Corn pone is a lot better than it looks.

Well, it is if you like charred food, which apparently I do. I’d never had corn pone, although I’ve heard of it all my life, having been raised in the South.  It’s basically cornbread with nothing but cornmeal, a tiny bit of salt, a tiny bit of sugar (again, Southerner- apparently sweet cornbread is a Northern thing) and very hot water. Smushed all down and cooked on the top of the stove in a skillet. What possessed me to make corn pone, you might well ask?? I have no clue! I kind of wanted to make some soup, and kind of wanted some cornbread to go with it (which is hilarious, since I’d been a lifelong hater of cornbread until fairly recent years, when I discovered, to my shock, that cornbread is… good. ) I have no eggs so googled eggless cornbread and found this. Even better than eggless- it’s very simple and doesn’t take long.

But now I don’t want to bother with soup – also have no broth – and I’m going to cook a piece of frozen salmon which is a little odd with corn pone, but actually I’m not even hungry now, so whatEVER.

I am having a ridiculously lazy day – I can barely muster up enough energy to breathe, and if I didn’t know the reason I would be pretty certain that I’m coming down with something. Well, I may be coming down with something, I suppose, but it’s much more likely that I’m still in recovery from spending two days with my dad on top of extremely busy and stressful days at work the rest of the week. My dad had a doctor’s appointment with a retina specialist on Tuesday, which I’d planned a year ago to take him to, and then minor surgery – a bladder tube replacement, ewww- on Wednesday. My brother who lives beside him was planning to take him to the surgery and I was planning to come the week before for a day to take him to the pre-op appointment. But naturally it snowed last week and we had to switch off. Which meant I got the dreaded two-night visit (I live nearly two hours away).  My dad is a wonderful person, and I am very grateful that he’s still around for me to complain about (he’s 90) but… omg visits nearly kill me. He lives alone, and his mobility is terrible, so he can’t do a lot of things for himself so he saves up ten gazillion chores for me (yes, my brother lives beside him. And in a sideline story, he recently bought a not-cheap truck for my brother – there are many good and fair reasons for this and I won’t go into that now, but let’s just say I no longer feel guilty for the bulk of the appointments and emergency room trips falling on my brother, which is a nice perk for ME, and I also find myself thinking CAN TRUCK-BOY NOT DO THIS FOR YOU???? When I am at the end of my sanity.) He also can’t hear and doesn’t like wearing his hearing aids and THAT is massively annoying, and he tells the same stories over and over and OVER (and does not  have any other signs of memory loss – he just is insanely repetitive) and it’s basically grueling, for two days.

As a side note, his retina issues have not worsened and he came through the surgery with flying colors, so THAT’S good.

ANYHOW, I’ve kind of lost my train of thought here, how shocking! And I just wanted to make a quick (hahahaha!!!) entry to say, how exciting is it to see so many familiar and long-lost names?!? I’m also at Prosebox but am happy to have duel citizenship again. And maybe it will actually make me write often, like I did in the Old OD Days.