7 Quick Takes about Eating Chicken Abroad, Words of Wisdom, and Getting Distracted in the Yard

It's 7 Quick Takes Friday! How was your week? 

—1—

This wasn't the first time I've had to report fraud on one of my credit cards, but it certainly was the weirdest. Usually the unauthorized purchase is an expensive piece of tech from Apple or Google, but this time do you know what it was?

Three separate charges to Kentucky Fried Chicken, ranging from $3 to $10. And three foreign transaction fees of a few cents for each of the KFC orders.

I felt weird about even calling to report the fraud because they were such small and strange charges. But since no one in the house had been out of the country that month it was pretty clear. 

Also, I'm not sure if it was our connection or if the lady I talked to was new, but it took her FOREVER and she kept leaving these really long pauses where I'd eventually go "Um... hello?" to make sure she was still there. The thought went through my head, "Am I somehow being scammed right now?" But eventually she figured it out and it's all good now. No more overseas fast food charges at the moment.

—2—

Before my mom left on Monday, we went to a museum with the 21-year-old. In one gallery, there a big wall of notes where you could leave words of wisdom for future museum visitors.

There were the standard political slogans, religious declarations, and words of encouragement and affirmation, along with a generous smattering of "Max was here" and "Taylor + Kelsey 4-EVA!!!" type notes. Pretty much everything I expected to see. 

But here were a few of my favorites:

"Make sure to love yourself, if you don't who will? I know I sure won't."

"Nobody really NEEDS eyebrows."

"If you are still saying '6, 7' you are not funny and no one likes you. It's over."

We stayed for a little while looking over the notes and as we went to leave, another family walked in. Their elementary schooler looked at the notes wall and then realized he could add one. Running over to the table with pens and blank notes, he announced: "Mom! I'm gonna write 6, 7 on it!"

So... it's not over, apparently. 

—3—

Usually, I don't comment on current events on this blog — especially anything political. And usually, I don't think there's anything funny about attempted violent crime.

But not always.

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Last weekend a shooter tried to break in to the White House correspondents' dinner, and while everyone else dove for cover under tables, one man just continued eating his salad with nonchalant curiosity. 

The article I read about it is behind a paywall, so in case you can't read it, here are some direct quotes from an interview with the man in the video:

"I’m a New Yorker. We live with sirens and activity happening all the time. I wasn’t scared. There are hundreds of Secret Service agents hurtling themselves over tables and chairs, and I wanted to watch... A lot of people said, ‘Why didn’t you get on the floor? Everybody else at your table and in the room was on the floor.’ First of all, I have a bad back. I couldn’t get on the floor, and if I did get on the floor, they’d have to bring in people to get me off the floor. And Number 2, I’m a hygiene freak. There was no freaking way I was getting in my new tux on the dirty Hilton floor. It was not happening."

What a legend.

—4—

We had an arborist come to the house this week to give us suggestions to fix our lawn after the absolute hackjob the power company did when they came through in February to "trim" our trees. They hacked off entire limbs, so many that the arborist predicted those trees will die now.

I could go on, but I won't because it makes me too upset. Right now I'm just trying to be positive, and not think about the fact that I will die before we get trees large enough to replace what they did. IT'S FINE.

Anyway, I've decided that deciding to plant trees is extremely stressful. I'm not good at visualizing, so even simple things like picking a paint color for the wall is really difficult for me, even with a paint sample. Planting trees is like that, but worse. If I don't like how the wall looks, I can re-paint in a couple of days. If I don't like the layout of our furniture I can move the sofa. But you can't shift a sugar maple 3 feet to the left (or change it to a beech tree) if you change your mind later on.

—5—

I often watch my ADHD family members with puzzlement and think, "I must not have ADHD because I don't understand that at all."

Except I think I get it with yard work. 

The other day I went outside with a measuring tape and some cones to mark where we're thinking about planting trees, when I noticed a bush that was getting choked by vines. The next thing I knew, I was out there knee-deep in a pile of brush with 3 different kinds of hedge clippers and my kids were asking where dinner was.

And I still don't know where all the cones should go.

—6—

A while ago, our women's group at church had a service auction. We all offered a service that we could do (free haircut, deliver you a dinner, give you a ride to the airport, whatever). We all got a certain number of points at the beginning and then we bid on the services we wanted with real paddles and everything. 

I offered two hours of help decluttering/organizing an area of your home, and this week the highest bidder contacted me to cash in.

We spent two hours in her basement and got so much accomplished! I was worried that I offended her by constantly suggesting that we throw away, well, everything (because that's what I do.) But she asked if I would come back and help her some more next week, so I must not have. At least not so much that it overpowered how helpful I was.

—7—

We're having ongoing problems with our washing machine, but we're not getting a new one. Phillip can fix just about anything, sometimes it just takes time and requires us to be patient for a few days until he figures it out. 

The 14-year-old daughter does not like this.

"Why can't we just get a washer that works? That's what other people do," she complained.

Well, luckily for her, we're outliers. She's our fourth kid so if we did what other people do, she wouldn't even be here. 

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7 Quick Takes about the Difference Between Boys and Girls, Mysterious Disappearances, and Hairstyles I Know I've Seen Somewhere Before

It's 7 Quick Takes Friday! How was your week? 

—1—

My daughter was taking care of a family friend's two dogs this week. Kira and Dexter (the dogs) stayed at their house, but my daughter went over three times a day to feed, walk, and play with them. 

Sometimes I went along and I could not get over their dynamic. 

Dexter would try to snatch the ball out of Kira's mouth when she had it, so Kira would tilt her head up and start twirling in a circle, like a middle school bully taking a shorter kid's backpack and holding it over their head to taunt them.

—2—

Prom shopping with boys is a totally different experience. As a girl myself, and as a mom of two girls, I've gotten used to shopping for prom taking months, multiple stores, lots of opinions, pictures, and an entourage of friends for opinions and moral support.

I accompanied my 17-year-old to Men's Wearhouse this week and and here was the entire process of finding shoes:

Man at store: Do you want shiny or not shiny?

My son: Not shiny.

Man at store: [checks box on clipboard] Okay, moving on...

We were in and out of there in 45 minutes, and most of that was just waiting for the guy to enter everything into the computer and pay for it.

—3—

It's spring break, and my kids have been good-naturedly at each other's throats all week. Nothing terribly egregious, just constant nitpicking (correcting how they pronounce a word, pointing out the teeniest sliver of a flaw in their logic, stuff like that.) 

It's exhausting.

The other day I was so tired of it that I told them, "From now on, here's the rule: before you open your mouth, ask yourself, Is what I'm about to say going to make them feel like a loved and valued member of the family?  If the answer is 'no,' don't say it."

The 12-year-old immediately asked, "Well, what if they're not?"

I closed my eyes to summon patience while my 9-year-old answered, "It doesn't matter, you've just got to make them FEEL like they are."

For the record, those two are the worst offenders in the house for incessant bickering.

—4—

My mom is here visiting for our spring break, so we've been doing some fun things. One of them was going to an aviation museum. 

My 17-year-old got to try the flight simulator:

The 12- and 9-year-old were disappointed that they weren't old enough for flight simulator, but there was a video plan race game in another part of the museum so they at least got to do something like it. They spent most of the time trying to find the most interesting ways to crash their planes, which is probably why there's an age minimum for the actual flight simulator.

Another thing: I've never seen anyone as passionate about anything as the volunteers at this museum were about planes. 

I asked one of them for his favorite fun fact about something in the museum, and he took us to this one plane and talked our ears off for 20 minutes. He even went and got his iPad to show us pictures that he was putting in a book he's writing about it. 

My 9-year-old asked a different volunteer a question about propellers, so the volunteer grabbed some toys out of the gift shop to demonstrate his answer and told my boys to take them home for free. Those were two guys living their best retirement lives.

—5—

I've been amazed before at the things people will take from the end of the driveway for free, but this one takes the cake.

We've been holding onto a very large fabric-covered ottoman that we never use because it matches the couches in our basement, but just because it came as a set doesn't mean we've entered into a blood oath to keep it as a set (see more ruthless decluttering words of wisdom here and here) so I set it at the end of the driveway and see if maybe someone would take it off our hands.

The ottoman was there all day (no worries, sometimes it takes a little while) and I meant to bring it inside at night but I forgot and then it rained. I was so mad! Now it was useless. I rolled my eyes and made a mental note to haul it to the dump later and pay a disposal fee. 

It disappeared later that afternoon. My best guess is that there's a portal to another dimension at the end of our driveway, because that honestly makes more sense to me than someone taking that soaking wet ottoman.

—6—

I pulled up behind this truck at a stop sign:

Me as a UPS driver.

—7—

Another thing we did with my mom this week is go to an alpaca farm. No one got kicked but we did get to see one of them spit.

Alpacas don't particularly like being petted but maybe 75% of them would tolerate it, especially if we had treats.

The alpacas are currently about three weeks from shearing, so they were SO fuzzy. You could sink your hand about 3 inches into their wool and leave a mark if they would let you touch them.

My favorite picture the 12-year-old has ever taken.

I also thought the windswept blonde mop on top of this guy was hilarious:

Hey, girl.

There was actually a young teenage boy of 14 or 15 on the farm with us, and the two of them had the exact same hairstyle. I was kind of watching his family to see if they noticed the similarity, but none of them appeared to. 

Of course, we parents are masters at disguising our real thoughts about how our kids look in whatever's trending. They'll learn the truth someday when their own kids see their old photos and let them know.

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7 Quick Takes about Being an Unofficial Uber Driver, Pest Management as Entertainment, and Just Bein' a Normal Gal

It's 7 Quick Takes Friday! How was your week? 

—1—

I tried really hard this week to think of interesting Takes. But all I've had going through my head this week is:

Spring sports has started, bringing our family total activity count to:

• Soccer (3 days a week)
• Track (5 days a week)
• Gymnastics (4 days a week, half-hour away)
• 2 piano lessons and a voice lesson (once a week)
• weekly youth activities at church

My 14-year-old also needs rides to and from her after-school job, plus she sure does make a lot of plans for someone who can't drive. The 17-year-old helps out a ton, but even then... it's a lot.

—2—

Look at this cute little jade plant I got for free on a local Buy Nothing Facebook group. One of our houseplants died a slow and agonizing death over the winter, and I'm ready to try again.

I think its predecessor died from lack of light, so now I'm looking at different options for a grow light. Someone online said they use a bug zapper, so I went to look at it out of curiosity and oh, the product image... the whole family is literally lined up with popcorn to watch the bugs die!

Who needs movie night when you can count the electrocuted mosquitoes?

When the stock photo of this happy family was taken, this is probably not the way the photographer thought it would be used.

—3—

A place near me has free concerts occasionally, and this week they had an Irish trio playing traditional music. It's something different and interesting, and it's free, so I was there. Phillip was working from home that day and used his lunch break to come with me.

The performers kept saying "Now we're going to play a jig" and "Now we're going to play a reel" as if that was a distinction I should already know, so I looked it up surreptitiously during the concert and that was my educational nugget for the day.

A jig is in 6/8 time, so if you're listening to a jig you can say "pineapple, pineapple" to the music. And a reel is in 4/4 or 2/4, so if it's a reel you can say "watermelon, watermelon." And if you don't read music and have no clue what I'm talking about, you can ignore everything I said and just enjoy the Celtic fiddling. It's fun.

—4—

While out running errands, I thought of Phillip and send him a quick text that said, "Thanks for being my man."

A few minutes later a friend texted me about throwing a bunch of stuff away so I wrote back "So they finally brought the dumpster?" But I accidentally sent it to Phillip since I was just texting him.

I explained I'd sent it to the wrong person and he asked, "so who is your real man?"

—5—

I saw this in the checkout line at the grocery store and it made me laugh.

Normal person tip: when scheduling your normal day, don't forget to leave time for your photoshoot with People magazine.

Not sure who this is, but... who's going to tell her?

—6—

My kids always get sunburned on the first nice day of spring where they have a soccer game or some extended outdoor activity. It always takes me by surprise, mostly because I'm too busy packing away their winter coats to remind them to start putting on sunscreen. 

Well, I'm very proud to report that the 12-year-old had his first soccer game, and he didn't come home burnt! We remembered the sunscreen this time.

But that was only because his sister got sunburned at her first track meet earlier in the week.

—7—

With the weather getting nicer we're about to bring out our porch swing, but first we want to re-do the porch floor. We've had the supplies sitting in Phillip's workshop since last fall, and he decided that this was the week.

He pried off all the old boards on Tuesday, and then things got really busy and he won't have time to work on it again until Saturday. So this has been the welcoming facade of our home all week:

An effective alternative to one of those novelty door mats that say "GO AWAY."

The forsythia blooms on the wreath go with the yellow caution tape, though, so I think it still looks pretty put together.

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7 Quick Takes about Non-Conforming Eggs, Ferns that Will Absolutely Stress You Out, and Rocking Out to My Educational System

It's 7 Quick Takes Friday! How was your week? 

—1—

Happy Easter! Years ago we learned about pysanky eggs from Ukraine, and it's become an on-again, off-again Easter tradition for our family even though we have 0% Ukranian heritage.

The traditional method involves drawing geometric patterns with a wax-filled stylus and dipping the egg in successive layers of dye, but those intricate patterns are way harder to do than you might think and exceed the attention span of our kids, so we design them however we want. The result is always creative and fun, even if it's also a cultural abomination that would make a Ukranian babusia weep.

The 14-year-old made an Easter scene with the three crosses on the hill where Jesus and the two theives were crucified:

I love how the background somehow looks like papier-mâché.

The 12-year-old made a starry night sky. Not the painting The Starry Night, just a starry night:

The 9-year-old must have been hungry and decorated his with breakfast food:

Scrambled egg on a hard-boiled egg. Very meta.

And here was my egg. The wax came off in some places so the design disappeared in some areas, but we've been doing this for many years and this was probably my favorite egg I've made so far:

And someone, I'm not sure who, colored this egg like a Minion and glued a scrap of a napkin to its head for hair:

Technically, it did use wax because the drawing was in crayon. But this is pushing the boundaries of what a pysanky egg is for sure. 

—2—

Easter weekend was also general conference (click here if you don't know what that is), and the overarching message I picked up this time was: be like Jesus. Fill your heart with charitable feelings, both toward people you like and people you don't. We need it, and the world needs it.

The general conference talks covered a range of topics and this one by Emily Belle Freeman was probably my favorite:

Runners-up included:

• The story about the dog trying to chase two balls at once and getting so overwhelmed that she just gave up and laid down by Dale G. Renlund (ironically, I missed part of the story because I was in the other room frantically trying to do like three things at the same time)
• Talk by David J. Wunderli about the importance of not letting devotion to Jesus Christ slide off of our list of priorities when life gets hard and/or busy (I also liked this because his joke suggestion to his 6-year-old reminds me of something Phillip would do with our kids)

I plan to re-read and re-listen to these talks many times over the next several months, because they're really important messages for me to absorb. And sometimes, I can be a really slow learner. 

—3—

The 17-year-old was telling us that his girlfriend lost her purse, and his 14-year-old sister exclaimed "Oh, no! What was in it?"

"Everything," he answered. "Her whole inventory."

I had to stifle a laugh, because video-game speak in real life is too funny.

—4—

I saw this online:

Interesting. We all know that being in nature is calming, so this sounds like it could be true. 

But I'd like to submit this contrary evidence, some photos of the fern in our upstairs bathroom which stresses me out every time I see it:

This previously thriving fern has been on death's doorstep ever since I brought it inside for the winter, but it's almost warm enough for me to put it outside again so maybe it will pull through. Cross your fingers.

—5—

The algorithm keeps showing me a parrot named Apollo on social media, probably because it knows we also have a pet bird. 

But unlike our parakeet, who gets lost trying to fly back to her cage for a month after we rearrange the living room, Apollo seems really intelligent. He has a huge vocabulary and his owner teaches him to identify all kinds of objects, what they're made of, and what color they are. 

 

But the other day, I thought about how different kinds of animals have a different number of types of cones (photoreceptors) in their eye to detect color. Humans have three types. How many do parrots have? Can Apollo even see all the colors his owner teaches him?

Well, I looked it up and apparently birds have four cone types, so their color vision is actually better than ours. They can also see UV light. 

So basically, from Apollo's perspective, the guy is showing him stuff that looks different but saying they're the same color, so Apollo just sighs, "Fine, dummy. I'll say whatever color you think it is, I just want a pistachio."

—6—

My 14-year-old daughter made the most obscene cookies at a friend's house. 

Just look at it! It has a normal-sized cookie as a garnish, if that tells you anything.

At 6.3 ounces, it weighs the same as a McDonald's Deluxe Quarter Pounder with all the fixings and is way worse for you, considering it's topped with cream cheese frosting instead of lettuce and tomato.

—7—

I'd been using my 21-year-old's Pimsleur subscription to practice my Spanish, but her gift subscription ran out. Listening to the audio lessons has been really helpful, but Pimsleur is expensive so I don't exactly want to pay for it. So I checked my local library.

The good news is that they have it... but only on a set of CDs. I don't even think we own anything that can play a CD. Luckily, our library also has a "library of things" that includes a CD player, so I also borrowed one of those and now I'm all set. 

I'm thinking of throwing it over my shoulder and walking around town this weekend blasting my Pimsleur, like it's 1983 and I just got a brand new cassette single of "Beat It."

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7 Quick Takes about Ladylike Carrots, Dementia Moments, and What I'm Doing This Weekend

It's 7 Quick Takes Friday! How was your week? 

—1—

 Look at this carrot crossing its legs that I found in the bag:

Interesting to look at, difficult to peel.

—2—

I overheard my 14-year-old, who was playing a game on the computer, tell her brother, "I was really good at this game back in the day."

"Back in the day"? What day? Yesterday? 

I guess due to our respective ages, our idea of what "back in the day" means is pretty different. There are bras in my dresser that I've owned for longer than she's been alive. 

—3—

My best friend from college and I don't talk nearly enough, besides emailing a few times a year and sending Christmas cards, so we decided to call each other and catch up. It's like we hadn't spent any time apart, like always, which is how you know she's such a good friend.

At one point in the conversation, Kim asked me "So what are all your people up to?" 

I looked out the window, where my 12-year-old was sitting on the deck in a camping chair, wearing shorts and a winter coat, eating ice cream straight out of the carton.

Normal. We are all doing completely normal things in a normal way, thanks.

Just kidding. Kim's been my friend for a long time. She would never believe that.

—4—

Big news. The behemoth refrigerator in our garage is gone! By way of short backstory: once upon a time, our nice fridge stopped working so we got an ugly secondhand one as a placeholder until Phillip could fix it. Fast forward five years later, and we were still using the placeholder in the kitchen while the other fridge took up space in the garage.

It was time to get rid of the one in the garage, and we did, after a very tense conversation that neither one of us enjoyed having. 

Phillip had never stopped intending to get that nice-looking fridge back in the kitchen, so I felt really sad as I watched him help someone else load it into the back of their pickup truck and drive away with it.

When he came back in the house, I gave him a hug and said, "Sorry your dream didn't work out."

"Which one?" he joked wryly.

—5—

The other day I was in line at Home Goods with my 9-year-old and saw this bag hanging near the register.

Pointing to it, I asked my 9-year-old "Isn't that a funny bag?"

"You said that before another time that we came here."

"I did?" I said, as I took a picture of it.

"Yes. And you took a picture of it before, too."

—6—

When we traveled home in February for my dad's funeral, I took the kids to a museum with an exhibit on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Apparently the guy who invented the pacemaker had been partially inspired by the story's idea of using electricity to re-animate people:

Anyway, the exhibit at the museum inspired me to read the book, so I checked it out from the library and have been chipping away at it ever since. I finally finished, went to go put my review on Goodreads, and discovered that I'd already read it in 2016. 

I'd even written a review.

This was way worse than the dementia moment I apparently had in Home Goods (Take #5.) I've had the experience of getting a few pages into a book and realizing I'd already read it, but this was something else. This was a full cover-to-cover reading where I didn't recognize a single word. From beginning to end, I was totally convinced I'd never read it before. 

Anyway, the book was okay, but this review was pretty accurate and made me laugh:

Not my review, but it could have been.

—7—

In preparation for Easter, our family has been reading an Old Testament prophecy about Jesus in the morning and a New Testament verse that shows its fulfillment every day, and then we've been doing one layer of a pysanky egg (we've done these before and it's really time-consuming, so I'm loving doing these a little bit at a time instead.)

Also this weekend, it's general conference! Twice a year, world leaders from my church give what are essentially spiritual TED talks, which are then broadcast all around the globe on Saturday and Sunday. It sounds boring but it's weirdly not.

My kids also look forward to our general conference snacks tradition, which probably helps a little.

But I also think it's because these people devote themselves entirely to encouraging the whole world to walk with the Savior, which means their words are prayerfully chosen to help us with exactly what's happening in our lives right now. 

Anyone who is interested can watch with me on the church's website or YouTube channel (bring your own snacks.)

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7 Quick Takes about Refreshing the Garage, Becoming Pool Sharks, and Handing Over My Shopping List for Good

It's 7 Quick Takes Friday! How was your week? 

—1—

Have you been Easter candy shopping yet? If not, buckle up. Candy has been getting more and more expensive for a while now (and the candies themselves have been shrinking and shrinking,) but this is officially ridiculous:

This chocolate bunny is $22. Yes, I realize that it's a big bunny with special chocolate. But I just can't imagine the cost-benefit analysis that would lead anyone to put it in their shopping cart. 

Maybe my sticker shock here is disproportionate because I have 6 kids and I'm mentally multiplying everything by 6 in my head. I don't know. Maybe if you're just raising Veruca Salt as an only child it's not as bad as I'm imagining.

—2—

I went to the mall with a friend and while I wasn't really planning on getting anything for myself, I saw this necklace on clearance for $5 (less than ¼ of a chocolate bunny) and I had to buy it.

I also saw a lot of other fun stuff that I did not buy, but I stood in front of this painting for a long time, just appreciating it.

This was not a small work of art, it was a large piece intended to be a focal point above the sofa and I love that.

—3—

Our recycling bins are a bunch of 18-gallon plastic totes that sit in our garage, and I don't love them. They certainly do the job, but they take up a lot of floor space, there are too many of them, and they don't have lids so any food remnants on the jars and cans is like an all-you-can-eat buffet for mice.

I did a ton of research and found that most covered stackable bins were too small, but I found the perfect bins at Ikea. They didn't deliver to me, but they deliver through FedEx which has some weird partnership with Walgreen's so I could get pick them up at the drugstore.

It looks so much better! The trash cans and the ball bin that I can now put against the wall used to be squeezed into the narrow aisle between our cars, taking up so much space that we regularly called getting out of the car "The Fat Man Challenge" because there was just no room.

Are there still stains on the floor from oil and grease and whatever else? Yes. Do I plan to do anything about it? No. It's an unfinished garage, and I'm looking for function over form. 

—4—

I was videocalling my 19-year-old daughter, who is a religious missionary right now. And she mentioned that her missionary companion says that she (my daughter) talks weird.

"Weird, how?" I asked my daughter.

"Like, casually using big words while talking. Not words so big that no one knows what they mean, just unusual words that people don't regularly use. Like... 'ocular' or 'uncanny.' "

"Hmm," I said, thinking about how this came up because I'd used the word 'scatalogical' in conversation a minute earlier. "I guess you can tell her it's because your mom is an English major. Sorry you're weird now."

—5—

Phillip and I have fallen out of a habit of date night. It takes time and energy to think of something new to do all the time, so we thought: what if we just pick four activities and rotate between them? 

For some reason we chose pool as one of our activities, even though neither of us play more than once a year and have no skill whatsoever.

We're bad, like comically bad. But there's hope, I think! After playing a few games of pool, I was able to hit the ball I was aiming for 95% of the time. (Now I need to work on my geometry, because once I hit that ball it only goes where I intended about 50% of the time.)

What should our other four things be?

—6—

After almost 22 years of having children, Phillip planned and threw his first birthday party. 

Was the party months after the actual birthday? Absolutely.

Did his man brain arrange the candles in a perfect grid instead of aesthetically spacing them out? Unfortunately, yes.

But most importantly, did I have to plan or execute anything? No. 

And the kids had a great time, even if it looked a lot different than the themed birthday parties I used to throw back in the day:

Exhibit A.

The birthday party reshuffle was part of the work we've been doing on redistributing household responsibilities, loosely based on the Fair Play method. It's been amazing. 

For me, it's less about the work it takes to, say, plan a birthday party or help them write a talk for church, and more about the emotional relief it is not being the only one who knows the details of what's going on with the kids at any given time. 

In fact, he is sometimes the one texting to remind me of something having to do with the kids now, and I am loving the teamwork.

—7—

I throw shade at Phillip's birthday cakes, but I shouldn't. Because the job he has done taking over meal planning, food shopping, and dinner prep puts me to shame. I always hated meal planning, but since I was the stay-at-home parent I just assumed it made more sense for me to be the one in charge. IT DID NOT.

Let me describe how Phillip is absolutely crushing it in the meal department.

When I used to do it, it was a mind-numbing slog every week. Half our recipes were on Pinterest and half were on physical cards in a recipe box (neither of which were easy to search through), and which one was where simply lived in my head.

But Phillip gathered up all our recipes, fed them into AI, and had AI digitize each one in a standard format and organize it into a searchable database. He doesn't have to look anything up to make a shopping list and it takes five minutes: he just selects meals from the database and AI automatically populates a list of ingredients.

But wait, there's more.

He wanted to have the list in the order he'll find things in the grocery store, so instead of memorizing the location of every single item in Market Basket and painstaking putting the list in order himself like I used to, he took pictures of the signs in the aisles and gave it to AI so it organizes the list for him.

All that to say: I should have been fired from this gig a LONG time ago. I mean, I was playing checkers and this man is playing chess. He's an artist and a genius. I can't believe we didn't make this switch sooner.

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