It's only noon and I'm already all tired out.

Because I'm lame and last week was exhausting (although hey, not expensive or terribly stressful) I was in bed by 9:30 last night, which meant I was awake by 6:30 this morning. Gave up the hope of going back to sleep by seven and went for a run, instead. The path through the park was not as bad as I feared it would be after yesterday's storm, but it did experience some damage and footing wasn't great. But I forced myself to take the long path and ran 3.25 miles.

After relaxing over breakfast, I went back out to get groceries, and I've just now put together some random ingredients in my crock pot. I was going to make chicken and sweet potato stew, since I liked that last time. Unfortunately, my sweet potato was nasty moldy (it was only a week old - if anything, it should have sprouted a few roots, but it definitely shouldn't have been moldy). I discovered this once I'd already cut up the chicken and put it in the pot. I've been thinking lately of making Redwing Stew (ani_no_mouse's lentil recipe) so I sort of combined that with the chicken, but I didn't really have everything I needed for that, either. So it's really a hybrid mutation of all sorts of scary.

Chicken and Lentils:

One pack of chicken tenders, cut into bite sized pieces
one (non-sweet) potato, cut into cubes
three garlic cloves (ANM's recipe calls for eight but that's a bit too much for me)
1 cup lentils
2 cans diced tomatoes
1 can chick peas
1 cup chicken stock
1 tbsp curry
1 tsp cumin
1 tsp cayenne pepper
1/2 tsp salt
fresh ginger (maybe three-quarters of an inch cut off the root? the recipe called for a tsp of ground and I don't know how to translate that to fresh so I just cut off a chunk and minced it)
dash black pepper
a bit of extra water

ANM's recipe includes split peas (I subbed chick peas - not the same thing, but I like chick peas) and brown rice (I already had a potato cut up so no rice), and no chicken.

It is now cooking away and should be ready to take off the heat and pack away by the time eve11 picks me up for shenanigans at her place tonight.

Woke up slow to a rainy morning and a cat tugging on my hair. I struggled to figure out what day it was before deciding it must be Saturday since my alarm hadn't gone off. No, wait, it's Thanksgiving! Got up, fed the cats (only surefire way to get them to stop poking at me) and went back to bed.

Mal moped around, meowing piteously all morning, before I realized he wanted me to clean the litter boxes. Which meant a walk in the rain to Rite Aid to buy kitty litter. I also picked up a student desk lamp so that I have some form of light in the living room - or at least some form of light in one corner of the living room. This is a fairly unsatisfactory, temporary solution, but it's better than sitting in the dark for the next unspecified amount of time until I'm able to get something better.

Before I headed out, though, I threw an experiment into the crock pot. It's been simmering and smelling delightful all day. ( The recipe is labeled as chicken curry. )

As it's Thanksgiving, I thought it might be nice to have some wine with dinner and since I don't actually have anything like that at home, I stopped at the state store to see if it was open. But, yeah, this is Pennsylvania. The state stores are almost never open, certainly not on the sorts of days where people might actually be wanting alcohol. But I do have a tiny little single-serve bottle of Absolut Citron (no idea at all where it came from) in my freezer, so I got a bottle of orange juice and I'll have a screwdriver later if I'm in the mood.

This afternoon, I watched a 1993 version of the Secret Garden that I don't remember ever seeing before. I couldn't find any record of the version that I have vague memories of, so maybe I'm just remembering wrong. Anyway, this one was nice enough. A few too many stop-motion montages of flowers blooming and trees greening up in the spring, reminding me of middle school nature films, but I quite liked the girl that played Mary Lennox, and there was surprise Maggie Smith as Mrs. Medlock, so it was okay.

All in all, this has been a very pleasant Thanksgiving-for-one.