Today I ate a meal with my mom in the tv room. She made homemade risotto, chicken pieces in a creamy sauce, and skillet sauteed rainbow Swiss chard with onions and mushrooms. It was delicious.

While we ate, we watched a cooking show: Jamie Oliver in Italy. Today, he was in Turin, and he and some local families made risotto and a bunch of desserts involving chocolate and hazelnuts.

YUM.

Here’s the irritating part:

The commercials.

What is it with North American food culture? I mean, literally every commercial interruption of the show featured some sort of icky food ad, from McDonalds fast food meals to highly processed, almost nondescript packaged or factory-prepared snack items or fake-looking desserts full of food colouring and chemicals.

After seeing Jamie visiting local Turin families who cooked these delicious lunches and dinners with simple ingredients harvested from the local region, my mouth was watering. The factory meat cheeseburgers from McDonalds and the highly processed, packaged desserts enhanced by god knows what and excessive amounts of sugar simply grossed me out.

Very discouraging. And counter-productive. Jamie is trying to show us what good food is, what it looks like and taste like, and here we are bombarded by these icky ads.

Meh.

Spam alert

I got a message from a DJ I follow on Twitter via the chat. He wanted to know if the message I sent him at 1 am on Instagram was legit.

Um… no.

While on my second coffee, a hockey dad I know from my son’s team asked me the same thing. He showed me the screenshots he received which I have copied and posted to my Instagram account to alert others that I was hacked.

See the red arrow pointing to my name writerofwordsetc0099? That’s not me even though they’re using my photo. These two screenshots are what the DJ and hockey dad received in IG, one at 1 am and the other at 4 am. And the third picture is the fake account someone created… I do not ever plead anyone to follow me in terms like that, or with those emojis.

Listen, I’m not texing random people in the middle of the night via IG chat app. Also I would not send messages like this and then say hey with a clapping hand emoji.

I made my IG account private but will probably take it down. If you follow me there, be advised. I can’t be bothered to fix things (and if I change my mind and do look into it, I’ll let you know).

So my Instagram is now private while I ruminate over this thing. I noticed some of you have blocked and reported them, thank you for doing that.

Dog sitting shenanigans concluded on Monday

As you may remember, Miss Happy Tail Syndrome Reya has been staying with Tucker and I and the rest of the family for a week. When she went home on Monday, so did I, back to my room with a door in the burbs.

I’m always so discombobulated the first day back in the burbs. I did some organizing in my room and in my Etsy studio downstairs, some decluttering and some reassessing things. I worked on some Etsy orders and listened to an incredibly irritating guy on zoom who presented a workshop I signed up for.

I left the workshop after 30 minutes. So unhelpful. To distract myself I texted Reya’s family to find out how their reunion with their dog went. I got this response:

She didn’t look happy to be home, and did two laps of the house before she even greeted me, LOL. I think she was looking for Tucker.

That is just so adorable. ❤ Tucker too was quite sad after Reya left when her human dad came by to pick her up.

Reya and Tucker were very happy together and when they weren’t into some sort of shenanigans, they snuggled on the couch together. They played outside, went for walks together, and if a human dared to pet one dog and not the other at exactly the same time there was excessive dramatics involving groaning, grunting, tail-wagging, paws on body, face licking and all sorts of other behaviour alerting the negligent human in question to pay attention to them.

“See these?” I told them both showing them my hands when they pawed at me incessantly. “I have two hands! That’s enough for both of you!”

Lordy. 😀

Here’s a cute video of me talking to Reya who snuck into the little spot I got ready for myself to sit and have a tea among all the mismatched pillows:

The original plan was for me to take Tucker back to the burbs for a few days but Sonja insisted on keeping him and even promised to walk him prior to school on Thursday morning when her dad leaves the house at 7 am. (Kids typically leave at 8:30 am). Neither her dad nor I were convinced this was going to happen since Little Miss Teenager isn’t exactly Little Miss Sunshine on school mornings. But she promised, so we adapted our plans and I left without the beagle.

Frankly, I’m proud of my child for stepping up. It will be a good experience for her on Thursday morning.

When I got to the burbs I got to sleep on my new mattress for the first time, and I tell you, it felt very different from that lumpy futon I used to sleep on.

And so begins another stretch of me in the suburbs. I’m busy writing book 2 for my contemporary romance Music Lovers, which is published on Amazon for Kindle. Please take the time to leave a review, I would appreciate it very much.

Thank you for reading by blog today! See you in the comments.