Lunch Notes | Summer Salad & A Day in the Life.

A summer salad from a Substack-er (say that five times fast), a behind the scenes on a day in my life, & the joys of a perpetual calendar. Plus, a line I wish I wrote.

Welcome to Lunch Notes.

Lunch Notes is born out of a desire to use my daily lunch break better. Not in a productivity, “optimize for everything” way, but in a “use it or lose it” sort of way.

I hope that this feels like a note that someone tucked into your lunchbox. Or like a class newsletter tucked in your cubby that a cringy keener kid made for you.¹

In today’s issue, we have…

• The salad I’m lunching on this week - from another Substack-er’s recipe. (I’ll be imploring you to make it!)

• A behind the scenes on what does a day in my life look like right now? (with a way too in-depth reflection because I am who I am)

• Lil treasures from the last week.

As always²: if you have ideas for what you’d like to see in Lunch Notes, I’m all ears! For now, Lunch Notes will be in your inboxes on Thursdays at 12 PM MST.

So, without further ado - welcome to Lunch Notes. 🧡

It’s another long one, so you’ll either need to expand in your email or read it right in the Substack app (always my favourite way to consume Substack writing!)

A few weeks ago, I got this recipe for a salad in my inbox from

Maggie

. It’s a family recipe, often pulled out when it gets too hot to eat, and when I saw it, I was like, “Oh! A Greek salad with beans! I can be into this!” With a homemade dressing so I can feel elite? Sign me up!

The ideal version of me wanted to get all the produce for it from the Farmer’s Market. The real version of me said, “Grocery store is good enough.”

The key for me (that I’ve never done with other Greek salads even though they might have told me to… largely because I am not detail oriented enough about recipes) is the seeding of the cucumber and tomato. It makes it so the liquid doesn’t become overwhelming and gross, and I’ve found it keeps better and longer.

On Wednesday, I did as Maggie said: had a side of buttered sourdough bread with it, and it was phenomenal.

If you’re looking for a quick salad to keep you lunch company all week long - I highly recommend this one. Make it and then say “Thank you!” to Maggie!

A Day In The Life: August Edition.

Do you have an opening question that you always keep in your back pocket? For years, mine was, “What’s your morning routine?” I once even tweeted

rachel a. dawson

to write about her morning routine. As a work break brain treat, I used to read about different morning routines.

Maybe it’s a weird question, but I think it always came down to how much I love watching ordinary, routine parts of someone’s day; how much I love being a part of the ordinary, routine parts of someone’s day.

So imagine my surprise when I get on TikTok in 2021 and find out that there’s a whole section of Day in the Life Tiktokers. Or the 5-9 people before their 9-5. Or the 5-9 people after their 9-5. Then, as all Internet things do, it moves over to my Instagram algorithm. And suddenly — I have access to too many ordinary, routine parts of people’s day… and the big Day in the Life vloggers that get served to me? They’re often influencers whose day to day life looks very different than mine.

But… I’m not sure having unlimited access to the lives of those around me is always a good thing. When I took my social media break earlier this year, that was one of the first things I noticed: how easy it was to take action on things because I wasn’t fixated on watching the lives of others. How good it was for my brain to be off social media, because there was no one to perform for. “Their day looks perfect,” I’d catch myself thinking. “But my days keep having this evening slump I don’t know what to do with.”

All of that preamble to say: I get that there’s a good side and a bad side to this. The bad: everything I mentioned above. The good: we get to see behind the curtain and gain appreciation for someone else’s life... even for our own lives. I noticed so much more about my day and my energy doing this exercise - the good, the pain points, the other stuff. I wasn’t just going through the motions — I was paying attention (in a way I’ve been slacking on lately). So if you’re feeling the overwhelm of a video day in the life, let me encourage you to do a written day in the life post, just for you, and see what you notice about your day. And I hope this is a fun peek behind the curtain of my ordinary life on a Tuesday (after a long weekend).

Morning:

6:15 am // Dave comes in and lets me know it’s 6:15. He wakes up between 5:30 - 5:45 and feeds the dog & makes the coffee. I aspire to that, but still snooze for an extra fifteen minutes. Then I catch up on Twitter’s curation of the Olympics & I read the latest edition of Morning Person (one of my favourite parts of Tuesday!) 

7:10 am // With my coffee poured, Dave and I quickly chat in our living room about our days. I head to get ready for the day. I throw my hair up, do some quick skincare and makeup, make the bed, and then I pick out an outfit and * ~ accessorize ~ *. I’m working on a future Substack essay idea, so I know what direction I’m going with the outfit, but I still have to get changed.

7:35 am // I get into my home office and sit at my desk. Yesterday, Dave and I did a clean and purge session where I found a bunch of old work notebooks.I look through them briefly for inspiration on how to I used to organize my work life and then get the desk cleared off for me to actually, you know, work. 

7:52 am // I start my to-do list for the day and week to get organized. I’m a Fundraising Strategist at a fundraising growth agency, so my days are mostly filled with emails, clients, and ideas. One of my first orders of business is always to pick a playlist - today it’s a Pumpkin Spice Small Town Tuesday Early Morning (fitting because I have pumpkin spice creamer in my coffee) 

9:01 am // I’ve done three larger things on my to-do list, with a side of other small tasks here and there. I will be spending the next hour or so in my email inbox, so I press play on a podcast to go make & eat some breakfast. (Two over easy eggs on toast, in case you’re CURIOUS.) I also quickly cleaned out the dishwasher, ate my eggs, checked Slack messages, and lived my life. 

9:30 am // I’m digging into the to do list further - I crossed off one project thing for a client, and went back and forth with some coworkers on the details for other client projects right now. There’s a lot on the go (and it’s hard to balance all of it with client vacations) but I’m feeling really good. 

10:30 am // My first client meeting of the day! It’s a kickoff call about their year end fundraising plan and the direction of the appeal. (That’s been the theme of the last two weeks.) Another team member was leading, so I got to sit back a bit, but we had lots of great chats and have a good direction for them to go find stuff.

Lunch:

11:25 am // I’m out of the client meeting. I have three things open right now on my to do list that I’d like to clear out. However, I’ve also taken a few moments to text with a friend about Taylor Swift’s re-records and do some clowning on theories for the London of it all. 

11:44 am // Nope, the work isn’t happening - I’m just moving from Slack message to Slack message. I’m going to take my lunch now. On the docket - Coffee with Maggie’s “too hot to cook” recipe (You can see it above, but the recipe again is available here! Sign up for her newsletter, it’s the best.) 

12:50 pm // I spent most of my lunch chopping and preparing the salad, but when I sit down to eat, I watch about half of an episode of the show I’m currently watching. Tthe salad slapped and I felt superiorly healthy to everyone around me. I made a tea quick before my 1 PM meeting today! 

2:03 pm // Did a big meeting just about data, ask amounts, and getting on the same page - but my second client meeting is done for the day!

2:31 pm // After catching up on some Slack messages and quick emails, I did my delayed 2 pm slump buster - I put my desk on standing, put on the 2 pm slump playlist, and worked through some of the follow up items from the meetings or things I missed on slack. 

Evening:

4:08 pm // I rarely hold to a hard out time at work unless I have an appointment or are meeting a friend. Normally, Dave works until 5 pm and gets home at about 5:30 pm - but he’s off today because of his work schedule for the week, so we make plans to head to the thrift store after our purge date yesterday. We quickly drive over, unload a trunk load of stuff, and drive back home. We have to go together, otherwise I would’ve done a leisurely stroll through Marshalls and undo the purge progress we made.

4:38 pm // We get home and I start on dinner — not the norm, but since I’ve been home a bit more in the last few weeks, I’m trying to get back to cooking once a week. I made a turkey enchilada skillet and it goes fastest if I do all the chopping at the front end. It takes some extra time, but it makes the cooking go easier and faster. While it’s cooking in the over, I give the kitchen a quick clean.

6:00 pm // I sit down to eat with Dave. We’ve also been re-watching Brooklyn 99 and are on the final two episodes — so we finish those off.

7:00 pm // Unofficially, I’ve been calling this my ice cream summer. After dinner, I run out to Dairy Queen to get a confetti cake dip cone (my ice cream choice of summer). Dave has hockey tonight, so he leaves while I enjoy the ice cream in the bath with my book (The Ex-Vows!) and reach just over the halfway point.

8:05 pm // Lately, my evenings have been lost hours. I want to blame some of it on being back on social media, but it’s also probably more realistic that I don’t have a menu of energizing evening activities. Candidly, I feel like I’m teetering on the edge of burning out from a life that is too jam-packed... so jam-packed that I don’t even know where to start when I do have an hour free, so I go back to old templates. For tonight, I look at my phone and read some more of my book.

9:15 pm // I finally pony up and start getting myself and the dogs ready for bed. I make a little list of what I want to do yet (clean up the gym, put all my clean laundry away, get the dogs outside) and start doing that with my audiobook (The Happily Ever After Playlist!) as company. The whole thing, as always, goes faster than I think.

10:20 pm // Tucked into bed. An intrusive thought enters: “If I could end the day better, maybe tomorrow would be a better day to show a day in the life post. Or if I could work out tomorrow, maybe that would show more of what I want in my days.” The bright side is: the thought doesn’t stay long as I read my book until I fall asleep. The day was good enough.

---

And there it is - a little day in my life! I’m holding myself back from trying to polish this up and make it more impressive; I’m also holding myself back from trying to explain the lost hours and… all of it. But the exercise did remind me that I can create an energizing list of evening activities, implement a phone bedtime, and that I do get a lot done in my work day. And I can probably sneak a workout in if I stop talking myself out of it. 🥲

I hope to do this quarterly as a Lunch Note but I also hope you’ll write down your own, even if it’s just for you! Thanks for reading. 🧡

In the Lunch Box is a collection of treasures in my life from the last few weeks - media I’ve consumed, products I’m loving, things I can’t get enough of… in a condensed, digestible, aesthetic format (I hope).

1. Never Better by Wild Rivers: If there’s one thing I love doing, it’s introducing friends to great Canadian music³ — and if you haven’t met Wild Rivers yet, it’s never too late to start. A great entry point? This short album — Never Better. It’s filled with all the signature Wild Rivers pieces: wonderful harmonies, strong lyrics, and upbeat and sad bops. I love to dance around to Never Better but I continue to let the lyric “From the second we met, I knew you’d be significant” from Backfire haunt me. I wish that was a line I had written!

2. I Hope This Finds You Well by Natalie Sue: Back to back weeks saying I heard about this book from

   Becca Freeman
   on Bad on Paper? I promise I will stop literary fangirling after this. Jolene works in administration at Supershops — but when her habit of saying what she really thinks about her co-workers in white text at the bottom of her emails is found out, she’s placed into an HR improvement course… and her email will now be monitored. But a mishap takes place, and now she can read everyone’s emails and messages. Obvious chaos ensues. Both the Goodreads description and Becca said it gave Eleanor Oliphant vibes - and I loved Eleanor Oliphant and this book. Tears pricked my eyes while I read, and I said out loud, “oh no, oh no, oh no!” at least five times. I loved the journey of how further context into her colleagues lives gave her more and more empathy. Ah! It’s a book you hug at the end of it. A plus: it takes place in Calgary — just down the road from me! It was a five star summer read for me.

3. A Perpetual Calendar: In my social media break, one of the most annoying pieces was feeling like I was missing the birthdays of friends and family. Growing up in a weird community that had Dutch subculture, we would keep “bathroom calendars” - a perpetual calendar that was hung in a bathroom. After our bathroom reno last fall & our last perpetual calendar getting damaged, I said, “Enough is enough!” and I ordered one last week. It fits our decor, and I’m already so excited to have to rely on my phone for one less thing.

I hope this was a nice break away from you - whether you’re reading on a work break, your lunch break, or with your coffee on Friday morning. I am having so much fun with this, so I hope they are enjoyable and useful for you.

If you have ideas for future Lunch Notes topics or things you’d like to see me write about here, please let me know and I’ll add them in to my (chaotic) content calendar.

And as a teaser for next week… I’m introducing something & someone new to Lunch Notes. Can’t wait to share!

Thanks for reading, and enjoy your lunch!

1. I can own it, fine. Yes, I did this. I’ve always been who I’ve always been.

2. It’s week two of this. “As always” is generous but hilarious.

3. It’s why one of my favourite playlists to send people is my Canadian Chill playlist.