Veg noodle stirfry with veg soup dumplings

Late last night I finally put down my kindle, took my tablets – scaring Suki off the bed in the process – and went to the bathroom for a last… well, you know. I flushed the loo, and the water in the pan went up, and up, and stopped.

Cue a frantic 20 minutes of Googling, followed by messing around with washing-up liquid, hot water, and a loo brush used as a makeshift plunger, all done as quietly as possible so as not to wake mum.

Blockage cleared, I went back to my bedroom, took off my glasses, and sat for a moment to catch my breath before lying down to sleep. From the darkness, immediately beneath my feet, came a “mrow?” Yes, hello Suki. [Purr.] I love you too. [Purrr.] Can I go to sleep now? [Purrrrr!]

And that’s why I fell asleep with one arm hanging off the bed, my hand being occasionally headbutted by a gently rounded tabby cat.

---

This morning, at 7.10am, I woke up, checked my phone, and found no message from the appliance delivery people, so I went back to sleep.

Some time later, I was woken by a tap on the door. “Hello? Hello?”

It took me a few moments to realise the knock was coming from the front door, and our new fridge and freezer had arrived. I grabbed my glasses, threw on a pair of trousers under my nightdress, and went to let the guys in, looking, I suspect, like the stereotypical mad cat person.

Anyway, long and rather uninteresting story later, we have a working fridge and freezer. The fridge has one fewer shelf than the old one, so I need to order an additional one, and mum keeps forgetting the freezer is there, but they’re in and working. That’s a surprising weight off my shoulders.

The rest of the day was spent on personal hygiene – a shower, a cut of my nails – a grocery order to replace the stuff lost in the freezer failure, and a new phone charger bought as my third one this year has died on me. (And without any help from a cat chewing through the cable, which was a favourite hobby of my last cat.)

Dinner was simple and boring: a bag of stirfry veg, some egg noodles, and hoisin sauce. Some Itsu vegetable soup dumplings (a grocery delivery substitution for the gyoza mum decided she liked) were an attempt to make things interesting.

And they were: interesting, that is. Not unpleasant, just… interesting. They smell strongly of cruciferous vegetables, and taste savoury (from the miso, I guess) and vaguely vegetal without being really anything. There wasn’t much soup in the middle, with the whole contents being vaguely sludgy.

I didn’t hate them, but I won’t be intentionally buying them again, either.

After dinner, mum had either a mental blip or an outbreak of weaponised incompetence and forgot how to do washing up. The rapidity with which she agreed when I said I would do it makes me suspect the second. The fact mum couldn’t remember what a freezer was makes me suspect the first. It was probably a mix of the two, tbh.

And so to the end of the day, with a Suki beside me on the sofa, and something random on tv which I’m not really watching. I’ll see y’all tomorrow.