My first working-from-home-one-day-a-week was blissful. I smashed through the grocery shopping in record time and threw on a casserole to slow-cook and fill ThePalace(OfLove) with deliciousness and warmth. Sure, I worked until about 10pm, but the trade-off was totally worth it.

Blissful.

I expected things to continue in this vein or perhaps even improve. Hah!

The next few weeks were kind of crazy and it was all I could do to get out the door to the supermarket, and shopping took much longer – not at all helped by the travelator at the shopping centre being out of commission for three weeks. Efforts to incorporate the slow-cooking into the day were causing no end of stress – and resulted in very late dinners or scrambling to find a replacement and carrying over the casserole to the next night.

Today was probably my least satisfying experience to date – involving a bunch of calls, extremely tight deadlines, collaborative prep for a presentation tomorrow (I hope what they say about bad rehearsals is somewhere near true), being dragged into other people’s extremely tight deadlines, trying to negotiate other very aggressive future deadlines with 10 different people, and then a bunch of number crunching admin (otherwise know as investigating someone else’s screw ups and not actually my job anymore) late into the night.

In amongst this choas I managed to make it to the supermarket, butcher and fruit&veg and put on that casserole (Nigel Slater’s rib ragout with pappardelle) quite a bit later than I’d hoped. When I grabbed the freshly bought pork ribs from their bag I noticed a rather unpleasant odour. I’m often hypersensitive to this sort of thing – so tried to ignore it and kept at the prep. But it niggled at me and the smell wasn’t really dissipating even after rinsing the ribs off and patting dry. Checked with Joe/Frank and he was non-committal – possibly/maybe (is that what pork smells like?). Mentioned it to Don who was still at work and he agreed I was probably overreacting. All was good and I left it to simmer for an hour (of three) and went back to my enslavement. When Don arrived home, he was all “dinner smells great!”, then lifted the lid of the casserole, wrinkled his nose and said, “oh ummmm yeah, I see what you mean”.

Reader, we ordered pizza.

Lessons learned:
+ it is ridiculous to assume I can do everything.
+ even managing to get the shopping completed is a huge win, I don’t need to cook extravagant things too.
+ be extremely wary of patronising that butcher again (not the first time something like this has happened – expensive lessons).

In related news, SML is stressful and I am currently eating all my feelings. I should probably stop that.