You Get What You Need

If you’re here with me now, know that we made it into August. With the state of things in the country right now, we shall acknowledge that we are here, and that in itself is an accomplishment.

If you are my friendie on FB, you know that I am insufferably posting photos of me in various stages of relax in my may-as-well-be-private pool. Sorry not sorry, Reader.

I’m working on getting settled in to mah new digs. I’m heading back to Melbourne today to do more packing up of mah stuff and then I’ll be able to really settle and get a true read on if I’m happy or not in Florida. With so much back and forthing, it’s an unknown.

I’ve struggled in the new place with the size of the kitchen. I don’t even have a full-sized sink, just a little wet-bar type sink, and a working counter big enough for a single-server Keurig.

This dumb thing has caused me angst, as I have to be able to cook some meals or I’ll go broke eating out.  So I need to re-adjust my cooking strategy, and figure out what I actually need to do in the kitchen.

I know what I cannot do:

1/ Make a cake

2/ Make Thanksgiving Dinner

3/ Toast stuff in a toaster

4/ Microwave anything

The microwave got moved, and an outlet was supposed to be installed, but that hasn’t happened yet. I can run a power cord, but am trying to avoid junking up my little area with unnecessary stuff.

But instead of focusing on the limiters of my Teensy Kitchen, I’ve decided to focus on what I can do with that space.

1/ Make coffee naked. Because it’s my own place and I can do all of my cooking naked should I choose to do so.

2/ Poor wine into my glass and drink it. Naked.

3/ Make a mushroom and cheese omelet and make “toast” in a frying pan, which is frankly delicious because it’s just soaked in butter. Naked.

4/ Make a spaghetti dinner, which is what I did on my first night there. Not naked, but I could if I wanted.

Now, I didn’t get all crafty with my Italiano meal-ie-o, and in fact my dinner cost me a whopping $4 because all the ingredients came from the Dollar Tree.

A can of Prego (which is awful, btw), thin spaghetti, a bag of frozen veggies for some added vitamins (which was mostly a bag of frozen pea pods and very little anything else, but luckily I like pea pods), a bag of what I thought would be questionable meatballs, but they were actually quite tasty.

I made that, and then fried toast into garlic bread which was delicious and also probably not healthy.

 

Yes, I know you’re jealous that my whole dinner came from Dollar Tree. If you would have asked me a year ago if that were even a possibility, I would have looked at you with chicken eyes.

Yet here we are.

I had no way of knowing in January what this year held for me. How many of us really do know that, though. Life just changes, it’s a fluid and breathing thing and we have to learn to match our own breaths to the new rhythms or we’ll suffocate.

I’m working on it. Every single day, I work on some aspect of adapting to my changing environment, pushing myself into leaning in to it, to see where it goes vs. resisting and belaboring the hard things.  And there are a lot of hard things.  I miss my People.  My cats. My house. My movie theater. My wing-night-and-drinks with friends. My patterns and habits and creature comforts, literally and figuratively. Watching our “shows” together – My Mister has zoomed through Stranger Things and now I’m left to catch up.  All those things.

But I’m forcing myself to lean in to the changes, Reader. Because eventually this will be my past, and I want to look back on it as the most epic time I moved to Florida, got an apartment two steps from the pool, did a great job at my new job, made new friends, and created a life I didn’t even know was on my horizon.  I insist this is going to be a past I’m proud of as I move into the future.