Make Me A Sandwich

This is the yummy veggie sandwich I used to get at our office building café BC. How I miss it… and my office! I’m one of those odd people who like working in an office every day. And I liked going to school way back when too. 📚

At first, I was gonna riff on the whole “sand witch” thing, but a billion people got there first. I hate when that happens. Which it always does. Instead, I will reminisce about the time that I actually got out of bed to make a guy a sandwich and he complained later that I hadn’t baked him a lasagna. True story for the #paulacanpickem file.

Anyway. The veggie sandwich isn’t my very favorite sandwich; it’s just my favorite that I used to get while working. My favorite is probably a grilled cheese and tomato. I’ve experimented with various breads and different cheeses, and I have to say that I always return to rye bread and American cheese. I also like my grilled cheese very well done, almost burnt, not golden like they serve it in restaurants.

Another favorite sandwich is loxonabagel. Yes, all one word like that. Most of the time, I have this deliciousness open-faced, but it still counts as a sandwich.

Please note how it’s perfectly fine and even recommended (by yours truly) to dot the cream cheese with capers, but I’d rather not have onions on my loxonabagel sandwich. And please no tomato! Save that for grilled cheese. Keep your sandwich fixings in their lanes.

Yes, I know there is tomato in this photo. I am just saying. The only way to know your loxonabagel is better sans tomato is to have one with tomato, amirite? 🤣

Moving on. Some people call a hamburger a sandwich… are you one of them?

I think it’s acceptable! The point is to have a thing between two other separate things. I’m defining it that way to eliminate stuff like pie, which is #notasandwich, but to include sandwich cookies, which we will discuss in depth soon. You didn’t think I was going to end this post without talking about cookies, did you? 😱😱😱

Anyway. Here we have a bun (hun), which is two separate bread pieces, and it creates a convenient way to hold the things inside, which we then can nom while continuing to lose at cards, just as the Earl of Sandwich envisioned. Of course, we must not nom on the pictured cheezberder because it is a CD holder and that would be gross.

Five years ago, when we were living like normal humans, relatively speaking, my eldest took me to a wonderful high tea in Northern California. We had the most scrumptious little cucumber sandwiches and other delights and pastries, and of course many pots of lovely tea. 💖

Before I bring the dessert cart, please allow me to pay tribute to one of the best combos ever invented: the peanut butter and jelly sandwich!

My favorite combo is Jif smooth PB with blackberry or strawberry jam (not jelly) on whole wheat. What’s yours?

Okay, onto the sandwich cookie! Oreo has a baZillion flavors out now, some totes ridonkulous, but I must admit that besides the Double Stuf original flavor, I thought the cookie dough was pretty tasty.

Up in Northern California (again ~ they have yummo food!), my daughter treated me to this divine hazelnut pastry at an Italian bakery.

So so good!

In my fantasy of living a normal life again, whenever that may happen, if it even ever does… I’ll walk into a restaurant without worrying about the last time everything was soaked in bleach, order a sandwich at the counter without fretting over how close people are standing to me, and calmly eat my lunch in a booth with my mind on my blog or a book or work or family or friends or whatever thing other than the you know what!

~*~

Images all mine.

©️2020 Paula Light and Light Motifs II. No unauthorized use permitted. Please check out Paula’s books for sale on Amazon.

Self-Isolation Report 3

Saturday Morning

7:30 ~ got up earlier than yesterday to be productive, wasn’t…

8:00 ~ Noon… finished the Pepperidge Farm Chessmen cookies, had coffee & tea, played with cats, read news to further terrify self, did phone games and Messenger chat

Saturday Afternoon

12:30 ~ did a couple hours actual work, moped, felt sad, depressed, horrified, etc.

3:00 ~ texted with drunk friend in MA 💖

4:00 ~ had a salad, quesadilla, blackberries

Later Saturday

5:30 ~ cleaned up kitchen, still feeling bad

6:00 ~ did stretches, had snacks, made tea

7:00 ~ 10:00… chatted online with friends & daughters, set up Zoom to play party games later, did really well at 2048, played the Cat Lady app for the first time (very fun)

10:00 ~ decided to look at writing messes in progress… NO WAIT! Schedule more posts for April, whew. Almost got trapped into doing actual writing, close call there 😱

~*~

Images from Bitmoji and me.

©️2020 Paula Light and Light Motifs II. No unauthorized use permitted. Please check out Paula’s books for sale on Amazon.

Self-Isolation Report 1

Thursday Morning

8:00 ~ cleaned cat box, vacuumed, did laundry, cleaned bathroom, read blogs

9:30 ~ had coffee & an avocado 🥑

10:00 ~ dusted, cleaned kitchen

11:00 ~ exercised to a video

11:30 ~ downloaded phone games

Thursday Afternoon

1:00 ~ played phone games, ate cookies 🍪

5:00 ~ thought about writing, took a walk in Huntington Beach

Thursday Night

7:00 ~ ate instant noodles, made tea, started work

8:00 ~ freaked out about Gov Newsom telling us we can never leave our homes again and began frantically chatting with friends and daughters

11:00 ~ finished work, had more tea

Midnight ~ made this post, feeling too anxious too sleep, glad I still have some Valium

Yah… so just like the olden days when I was all upset about some dumb man, I can’t get my mind in a clear enough state to switch over to the fictional realm. It’s too cluttered with stabby bits of reality and what ifs.

~*~

Images from Bitmoji and me.

©️2020 Paula Light and Light Motifs II. No unauthorized use permitted. Please check out Paula’s books for sale on Amazon.

The March S/hare 🐰

Here are some interesting questions from Melanie for the first Monday in March…

Can you bake a cake? 

I assume you mean from scratch, since any dingdong can follow a box mix directions. Yes, of course. I’ve made lots of cakes from scratch, but I gotta say… I prefer a box mix. If you use butter instead of oil, they’re just as yummy, more precise, and less messy. I like box brownies too with extra noms in them, like chips or PB. Love to take a spice cake mix and fancy it up with things too. All good. And canned frosting is delicious as long as it’s buttercream. Do not buy that nasty whipped stuff (gross).🤮

A yummy carrotty cake I made a long time ago…

Cookies though? Sorry, they must be from real cookie dough mixed by hand. No box mixes or goo squoozed from tubes or some frozen pre-cookies plopped on a sheet. Idk why, but it is so.

What’s one thing that can instantly make your day better?

A kitty saying hi. 🐱

When you were a kid, did you eat the crusts on your sandwich or not?

I ate them. What’s weird though is that I hated PB&J until I was around 12. Wouldn’t touch the stuff. But now I love it!

What’s something your family would be surprised to learn about you?

My family consists of just my daughters and there is nothing they don’t know about me. But if there was something I wanted to keep secret, from them or anyone, I sure as hell wouldn’t blab it here. 🤣

AND (of course)
GRATITUDE IS AN ATTITUDE!
Please feel free to share some gratitude from this past week (or month or year).  This is purely optional of course, but it does tend to uplift everyone (I happen to think) to read some happy and/or joyful thoughts or view some uplifting pictures.    Thank you if you do so! 

I’m super grateful to my friend Doug for motivating me to write Switching Positions. We’ve been writing buddies for ages, but he’s much more prolific than I am. In fact, I was in a slump after putting out my last few poetry books, which barely counted in my mind anyway because they were borne of pain from a relationship. I don’t consider them creative art really. And other than bits and pieces of twittery and bloggery, I hadn’t been creating anything for a while.

So, Doug and I were chatting about politics in December and that whole “wine cave” business came up. We were riffing on it, and I said it would be a great place for a meet cute. He told me to write it ~ a short story. Well, it turned into a longer story, a novella. Every time he asked me if I was finished, I’d say no, I have more funny stuff to say. I tried to zing all the candidates, but there were too many. Not so many now…

Anyway, I’m really happy with the book, and the fact that it’s sold a bunch. Woo hoo! Thank you to everyone who’s bought a copy of Switching Positions. I even have a 5-star review, woohoo! Love reviews. 😍 And now I’m motivated to get back to my other WIPs and finish them up too. All thanks to Doug and his pep talks… much gratitude. 💙❤️💙❤️💙

~*~

Images from Mel & me.

©️2020 Paula Light and Light Motifs II. No unauthorized use permitted. Please check out Paula’s books for sale on Amazon.

321 Quote Me ~ Balance

We’re back to Rory’s Quote Me game that anyone can play whenever. The theme today is balance. Play along! No tags! 🙂

3 Quotes…

2 Songs…

1 Picture…

~*~

Images found on Google and in Paula Light’s collection.

©️2020 Paula Light and Light Motifs II. No unauthorized use permitted. Please check out Paula’s books for sale on Amazon.

The Irishman [socs]

[Note: this is stream of consciousness writing for Linda’s Saturday prompt, taking the title only of the last movie I watched, not the content, and going from there.]

When my daughter received the results of her DNA test, there was a surprise bit of Irish mixed in. 🍀 It had to be from my side, just because. We speculated that my maternal grandmother slept with an Irish milkman. But why did he have to be a milkman? I don’t know. Probably because of a long-running alt.writing joke about them on Usenet.

I became excited about being part Irish. This explains why I like green, I decided, and my cravings for those delicious shamrock-shaped butter cookies. I also love rainbows… who doesn’t love a rainbow? 🌈 Apparently, you can’t say anything about rainbows now without some idiot making it political. Eff that. Rainbows are pretty! I put Ireland on my list of places to visit that I can’t afford, and I don’t have a passport besides.

But then a very smart science person in a Facebook group (I was on FB at the time) explained to me that genetics didn’t work that way. Just because a (not necessarily accurate) test showed my daughter with this 12% or whatever Irish doesn’t mean I have a quarter. It was a while ago though and I don’t remember the discussion cuz I guess once she said there’s no guarantee of an Irishman in my ancestry I lost interest.

But I went ahead and took my own test a while later… and yep, no Irish. Where’d my Irish grandpa go? Disappeared. 😢 At that point, one might start to look to my child’s other parent for the Irish connection, but let’s just not. There is no Irish there. It’s either in my genes or nowhere. We began to accept that the Irish part of her result was an error.

However! Ancestry is continually updating its database. As more people submit their DNA, the methodology gets more accurate, and they tweak your profile from time to time. The last time I peeked in, relatively recently… not only had they pinpointed my Ohio family with greater geographical precision, but also they threw some Irish on me. Just a wee bit, but I was wearin’ the green in mah genes!

I know, I know. Who cares? It’s fun though. When I was in my 20s and 30s, I thought all genealogy research was stupid. You hang out with people you love and who act like they give a damn about you, and… that’s it. Why does it matter who your third cousin twice removed is if you never talk to her? Who GAF about 100 year old newspaper clippings, bah! But now… as I’m close to finishing up my 50s, I’m getting all mushy about connectedness. Family ties. All that. My aunt sent me a totally awesome book full of family stuffs and I’m really digging it. When I was younger I wouldn’t have been interested, but…

Things change. ✨

~*~

Image from the Bitmoji app.

©️2020 Paula Light and Light Motifs II. No unauthorized use permitted. Please check out Paula’s books for sale on Amazon.

Christmas Eve Morning [flash 278]

“Mom, Bryce and I cleaned the fireplace so Santa won’t get all dirty when he comes down the chimney tonight,” Brianna announced.

Kim nodded. “Great work. Now can you pick up your rooms so your cousins don’t have to sleep on top of books and clothes and bags of chips?”

Brianna rolled her eyes. “Fine, but they won’t care! All they do is play some dumb flower game on their phones anyway.”

“I care,” Kim said as she resumed looking through the fridge for expired food to toss in the trash before her sister arrived to judge her.

“Honey,” her husband said as he brewed up some coffee at the counter, “why are you throwing away my favorite pickles?”

“Because I don’t want to listen to Karen lecture us all on the evil effect of salt again.” Kim began going through the cabinets. “I’m dumping these cookies too.”

“Not the pecan sandies!” Tom looked aghast. “Don’t you think you should dial it down a notch? What are we having for Christmas dinner anyway?”

Kim shrugged. “Karen said she was taking care of everything so we could relax. Isn’t that nice of her?”

“Oh, my God.” Tom passed his wife a cup of coffee. “We’ll all starve to death!”

“Don’t be silly.” Kim smiled at her husband. “Our perceptive neighbors next door are keeping emergency rations warm for us. We’ll just have to find excuses to sneak away at different times. The kids are already coordinating their exits.”

“Brilliant! But let’s have these pecan sandies to fortify ourselves with.” Tom opened the bag and handed a cookie to Kim.

Bryce and Brianna entered the kitchen. “Cookies for breakfast! Yay!”

~*~

©️2019 Paula Light and Light Motifs II. No unauthorized use permitted. Please check out Paula’s books for sale on Amazon.

One-Liner Wednesday

Let me tell you about my flight to Oakland last night. I was flying out of Long Beach, boarding time 7:15PM. I left my place at 4:15 for a 20 mile drive because we are talking about SoCal traffic on the 405. It was all a crawl, natch, but still I arrived in plenty of time, checked in, all that. Found out my flight was delayed 20 minutes. No biggie. I began to read a book on Kindle. At least I wasn’t on the Sacto flight, which had been delayed hours.

After a while, they began to give the Sacto peeps vouchers. I bought some coffee. When the vouchers were sorted out, my fight was now delayed an hour. Okay fine. I was 30% done with my book by now. Then we began to board. Found a seat, etc. We were all settled in and the captain came on the intercom to tell us that the power was out in Oakland.

Yep. Planes were trapped on the ground and new ones could not fly in. They were fixing it. When would it be fixed? Dunno. So, I kept reading. Most of the plane was filled with young folks. They all thought this was a great time to talk to each other and chat on their phones. So annoying! Why can’t people just text? The girl next to me called her mom to complain that it was the worst day ever and she was starving to death. To be fair to her, they didn’t serve any snacks on this flight, not even that tiny crappy bag of pretzels.

Finally, at 9:20 we took off. Really, this was only an hour and a half late. I was around 60% done with my book. I’m really glad it was an engrossing story because the flight was bumpy especially at the end. They made the people with beverages give them up about 5 minutes after serving. Oh well. (I didn’t get one anyway.) At least I got here! It was so windy cold and rainy in Oakland though. I was prepared for it, but even so… brrrr.

The arrival line was super busy and my daughter had a hard time finding me even at almost 11PM. But we finally connected and it was awesome to see her and jump into her warm car. And guess what? She brought me a cookie!

For the record, this is a different cookie. They have a whole package in the house. Er half a package… 😍

~*~

Linda’s One-Liner Wednesday

Cookie Monster image found on Google

©️2019 Paula Light and Light Motifs II. No unauthorized use permitted. Please check out Paula’s books for sale on Amazon.

Me Myself and I

[post title stolen from Beckie]

Rory has a new game happening, which is all about me.

Now, I realize I’ve been saying that I’m gonna avoid these kinds of rambling personal posts and focus more on fiction and poetry, but the first thing you need to understand about me is… I’m a liar. Okay then.

1. What is your favourite sweet treat?

I have lots of favorite sweet treats. But first, let me announce that I’m not a chocoholic. I can happily leave the choccy treats to others… and while I enjoy a chocolate chip cookie like any normal human, it’s not at the top of my list. What is? Coconut cake, lemon bars, thick homemade peanut butter cookies, and crumbly cinnamon coffee cake (like the kind Starbucks used to sell before they made it “healthy”). I also love pie, but am super picky about it ~ if it’s not exactly right, I don’t like it at all. Forex, pumpkin pie is awesome but only if it has a graham cracker crust and whipped cream on top. Otherwise, meh.

2. If you want to really relax – what is your go to?

I have a hard time totally relaxing. There’s always something (usually several things) bothering me somewhat. Idk how people can forget about all that’s wrong with this world… even if you’re personally cocooned against financial horrors, what about other people and animals? You must know of the vast suffering that goes on day in and day out, unabated. I just trudge along, I guess. There are things that temporarily distract me like movies, games, poetry. But I know the other stuff is there while I divert myself with trivia. I spend too much time on news sites, which is depressing, and I know I should stop. What’s the point? I can’t do anything about all this outrage… it just boils in my brain, keeping me from being able to relax. Soon, I’ll be moving to a place where it’ll be easier to exercise; maybe that will help.

3. What is your guiltiest pleasure?

This is a weird question for me now. I don’t feel I even have “guilty pleasures” these days. I hardly indulge in anything because of fear of consequences. And after a while, not indulging becomes as much of a habit as indulging, you know? It’s like I’m too lazy to do anything wrong. Drinking? Nah. That’ll give me a migraine. Sex? No thanks. Too stressful to deal with another person. Overeating? Ick, tummy ache! The only self-indulgent thing I might do is not get dressed on a Sunday and watch movies or read all day instead of finishing any chores. But this isn’t even that pleasurable… I only do it when I’m really tired. And I’ll feel bad when the unproductive day is done.

So, there you have it, Rory. Super boring personal jabber. I warned you. 😜

~*~

©️2019 Paula Light and Light Motifs II. No unauthorized use permitted. Please check out Paula’s books for sale on Amazon.

FPQ45: Oreos

Fandango provocatively asks…

Are there limits to human creativity? Is it be possible for humans to create something completely novel and new that is based on nothing that previously existed? Or is human creativity just rearranging and building on previous ideas?

Well… I guess there are ways to stretch and say anything is somehow connected to something else. The internet was novel, allowing strangers to find each other and chat about topics in common, but before that some folks did manage to find pen pals in different parts of the world (or in prison) to communicate with. It was much slower, and individual rather than a freewheeling message board system, but one could make the case that there’s a similarity. Lonely people, reaching across the miles for new friends they’ll never meet in person…

Art, music, literature, science, medicine, etc. have existed since there were humans who had any free time between birth and death, so… nope, all of that will be filed in the “building on” category.

What about things that have been invented we don’t know about cuz they disappeared without a trace? There must be loads of ’em, and I’m thinking that many of these might fit the novel definition. But the reason we don’t know about them is because they were useless or unable to be marketed. We like things we’re familiar with. Sure, we crave novelty, but only to a degree.

This is why we keep seeing “new” offerings from the same old places, like Oreos with different middles. Ooh, a novel filling! How thrilling! But we’re comfortable with this product, and we trust it, because it’s still an Oreo.

~*~

©️2019 Paula Light and Light Motifs II. No unauthorized use permitted. Please check out Paula’s books for sale on Amazon.