Cooking - August 13, 2026

I am so tired of cooking.  It's not so much the actual cooking as it is planning the meals and getting the ingredients.  

Last night I asked The Husband to think of something for dinner tonight.  "It can be anything," I said.  "I'll go to the grocery store tomorrow."  

He pondered a while and said, "Well, we haven't had Mississippi pot roast in a while."  

Google it if you don't know what it is.  It's good, as far as pot roast goes, but it has a lot of high-sodium packaged seasonings.  

I went to the grocery store this morning and got the stuff to make it, but I also got ingredients for crock pot Cajun chicken penne, which we are having tonight.  The pot roast can wait until Sunday.

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There is what I believe to be a honeybee crawling around on the screens inside the back porch.  One gets in here almost every day.  I send them mental vibes to fly over to the door, where I will let them out.  

There was also a large, hairy spider inside the screen.  I am not so tolerant of spiders when they invade my space.  I got the fly swatter and whacked it, and it dangled down on a web thread.  I whacked it again, and it sailed somewhere.  There is a mountain of stuff on my worktable - multiple bowls of beads, a tin for wire remants, a couple of caddies for tools and paintbrushes and pencils.  The spider could be anywhere, and I don't know if it's dead.  

This is the stuff of nightmares.

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I wish I knew more science about polymer clay.

Recently, I have been sort of fixated on the baking process.  When I first started fooling with polymer clay, I dragged out some old digital thermometers - the kind with a probe on a cord - and set my oven for 275 degrees, with the probe laying on a pan.  When the oven said it had reached 275 degrees, the thermometer said 230.  It never got to 275 in an hour of baking time.  This week, I got a new digital thermometer, again the probe type.  Same deal; WAY below 275 degrees.  Thinking that it was maybe the fault of the thermometer - maybe the cord in the door let the heat out or soaked up cool from the room.  So I ordered another thermometer, the dial kind that sits on a base inside the oven.  Tomorrow, I'll let you know how it did.  

To be honest, I'm not real keen on baking polymer clay in the oven where I bake food.  When I bake clay, I always run the fan over the stove, and after the oven turns off, I open the door a little to let any fumes out.  But I am not comfortable that the clay isn't leaving oven residue that might somehow work its way into our food.  I know that we eat, drink, and breathe plastics every day, but I like to avoid it where I can,