As I say all the time, Tarzan doesn’t like my cooking.

Well, let me rephrase that.  I don’t think my cooking is the problem.  He doesn’t like what I cook.  As my friend Lynn would say… “same, same”.

Anyway, as far as meals go, my stand-by Make Tarzan Happy meal is spaghetti.  It’s also the best bet for the grandkids, although they are historically much (much much) less picky than Tarzan.

Spaghetti was also one of my favorite things my mom made when I was growing up.  I do not like anyone’s spaghetti but my mom’s, except my own (which is just like my mom’s.)

I remember being at a friend’s house for dinner once, and they were having spaghetti!  It looked just like the spaghetti I knew and loved, and I helped myself to a nice big plate!  I discovered too late that it was full of onions and green peppers!  And those chunks of red that looked like tomatoes?  Red peppers?!  And the sauce tasted… sweet?  What in the world?

That was when I first realized that different people make the same dish differently!  That wasn’t a concept I was familiar with at the time.

Anyway, I don’t do anything fancy with spaghetti.  Just a pound of hamburger meat, a jar of meat sauce from Aldi, and noodles… the thin ones.  Our grandkids’ mom says that she spends all day simmering her special spaghetti sauce… and she tries not to get her feelings hurt that her kids appear to prefer my version, made with noticeably less “love”.

The trick is getting the right noodle-to-sauce ratio!  I never get it right.  What I have to do is make way more noodles than I think, and then add the noodles slowly to the sauce until it looks right.  Then I use the remaining noodles for other things (for instance today I ate some cold noodles with my current favorite side dish, a broccoli and mushroom recipe I got from emeals).

So this evening I googled “noodles to pasta sauce ratio”, and according to most sources, the right combination is a pound of pasta to 24 ounces of sauce.

Well, not at the Dalton’s house, it isn’t!  That would be waaaaaay too many noodles.  This last batch I made I cooked about 10 1/2 ounces of noodles, but probably only used a little over half that.

Oh, and I love the pot-sized spaghetti noodles, when I can find them.  You have to really look for them in stores, I always tend to overlook them on the shelves, I guess because the box is a different size/shape than I’m expecting?

Some day, I’ll remember to weigh the uncooked noodles, make a note… then before I add the cooked noodles to the sauce, weigh them… then weigh the remaining unused cooked noodles, once I get the sauce-to-noodle ratio to my taste… and back into the calculation of how many ounces of uncooked noodles that would be.

Yes, that’s the kind of thing I do.  For fun.

If you think you know the answer, if you think you know the right number of ounces of uncooked thin spaghetti noodles per 24 ounces of pasta sauce (plus a pound of hamburger meat, if that matters), go ahead and let me know.  But know, you’re ruining  ALL my fun.  😉

Tomorrow I start my new job.  I spent the day traveling across the country, so I could be where I need to be first thing tomorrow morning.

I’ve had a few people comment that I don’t seem very excited.

It’s true, I’m not.  I’m not unexcited (that’s not a word, is it?).  I’m just kinda… well, okay, let’s see where this is going.

I suppose part of my apparent apathy can be explained by the fact that I pretty much know what to expect.  The work itself is not going to be all that much different.

Another big factor is the fact that I left a good job, where I was reasonably happy.  This is the first time I’ve made a job change when it wasn’t blatantly obvious that the change was going to be better for me.

I remember when I was preparing myself for my second interview at my last job.  Tarzan and I had not been married very long.  I commented to him that “I really want this job.”

He responded that he’d never heard me say that about a job before.

It’s true, I’ve changed jobs… kinda a lot?  In the four years we’d been together up until that time,  I’d changed jobs twice, which is a lot by most people’s standards, including my own.  I remember him being worried that I had changed jobs too often when I was interviewing for that job.  I wasn’t the least bit concerned.  I was certain I was doing the right thing that time.  And I was right.

This time just isn’t so cut and dry.  I know I’ll come out okay.  I expect it to be better than just “okay”.  I just gotta warm up to everything.

I’ve tried to figure out what my dream job would be.  In my wildest dreams (well, with the caveat that in my wildest dreams, my dream job is an actual job, and not something like “professional cookie dough taster”) maybe it would be cool to be a private investigator?  Catch cheating husbands (and wives) kind of stuff.  I can’t really come up with anything that’s feasible to switch to, not this late and life, and not while paying the mortgage.

But I do have a secret talent.  I really REALLY kick ass at crossword puzzles.

Well, you know.  The ones in the magazine racks at the checkout line.  The ones labeled “EZ”, “FUN” and “BIG PRINT”.  Not, like, The New York Times ones.

The lady next to me on my second flight had a book of EZ CROSSWORDS.  It was painful to me to see that she had incorrectly answered a clue in the upper right corner, and that had caused her to take a few other clues the wrong direction.  It was mucking up her whole puzzle.

Now, some people like help with crossword puzzles and some people do not.  (I learned this the hard way.) So, I thought I’d ease into it by asking innocently,  “Do you… have any particular method to working on crossword puzzles?”

“Oh, no, not really.  I just start out with the ones I know and kind of go from there.”

“Ah, I see.  I used to do a lot of crossword puzzles when I was a kid.”

“Really?”  this perked her interest, “I haven’t ever seen a child do a puzzle like this.  How wonderful!  I used to be a teacher!  How old were you when you starting doing them?”

I didn’t know.  All I know is I know all the answers in those EZ books.  I once took one to one of Tarzan’s family get togethers, and you would have thought I was doing parlor tricks… the Daltons were quite impressed.

I pointed to the offending answer in her puzzle, “I think that should be ALEE.”

She screwed her face up.  I don’t think she believed me, but she erased her wrong answer.  “How would you spell that?”

I told her.

“What’s that even mean?” she referred back to the clue:  toward shelter.

“It’s some nautical term,” I told her.

She finished that corner of the puzzle.  “Do you know this one?”

She pointed to the clue:  a man in a cast.

“I think it’s ACTOR.”

She slapped her forehead, “I was thinking like, a leg in a cast!”

I nodded, “It’s all in how you look at it.”

“You’re really smart!”

So.  I wonder how you get going in a career solving crossword puzzles?  Professionally.  Only the EZ ones.  The others are above my pay grade, I’m sure.