Month: March 2021

Nourishing When Plans Go Awry

Plans go awry. It’s a rare day that I wind up doing what I planned to do in the order I planned to do it without running into problems. That’s usually because the people in my plans need to shift, but it can be because inanimate objects interfere. These are problems common to all humans. I see it happening to my friends also, so we commiserate. Often, I can see a solution and move forward with a new plan. Occasionally, I need someone else to see my solution because I am overwhelmed.

On Saturday, my husband drove to all-day meetings in another city. I planned to do seven loads of laundry, writing articles between loads. I stripped our bed, and my kids stripped theirs. We gathered towels. Every person in the house had a basket of clothes that needs washing, so we lined them up near the utility room. I started the master bed sheets and unloaded the dishwasher while the coffee perked. I made myself breakfast and greeted the children as they wandered down. I moved the sheets to the dryer, started another load, and sat down with my coffee until the dryer buzzes. I got cozy to read and sipped my coffee, but I’d only finished the second page when the dryer buzzed way too quickly. I got up and turned it back on. It stopped in just three minutes. Traitor. So much for my planned day of reading, writing, and laundry.

The boys tidied and vacuumed their rooms, and I researched the problem. Likely, the motherboard on the dryer was toast. Because of the dryer’s age and the fact that we replaced the washer last year, our best choice was to find a good deal on a replacement and figure out what to do with the mountain of laundry. As I decided that, my mother called, asking if we had time to have lunch with her. Upon hearing my tale of laundry woe, she brought us our favorites from Chick-fil-a, a couple of extra laundry baskets, and the brilliant plan to move the mountain to the laundromat.

My mother, with her gift of lunch, laundry baskets and plan, saved my day. My kids are plenty old to stay home by themselves. So, they loaded all of that laundry into the car, and she and I headed out to a laundromat, where we could wash seven loads of laundry in an hour and a half. (BTW – This might be a new solution for my occasional mountain of laundry.) We also priced a new dryer. I would have bought it, but my appropriate card was in my husband’s wallet across the Red River for some inexplicable reason. Mom and I walked carefully-timed laps around the parking lot while the clothes washed and dried, and a chore that would have been annoying under other circumstances turned out to be pleasant for all of us. We picked up pizza for dinner, and she left the boys and me with five baskets of clean laundry to sort and put away. Jon was on his way home from his meetings. Sunday after church, we went to Lowe’s and ordered the dryer and a pallet of mulch. This week, all of the flower beds will be weeded, mulched, and prepped for planting. Hopefully, a new dryer will be delivered, and we’ll be back in the laundry business at the beginning of next week.

Truly, Help is almost always available. I wouldn’t have wanted to call my mother or any friend to ask for it, but her idea was way better than mine. While I greatly appreciated her spending the afternoon with me, just the idea to take the laundry to the laundromat would have been enough to get me moving in a positive direction. I never mind helping a friend think through a problem, and I’ve been the person to show up and lend a hand. I don’t know why it is so much harder to be the person who needs a little assistance. It shouldn’t be.

THIS WEEK IN THE kitchen

We’ve been trying to eat fish once a week. I’m tired of salmon, cod, and tilapia, so we tried steelhead trout. It was delicious. I cooked it simply on the stove with garlic and butter and served it with roasted broccoli and baked potatoes. I ate potato skins while a boy ate the insides of the potatoes because he doesn’t like the skins. BTW – that potato skin at the top has actual sour cream in it instead of Greek yogurt like the rest. I saved it for last and savored it.

This week in the library

I didn’t read all of each of these books this past few weeks. I read FROM all of them. I finished one (noted below). *

*All links are Amazon affiliate links.