakes, waffles, or bagels, we eat our serving a piece each when it's fresh and hot, and the rest goes into the freezer packaged up two servings to a ziploc. A steady supply of breakfast meat to have on the side, eggs one or two times a week, and cereal on occasion, and we eat pretty well in the mornings.

I am trying to apply the same principles to dinner, but there are so many more choices to be made! I do have homemade pizza shells in the freezer, so there's that. And when I do settle on a meal, I make a lot of it and freeze some to have later. I lean towards the flea system of menus - deciding what to have is the hard part, so once the menu is made, we will stick to it. But since making the menu is the hard part, it doesn't always get made.

But I am still relying on prepared food much of the time - it's so much easier to just have whatever is next on the stack and heat it up in the microwave than do all the deciding and shopping and cooking. It's a step up from the near constant stream of fast-food I was eating not so long ago, at least.

This morning when I got to work all of the power was out. The elevators came back, so now I am upstairs in my office, but I guess that was an emergency generator or something, because the rest of the power is still out. No computers, no lights, and no ventilation.

It's the last one that might send me home.