Can it be Monday again, already?

It was raining when I woke up on Monday morning, but not hard. Still, I dislike driving on the expressway in rain (it is just a big ditch, after all) so I left early and drove down Plymouth Road, through the construction, to get to work. Before I left, though, I washed the main bathroom floor and left it to dry.

Either the construction wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be at that time of the morning, or I left too early, but I was the first one at work, by about a half an hour! I made a pot of coffee and settled in. I took my rain coat, but it wasn’t raining hard enough here to need it.

I think the major storms passed north and south of us overnight.

I called into CVS to see if I had another Celebrex prescription on file. Luckily, I did, so I didn’t have to mess around with calling my doctor and having her give them both the prescription and the special okay she always must do do to prescribe non-generic drugs for me. I told them I’d pick them up on the way home. Why not at lunch? Well, at lunchtime, I had an errand and a plan.

When I left at noon, it was cloudy, but not raining. First I went to the Newburgh Grill and had a cup of beef vegetable soup (it was hot outside, but all the rain and gloom this morning left me feeling cold) and then a patty melt.

Then I went to Randazzo’s down the road in Westland. I admit, I’ve bought a lot of flowers, bushes and even some trees from them, but have never actually been in the store. It was much more like a warehouse than a grocery store. But, I did score the two things I needed for tonight’s dinner: celery and a jar of cheap dill pickles (if it was a regular grocery store, I would have bought a small jar of dill pickle relish, BTW).

After work, I stopped off at CVS. The girl was apologetic and said she had called the house (duh, I was at work) to tell me they were running low and they only had five pills they could give me until Friday. I told her not to worry as I had enough until Wednesday and so I could easily wait. The male druggist (whose name I regret to admit I forget) came out from behind the counter and shook my hand, saying “Mr. Goerlich, I can’t believe how good you look!” I haven’t seen him for quite a while, so I guess all he remembered was the walker, brace and that gaunt look on my face.

Finally home, I rolled the trash out to the road before I closed the garage door and came inside. This annoyed Scruffy who apparently felt I should have been a little quicker on passing out cat treats than I was.

I changed my shoes, put on five eggs to hard-boil and went back outside for just a bit. I wanted to trim some of the bottom black walnut branches that have grown long enough to droop. I noticed them sitting on the couch on Sunday but it was too windy then. I used my extension pole/tree saw/lopping shears with a rope thing and not exactly as easily as in the past, but I finally got the job done. I put about eight good-sized branches on the brush pile.

I went in and cooled the now finished eggs. I walked out back to check the rain gauge and there was a good half-inch of water in it. Again, I think (from all the flash flood warnings I heard) other areas got much more, but I was happy with what I got.

I made a quick call to Jake and Carla’s house and talked with Carla. I only had one question. I bought an electric meat grinder/sausage maker a few years back that I have never used, but they had. My question was, which would be easier to clean: the electric meat grinder or my food processor.

She answered without hesitation: the food processor. I thought I remembered them saying the meat grinder had a lot of little parts you really had to take care to clean well. So, after we hung up, I got started on dinner.

You see, when I was a lad, I remember my mother feeding ropes of bologna and dill pickles into one of those old metal meat grinders (that you clamped to the counter or table) while I turned the handle. I thought all she did from there was to add mayonnaise and mixed it to made an excellent sandwich spread for school lunches and so on.

Well, I’m tired of that ham and wanted to do something similar. I found a simple recipe for ham salad (I really only wanted the ratio of pickle to ground ham as I was too busy turning the crank for her to pay attention to that, back in the day). But, it said to use a food processor on pulse (which I successfully did) to chop up the ham and had ingredients, such as hard boiled eggs, chopped onions, fine diced celery and Dijon mustard, that I do not remember her using at all.

But in the end, I mixed together two cups of chopped ham, one cup of fine diced celery, 1/4 cup of sweet onion (finely minced) and two hard-boiled eggs (diced). I folded in a dressing made with one teaspoon Dijon mustard, 1/4 cup of dill pickle relish (I just ran some of the cheap dill pickles in the food processor as well – no way was I going to use my good dill pickles on a food experiment!) and 1/2 cup of mayonnaise.

I made one sandwich on sourdough bread. The hard-boiled eggs were a little strange and I thought it needed more dill pickle, but I liked it so well, I had another for dessert.

I put the rest of the sandwich spread in the fridge, stuck the rest of the chopped ham in the freezer (I’ll use it in beans or soup this fall) and cleaned up. Clean-up was easy-peasy. Everything went into the dishwasher, with enough room left to wash the drip pans and grates from the gas stove.

I washed the counters and cutting board and let that all dry (I’ll spray the counters with anti-bacterial spray in the morning). Then, working backwards from the downstairs, I washed the kitchen floor until I ran out of tile. I went in the bedroom and watched TV until I fell asleep for the evening.