Tuesday, October 22 2019

Dear Journal,

Good morning, everyone! Hope you're doing wonderful this morning. Looks like it's supposed to keep raining today. Yesterday it happened to downpour for the four minutes it took me to cross the street and walk to the bus stop. It always seems to work out that way, doesn't it? I also wore a lighter pair of canvas shoes, so I walked around with wet socks for most of the day. Today I'm prepared. I'm wearing a rain pancho, and I think that's going to be my look for the whole day.

Yesterday was a pretty good day. When I got to work, we were in the middle of something called a "sev 4" incident, which in short means something's about to break. We all sat silently combing over metrics and reading change logs for about an hour before we finally found the culprit. We alerted the team, they reverted the change, and the graphs immediately began to trend down to more palatable numbers. It was a pretty good win for our team. In previous months, something like this probably would have gone unnoticed until it caused an actual incident, so the fact that we were able to anticipate an incident and resolve it before it happened is something to be proud about. We moved all of our morning meetings to the afternoon, so I ate lunch and went for a long walk.

While I was heating up my cheeseburger in the break room, a coworker of mine innocently asked "where did you get that cheeseburger, is it from Walgreen's?" His exact wording made me erupt in laughter. The night before while I was trying to convince Marissa of how terrible my cheeseburgers were, my closing argument was "Look at it! Just look at it on the plate, it looks like one of those frozen cheeseburgers from Walgreen's I used to eat!" The reference sidetracked our play argument. "Why did you walk to Walgreen's and not to Novanta, they're right next to each other," she asked. "Probably because we were tight on money, and those cheeseburgers were only \$2.50," I laughed.

The rest of the work day went pretty swimmingly, and soon I was on a bus headed for home. I threw together a shopping list, then scrolled through twitter until we reached my stop. Marissa was at the front window making a bug eyed face at me as I walked up our driveway. When I walked in, Marissa eagerly gave me a tour of all the rooms she tidied up while I was gone. We chatted for a bit, then Rodney ran around the corner and gave me a hug. I scooped him up, put his shoes on, then we went to the grocery store.

We had a big grocery list to get through. I wanted to make hutspot, saucijzenbroodjes, and try out a new cabbage & onion side. Marissa was also out of ingredients to make her salad.

Sip. Ah, Marissa's salad. Let's pause yesterday's recap and talk about this salad. Romaine lettuce, sweet corn, red onion, Mexican cheese, cherry tomatoes, avocado, and BRIANNA'S HOMESTYLE cilantro lime flavored salad dressing all make up her favorite Mexican salad. She's made it for me a few times, and personally, I think it's too much red onion. It's a lot of red onion. Like a whole red onion diced up, and all the other ingredients are basically just plunged in a cut up red onion.

For whatever reason, I hate picking up the ingredients for this salad. It used to be a big point of contention for us. Earlier in our marriage we've had some real arguments that culminated in me flinging bags of old lettuce and cheese out of the fridge trying to demonstrate the chaos this salad has brought upon our home life. Some days I would come back from the grocery store and yell up to her "FIFTEEN MINUTES. TOOK ME FIFTEEN MINUTES TO FIND ALL THE INGREDIENTS FOR THIS SALAD." Before we used to regularly clean our fridge, we would unknowingly purchase duplicate bottles of BRIANNA'S HOMESTYLE cilantro lime flavored salad dressing, and one summer night while I was cleaning through the fridge I found four unopened bottles. I proudly lined them all up on the counter like a lion with a fresh kill.

My time is almost up, and I guess I burned the rest of this entry teasing my wife about her favorite salad. We're older and wiser now, and I think this salad has finally gotten into teasing territory - I'll hear about it if it hasn't. It's actually not bad, as long as you go easy on the red onion. And if I'm such a salad critic, you'd think I'd have a favorite salad. I really don't. I find salads kind of obnoxious to make. Just know this - if you ever eat dinner at my house and I put a salad down in front of you, know that I must really care about you. And it probably took me fifteen minutes tracking all over Hy-Vee to get the ingredients, I had to slice and rinse all those stupid ingredients and toss them in a bowl, and you better appreciate it.

This has been Salad Ranting with Alex. Hope you have a great day today.