and so it goes, and keeps going

I went home with Matt today and made a meat loaf for dinner with him and his apartment mate, reminding Matt how to do it, from his cookbook that we created when he was living with me. The two of them are not too well equipped.

The ground beef was still frozen. I put it in the microwave to thaw enough to work with. You may wonder that these challenged men use a microwave. Using was no problem (no metal, pierce a closed item to prevent it exploding, etc.) Cleaning was something else and another story. On with the meatloaf.

No breadcrumbs, but they don’t eat crusts, so I took two crusts off their loaf in progress and put them in the microwave to get stale and then pounded them into crumbs. I knew there were no onions in stock, so I had taken along a couple and Matt chopped one. Okay for the egg and salt but no black pepper. So much for seasoning. No salsa but a huge bottle of ketchup. No brown sugar but a little white sugar sweetened the topping.

Matt is very good at smushing. He’s also very good at washing his hands before handling food, thanks to Covid-19.

Voilà, meatloaf ready for baking. There’ll be enough leftover for sandwiches.

And that was the 27th of December.

it was lovely, thank you

Christmas, that is.

Today has been almost like a hangover, not from the champagne we sipped by the fire but from the almost normal feeling or hope-it’s-normal normal feeling we think we experienced, believing in a future different from the the past two years. Today it was the new normal again: some anxiety over Matt, who has been with me again for three nights and who is what is called “high-functioning” but who often moves on lower levels of coping and causes some difficulties for his room-mate and me.

But it was a nice day. I’m still—not quite euphoric, but hopeful.

Lots to do tomorrow.