Not hungry at all

Finishing up a long weekend here in Belarus, but it’s been a boring one. We were off both Good Friday and Easter Monday, and it’s the second consecutive Good Friday-Easter Monday long weekend where I’ve been stranded due to COVID. The good news out of that is that Christ has risen, of course, but a far distant second is that I haven’t had an opportunity to spend money. In any other normal time, I would have plunked down $400 for a flight to anywhere.

Instead, I’ve done pretty much nothing. The weather hasn’t been all that great, although it is finally warming up. (Think low 40s.) I tend to be up early and get my outdoor walks in before noon and it’s really chilly still. This morning, it wasn’t quite in the low 40s and was windy to boot – I wound up going two blocks and turning around to come back for the warmer jacket.

The only thing I’ve really accomplished this long weekend is to procrastinate studying. I did manage to finally get to this week’s assignment and discussion, but I’m even at this very moment dilly-dallying to put off working on the final paper.

Mostly, I’ve been watching TV and eating. Not a good combination. I mean, I have gotten 12k-14k steps a day – I’ve started out doing four miles each morning on the treadmill – but after that, not a whole lot. One of the more productive things I’ve watched was today, when I tuned into two different seminars on the class topic. Although I am a visual person, just reading from the textbook and the online forum just isn’t doing it for me.

Beyond that, I watched “The Passion of the Christ” and the entire Hunger Games series, which is kind of ironic considering the amount of food I’ve consumed. Gosh, being home is boring and when I’m bored, I want to do something. Eating is the low-hanging fruit.

The pit is where the Jews were massacred.

I did walk to the far-away market and bought veggies, which meant I could cook. This, in turn, led me to another game of Tetris, trying to fit stuff in the freezer. I’ve again completely exhausted my storage containers and am again vowing not to set food into a grocery store next week. Unless it’s for carrots, because I still have a jar of hummus I’m working on. Hummus is pretty wonderful.

But I managed to make progress with my pantry, which overflowth like that of a Victor of the Hunger Games. I really am trying to whittle it down and right now, I could live through a couple of hurricanes. I used up a Lipton Onion Soup mix, one of the three Jiffy cornbread mixes, the remains of the big canister of butter-flavored Crisco and the rest of the rock-hard dark brown sugar. I still have several Crisco sticks and half a bag of light brown sugar that’s solid, but not rock solid. I made blonde brownies for the first time in awhile with that – it melted the sugar rocks just fine, but they weren’t as chewy as I remember. I need to make a dessert that’s made up primarily of powered sugar because I have a ton of that. When you only use it to sprinkle on brownies, a bag goes a long, long way.

I’m still planning on saving the brownie mixes and the bags of M&Ms and chocolate chips for a bit longer, but I think I need to start making popcorn as my “chip” at lunch, and I’ll have to really douse it with the yellow butter flavor popcorn topper. I’m still working on my first bottle of that and I have two more. Not really sure what I was thinking on that.