Dinner Time

As most of you probably already know, I love to cook. My census enumerator work usually goes into the early hours of the evening, which means that dinner time has become a real challenge. Two nights last week I had left overs handy. Another night I just opened a microwaveable soup. And last night I fixed the shrimp dish above. Regardless, it usually means I am not having dinner until nearly nine o'clock and what is left of the evening after cleaning up, leaves me little time to decompress. I have not been able to do evening walks either. And since I have been usually starting my shift around noon, I haven't been able to work in time to walk earlier in the day. I am fixing a slow cooker meal for tonight which will also afford me leftovers from it. I, unwisely I am now thinking, decided to try a new recipe. Once I got into putting it together for the slow cooker, I realized it was a pretty weird recipe with directions that are not well written. At that point I decided to just use my best judgement about how to prepare it. Who knows how it is going to turn out? All of the ingredients are ones that I like, and they "should" go together in a pleasing way in the end...I hope. One other aspect of working now is that I have realized how long ago it was when I had to plan and eat meals around a work schedule that included evening hours. My normal schedule has been so disrupted in the last week that I hardly know what a normal day is like. I feel a bit like I am having an out of body experience. But it's OK. This is a short term job. My life will settle back down again before too much longer. I think it is good not to ever get too comfortable with your life anyway. Every once in a while you need to have things challenge you to try to make your life as normal as possible when other things are disrupting it from what you have become used to. And if trying to have good dinners at the end of the day is my worst challenge at the moment, that's not too bad.