Weekly Update: June 15th - 21st — The Wine in the Pines

As the weather grows warmer but the quarantine shows no end in sight, I found ways to enjoy the coming summer months without risking my health and safety. Mr. Mustang and I have been living in our condo for nearly 3 years now and in that time, never once have we used our balcony. It’s not spacious nor is it in any way pretty but that soon will change as we made a quick trip to a Swedish furniture store to ‘pimp’ our deck. The vision I have is heavily inspired by the hipster part of pinterest with teak wood flooring, a jungle’s worth of vegetation and wall to wall fairy lights (and I mean a near cringe worthy level of fairy lights). The only issue is now that we have all the supplies necessary to upgrade our depressing balcony, the HOA has decided now is the time to repaint the entire exterior of our building. Oh and there is no estimated time when the painting project will be done so they ask to have all the balconies completely cleared of furniture throughout the entire duration of summer.

Mr. Mustang and I acknowledged their request and decided to furnish our balcony anyways as a mild protest for the prolonged painting project with no end in sight. To complete our balcony makeover, we purchased a new grill to replace Mr. Mustang’s older version he’s had since his college years and it ignited (pun intended) a new cooking passion for me. I found out that I am an excellent griller but I prefer bbq grills over a stovetop to the point I plan to continue grilling during the autumn and winter months. So far this week we’ve been enjoying Seattle dogs, grilled corn, venison burgers (which were so good that we will now primarily use and eat venison over beef), and bbq chicken thighs.

Despite discovering I have a natural talent for grilling, I unfortunately realized that I do not have the skill to bake bread. For the past month I have attempted to bake baguettes on three separate occasions using three different recipes and each time the results have been pitiful. The first few attempts I blamed the recipe while ignoring the fact that both recipes have glowing 5 star reviews but after the 3rd try, I admitted that the common denominator was me. Following the recipe to the exact measurements doesn’t mean a damn thing if I am unable to knead the dough properly. I might try again but in the end I’m just getting fed up with all the flour I have been wasting considering it is still difficult to find a store that has flour in stock.

Another new exciting development in our lives is us welcoming a new family member to the household; measuring at 11 inches tall and 71 pounds, we brought home a brand new air conditioning unit. I’ve been dreaming about this my entire adult life to have a window ac unit and the timing couldn’t have been better. Temperatures have been steadily increasing with an unusual spike in humidity in the Seattle area so having a 12,000 BTU AC and dehumidifier will make the summer somewhat tolerable. We originally were planning on installing the original bracket that the unit came with however Mr. Mustang tries to limit the amount of drill holes into our condo at the bare minimum. Not comfortable with having to drill into the actual window sill to secure the bracket, we went a different path by having the AC supported by two scissor jacks instead.

Saturday & Sunday

With a new spike in COVID cases across the country and within our own county, Mr. Mustang and I remained indoors for the 16th weekend in a row. Despite being contained in our place for over 4 months, we’ve yet to experience any symptoms of cabin fever and instead embrace the fact that we may secretly be introverts. There are times we are too comfortable staying indoors that we would rather pay the extra delivery fee to get our dinner delivered despite the restaurant being only two blocks away. We have noticed a sharp uptick in how much we have spent in takeout that I decided to force myself to cooking our meals again - for this past Saturday I made venison burgers with caramelized onions and wild boar bacon.

The worst start I have ever seen in Civ 6

As the night progressed, we decided to play an online game with one of Chris’s friends for only a ‘few hours’ and in a blink of an eye, we looked at the clock and read 2:04am. In these moments I am so glad we are DINKs and can get away with staying up that late. Granted, Mr. Mustang and I are no longer in our early twenties where we can easily shrug off an all nighter like that but it’s nice to pretend that we still can.

Father’s day was suppose to be spent down in Vancouver with Mr. Mustang’s family but with the recent spike in COVID cases, we shelved the journey to another day and called family instead. Other than Father’s day, we did practically nothing on Sunday besides continue our marathon long gaming session with friends and eat leftover venison burgers from the previous night.