A Bit Irritated & Out of Sorts

 

As the title suggests, I am feeling a bit irritated and out of sorts today.  Nothing is wrong, per se, I believe my feelings are more due to the less "planned" aspects of the day.  Instead of having had a set of goals and accomplishments to work towards during the day, like I typically like to try to have, today has been a veritable mish-mash of having lots of plans change at the last minute, having to shuffle things around a lot, and getting pulled out of planned activities by the needs of other.  

Again, nothing is "wrong".... I just feel quite out of sorts because most work and home related tasks are being jumbled and jostled in all different ways..... and the brunt of the jostling is bruising my psyche. 

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I ran 15.5 miles (~25 km) this morning, starting at 5:30am, which is a better time for me to begin than the later start I had yesterday.   I still should work for an earlier start.  Soon, I will NEED to have an earlier start in order to get the run accomplished ahead of my Fall class' start times at the U.

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I was heading to the U around 9:30 this morning, when my wife calls and after some discussion, I turn around and come home to work on the computer in my den instead.  This was due to vehicle needs of others that had to be accommodated.  Turning around when almost at the U did not send my mind to a peaceful place, but I worked to roll with the punches and was doing "ok" by the time I returned.  

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PCS - 8... not unexpectedly, with all the moving around of schedules and my feelings of disjointedness in regards to what to do today and when, it ratcheted up my PCS score.  I attribute this to the fact that I had always found my pipes and pipe tobaccos to be a profoundly helpful pastime for me to quell and quiet feelings of stress.  More than once this morning, as all manner of plans transmogrified to new times and as I mentally adjusted ideas of what to do and when..... I would absent-mindedly reach towards my shirt pocket in a fruitless attempt to grab the pipe I had so long always carried in a shirt pocket or sport coat pocket.  That this nearly innate response, which feels both Pavlovian and Skinnerian in effect, surprised me after more than four full years being away from the avocation.

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I am going to prepare a dish I concocted perhaps 20 or so years ago, tonight for dinner.  It is a dish I have called "Mexican Christmas Beans" for all this time, and it has been a family staple/favorite.  It is a casserole that is actually a mixture of Lima beans and kidney beans that are baked in a sauce of tomatoes, cheeses, salsa, and various stereotypical "Mexican" spices.  It is baked until the liquids and cheeses collectively form a thick and creamy sauce around the beans.  I serve it with spiced cornbread, and then for me at least, I also have mandatory vegetables and a salad that (as usual) is quite hefty.... bigger than my head.  

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Today is garbage pick-up day.  I felt a slight twinge of the passage of time, as I had to put to the curb our "secondary" television.  We only have two televisions in our home, and one is our primary, garnering ~90% of our admittedly limited viewing (we perhaps average about 1 hour of television a day, sometimes an hour-and-a-half).  The second television is our "secondary" one and up until recently, it was an old, relatively small, cathode-ray-tube (CRT) television (perhaps ~19 inch?) that we had for probably at least ~25+ years.  Well, when my wife experienced Covid-19, she was isolated in the upstairs room where we had this television. Unfortunately, during her quarantine, it "gave up the ghost" and stopped functioning.  To help her in her quarantine, I immediately ran to our local Best Buy and bought a smallish sized "Smart TV" that was able to fit in the furniture cabinet where the CRT television had resided for decades, which I did install, fully masked, in the quarantine room after I returned home.  But, as with most things, I did not immediately discard the CRT television, but instead did my "due diligence" in carting the thing into the basement, and then opening up the beast to inspect its innards and to see if there was any way I could potentially repair the beast so that I could extend its service life.  Unfortunately, nothing I could figure out was able to fix the beast, and last week, I literally "threw in the towel", and decided to put it to the curb this week with the other refuse. So with a slight tinge of guilt at not being able to figure out how to repair it, and a little bit of regret at the end of our family's CRT era, I took it to the curb this morning.

PipeTobacco