jazzfish | Entries tagged with you gonna eat that?

Thursday I stopped at the farmers market to get eggs, which they were out of. I did get a thing of Concord grapes, though. Also a thing of raspberries, because they were slightly cheaper if you were already buying something else. I have been marketed to.

Not that I knew what I was going to do with them. So on Friday I got a thing of whipping cream, so I could have crepes and berries and whipped cream.

Crepes take forever to make, though, and awhile back Erin sent me a recipe for what's basically a crepe made in the oven in a 9x13 pan. The texture isn't right (too cake-y) but the taste is.

Anyway, after having done that for breakfast for three days running I am a) out of whipped cream and raspberries and b) pretty confident in being able to make it. The general idea is "make sheet-pan crepe, spread whipped cream and raspberries, roll up, slice and eat". (The original called for strawberries, cream, nutella, and dust with cocoa powder, but I don't so much like strawberries and am meh on chocolate things.) I cut the recipe in half since otherwise it's too thick for me to roll well, and learned to let it cool substantially before adding the whipped cream.

Very yum, kinda fancy, and pretty easy.

( recipe )

When I hit up the dollar store for wax paper for my Ogre gluing, so I wouldn't drip glue on everything, I also picked up a long roll of aluminum foil. For reasons that are unclear to me the grocery store will only sell foil in rolls that are slightly shorter than the short side of a (half-pan) baking sheet.

Normally when I make bacon I do it in the oven, on a baking sheet covered in foil. Normally I have to fold up the edges of the foil manually. Normally some bacon grease leaks out anyway and I have to carefully clean the baking sheet.

This morning I used the long roll of foil, and it covered the entire sheet with overlap on all sides. Near as I can tell no grease leaked through.

It's kind of astounding how having the right tools can improve one's life.

Ogres remaining: one that requires surgery, five more that require colour choice and thought, and three that require both. I'm honestly a little startled that it's almost done. This has been an enjoyable project: it's not so fiddly that I get frustrated at my inability to do fine motor work, and it's producing tangible objects.

This afternoon I decanted the vanilla extract I put up last summer. I'm less optimistic about this. The cinnamon extract I did in the fall was cinnamony enough but also pretty harsh, due I assume to using cheap vodka. Half the vanilla is likewise cheap vodka (though a different kind), so maybe that will turn out alright; the other half is spiced rum, and I have no idea how well that will do. At least it's only a dozen small bottles, instead of the twenty-odd of cinnamon that I need to do something with.

French toast tomorrow morning should give me some indication of quality, at least.

I also spent an hour or so scraping/squeezing "caviar" out of the beans to make vanilla sugar. This was an extremely annoying process that I do not recommend to anyone: removing sticky goop from slick wet beans is not a good time. But I am now prepared to make an awful lot of vanilla sugar. Just need to figure out where I'm storing it. Probably in one of my tall plastic bins: making one smell faintly of vanilla is unlikely to be a downside.

Next steps there are to let the scraped caviar sit until tomorrow so it dries out (possibly with an assist from the oven on low heat), blending it all into a small amount of sugar, and then mixing that into the full amount. The recipe I have calls for "one cup of sugar per vanilla bean". Online varies between one and two cups per bean, so that's a good starting point. Thing is, I undercounted woefully last time; I used eighty vanilla beans in the extract. These are small beans, so, sure, cut that in half. I used forty full beans to make the extract, that's twenty cups of sugar, at 200g a cup that's four kilos of vanilla sugar. That ... should tide me over for awhile. Get some pint or half-pint jars, that's much of xmas sorted.

Then I have the mostly-empty bean pods that I should do something with. I'm currently letting them air dry as well. I guess I could snip them up small and mix them into some (more) sugar.

Onward.

or "Blackened Spaghetti" if you will

Turn the back burner on medium-high because this stove is old / underpowered. Put the pot on the back burner and add some olive oil.
Sautee some onions and garlic.
Add some carrots (yes) and bell pepper. If you had ground beef this is when you'd add it and brown it.
Add a can of crushed tomatoes (normally I'd use pureed tomatoes, or stick-blend them for a minute) and a bunch of mushrooms, and some more water.
Wait til it all comes to a boil.
Turn the front burner to Simmer.
Check on it in forty minutes or so. Swear because it's boiled dry and burnt to the bottom of the pot.
Have salad with leftover chicken and potatoes for dinner instead.

Unfamiliar stoves are the worst. Thankfully the pot was anodized, and pouring some more water to deglaze worked pretty well.

Been a minute. Have a ramble.

I spent last week up north with Erin, which was ... it's good to see Erin, and the critters, but the weather was mostly grey above and rainy and muddy, which all makes it hard for me to, well, function. In my own space that manifests as just kind of zoning out a lot. Around someone else or not at home, that's less of an option, so it was hard. But there was tasty food, and snuggling, and talking, and overall it was much better than not.

Now I'm back and have a bunch of classwork to get through in the next week and a half: four lectures, three assignments, two quizzes for stupid Rob, and a video presentation and a practicum proposal for the other class. Doable but I'll be busy.

Canada Post workers are on strike. I'm planning to go out and support a picket location on probably Wednesday, will be good to get out for a bit anyway.

The strike, and the fact that the union and management are apparently pretty far apart so it will either last for awhile, or they'll get ordered back to work, is colliding in my head with the recent elections (etc) and the way that lots of folks I know are having a particularly hard time the last while. No particular coherent thoughts, and certainly nothing actionable. Just noting that civilisation, society, is in fact slowly crumbling as all the money concentrates at the top.

I read David Mitchell's The Bone Clocks a couple of weeks ago (on William Gibson's recommendation, whenever I heard him speak at the one VCon I went to), and it was quite good. The part that stuck with me is the last section, 2045, set in a rural community in Ireland where the civil government is collapsing and pulling back, and people are struggling to Make Do as the twilight deepens. It's sort of hopeful, I guess, overall, on a longer timeframe, for other people. Felt real and immediate, though.

My passport has made it to the passport office in Philadelphia. An acquaintance observed in passing that there's a good chance that passport renewals with X-gender that aren't processed before mid-January could be held indefinitely, so maybe that was an error. Guess we'll see.

I did bring a big jar back from Erin's with me, so this weekend I was able to put up my cinnamon to make into extract. That'll finish out, mm, four to six weeks, so either just before or just after solstice. (Cinnamon extract is supposedly good in anything you'd use cinnamon in, but especially in things where it's nice for the cinnamon to dissolve, like french toast.) The vanilla from June is still going; decided to let it keep soaking. I'll decant it this spring and make up sugar then, and it can be 2025 xmas presents or something.

Right. Lunch, and then back to presentation work. I hope you're doing well, and keeping warm physically and emotionally as best you can.

I talk a lot about how the one unambiguously good thing I got out of being on the Feingold diet as a kid ("no artificial flavours, colours, or preservatives, no high-fructose corn syrup, no 'natural salicylates' from certain fruits") was real maple syrup. I don't think much about how 'vanillin' was also banned and so I developed a taste for real vanilla as well.

Some years ago Erin got into a Facebook group related to a vanilla bean co-op, and made some extract and paste (like extract but gooier, stronger, and with bits of tiny bean pods / 'caviar' in) and sugar. This seemed like a pretty neat thing but I wasn't in a headspace where I was up for a new hobby, especially not one with a multi-month lead time. So I mostly forgot about it.

A few months ago Andi mentioned that she was ordering vanilla beans and did anyone want any, or have any recommendations as to what to do with them? And I said "oh right that" and got her to order me four ounces of Vanilla × tahitensis beans, with also no real idea what I'd do with them. They showed up while Erin was here and have been infusing my apartment with a lovely scent, from inside a sealed ziplock.

This week I finally got around to putting them up for extract. Based on "standard is one ounce beans to one cup booze" and "there's no real point in doing more than double that" I figured I could make 2x375ml. One is the cheapest vodka I could find, because they recommend vodka for a starter. The other is "Sailor Jerry's spiced rum" because it sounded interesting. I decanted the booze into pint mason jars so that I could get the beans back out again afterwards, split the beans and dropped them in, and put the (labeled) jars at the back of my pantry. I'll give them a shake when I remember and test them in four months or so.

Once the extract is done I can use the beans to make vanilla sugar. Based on "one bean per cup of sugar" and "these are smallish beans, and more certainly won't hurt" I will still have around a 2.5kg (5lb) bag worth of vanilla sugar. Might end up as Xmas gifts, depending on timing.

("What do you do with vanilla sugar?" You put it in any recipe that uses white sugar and inexplicably does not include vanilla extract. Or you put it in your coffee/tea/lemonade, or use it for cookie decoration, or or or.)

Nice to have something concrete to look forward to in the fall.

Time still doing that "passing" thing. Classes go reasonably well. Having a bit of trouble sticking to my "finish one class a day" plan but not so much it's a problem. And next week is the start of midterms so that should be easier.

I figured out the problem with the cookies: I'd only used half as much butter as I was supposed to, so of course they're dry and crumbly. This is a flaw in my otherwise excellent "do everything by weight" system: sometimes my mental conversion fails me. "A cup of butter, that's four ounces, right? No way it's eight, that's just way too much butter." Oh well. Won't make that mistake again in a hurry. Perhaps sometime I should go through my recipes and update them all with weights.

Mr Tuppert has begun demanding red-dot time earlier and more, which is not necessarily ideal. But I'm glad he's got something he enjoys playing with, at least. I can occasionally get him to bat at the wire-toy for a minute or two; this is an improvement, as initially he was terrified of it. He's also been lying on my "lap" when I'm laying in bed reading before sleep, and requesting scritches, which is nice. I suspect that if I had a lap-blanket I could turn him into more of a lap cat, but "coming on summer" is not the time to experiment with lap blankets.

More worryingly, he's exhibiting occasional weird health things. He's always been yuking up wet food once a week or so; he's always been pooping about five days in seven. Lately he's been occasionally twitchy/tremor-y: he'll twitch a bit when he's standing on the ottoman deciding whether to sit down, say. Last night on my lap his back half shook for a minute or so. I'm attributing it to stress / poor emotional regulation; earlier in the evening there was a LOT of shouting and stomping from upstairs / outside. But it's worrisome, and I'm keeping an eye on it.

Chatting with Erin who's coming down for a long visit in a week or so; chatting with Steph and trying to work out when we can get together again; both of those are good.

Money's an issue, books are good. The weather is threatening to turn, which means I'm thinking about getting my bike back out. Been wanting to start back in on something musical too, probably viola since there remains no easy way to set up the bass here.

Counseling is digging into "why do i think all relationships ought to be transactional" with a side of "why do i have so much trouble Being Myself in relationships". Or maybe the other way round. For once this is a thing that seems like it doesn't tie directly back to Abandonment Issues, which is a nice change.

I'm a little lonely, and a little tired, but mostly I'm doing alright, I think.

Erin came into town the weekend before last, which was lovely. I am still unaccustomed to people actually coming to see me; my mental framing, which has held sturdy since at least 2006, has been "people don't come to me, i go to them." But now that I've had two in the space of six weeks, plus Mya coming over I guess once a month or so for dinner, I should perhaps re-evaluate that.

As a result of Erin driving down, I now have a fridge filled with eggs: two dozen chicken eggs, nearly a dozen duck eggs, and unsure but probably not quite a dozen goose eggs. In my experience duck and goose eggs are great in baking (one goose egg is about three chicken eggs, depending) but have a weird texture when cooked on their own. Will see how long this lasts me.

I also had my first cookie fail (hubris ftl): creamed the butter and sugar, added in the (duck) egg and vanilla, and then let it sit for half an hour or so while we had dinner before finishing it off. Result: dry and crumbly cookie dough, dry and crumbly cookies. Ah well. I'm assuming this is a result of leaving it to sit rather than the duck egg. Will conduct further experiments (involving duck eggs rather than "leaving to sit") to determine.

Sunday the weather was quite nice, and we went and hung out in Pier Park with a bunch of mugs and a butane stove and a kettle and some tea, and some folks dropped by and chatted and drank tea and went home with mugs. Erin's been doing pottery fairly intensively for the last ... while, I guess, several months? Which means that she ends up with an awful lot of different pieces, mostly mugs, in different glazes. So some of them found homes over the weekend. It was lovely: beautiful pottery all shimmery and bright-coloured in the sun, and tea, and people I don't know terribly well but generally like.

On Tuesday we drove north, for a generally good and low-key not-quite-week. I managed to forget my toiletries, which meant that I got to once again experience several days of beard growth. This is definitely Not For Me. I like the look of a goatee, but that takes actual effort and morning thought to maintain, so it just all comes off. Quite relieved to be home to my razor on Saturday evening.

More importantly I also got to experience life without ADHD meds. It's hard to say what effect this actually had on me since there wasn't really much that needed doing in a specific timeframe while I was there. The main thing I noticed was a return of sugar craving. Thankfully a couple days back on the Concerta has squelched that down again.

Winter term is complete; spring term starts tomorrow, and on Friday night I fly out to Ohio to hang out in what looks to be heavy cloud cover for a total solar eclipse. I am of course pleased that folks in Niagara will get a clearer view but also irritated that it had to be -this year- that I'm missing it. C'est la guerre.

My ability to make consistently Quite Good cookies is, I think, a direct consequence of a) a good recipe (Betty Crocker, in this case), and b) measuring by weight and not by volume. It's also just easier, at least for me: no digging around to find the right size scoop and hoping it's clean, just leave a 1-cup in the flour and a 1/3-cup in the sugar.

(My mnemonics do annoy me: a cup of flour is 5oz, a cup of sugar (brown or white, I forget for powdered) is 200g. But I'm usually adding flour and sugar at different times, so it's not as bad as it might be.)

Good tools help, too. Stand mixer for creaming the butter and sugar (overkill), a ridiculously overproduced paddle for mixing the flour and then the chips (do not use the mixer for the flour, you'll overwake the gluten), silicone baking mats for my trays so I don't have to deal with parchment paper, a cookie-baller to make them consistently the right size so I don't have to mess around with two spoons or hand-rolling things. I kind of wish I had a full sheet baking tray so I could do them in two batches instead of four, but where would I store it? "In the oven" is absolutely the wrong answer.

Also it appears to take me about twenty minutes to go from "I should make cookies" to having the first batch in.

Stupid presentation for stupid Josh's stupid barely-a-class is done, another group member uploaded it an hour ago. Spent today wrestling ArcGIS into submission for a Cartography project. This is using a bunch of stuff I've learned in several classes, which is nice. Feels like I'm actually learning how to do things. It will be messier than I'd like by the deadline tonight but I'll get good feedback from Tony and then the actual final thing will be decent.

Part of why I've liked Tony's classes (Arc1 last term, Cartog this) is because they're project-focused. I'm not just going through exercises-- well, Arc1 mostly was, but the final project was "make this map" and the final exam had a practical "use Arc to solve these problems" component that I quite enjoyed. That's been mostly lacking from my other classes. Feels ... well. Practical. Able to be put into practice.

Class is done save for the Mapping final on Thursday. Feeling ... relatively confident? Guess I'll see in a few weeks.

Xmas shopping is mostly done, and should be entirely done by this time next week. It better be, since much of it needs to be shipped.

Last week I was craving hot chocolate, which is usually a Problem since commercial hot chocolate always feels watery. I got my mother's recipe for hot chocolate mix today but I don't think I'll be making it. This is a recipe for making enough hot chocolate to give as Xmas presents to pretty much everyone. "Makes about 19 cups," it says, and that's 19 dry cups of mix, not "cups of hot chocolate."

But I bought myself cocoa powder in the grocery haul this week anyway, and found a more reasonable-sized recipe online and tried it out this evening. If the only secret to good hot chocolate is "use milk instead of water" I will be mildly annoyed but mostly happy that it's that easy. For the second mug I added a couple drops of orange extract instead of vanilla and it was like drinking a chocolate orange.

So I had hot chocolate in one of my big Xmas tree mugs that I scavenged four(!) years ago when my folks moved from a giant house into a small apartment, and watched Muppet Family Christmas (and teared up at Jim Henson's cameo at the end, as always), and generally feel better combobulated after a somewhat stressful Sunday. I get grumpy about seeing Christmas stuff before December but I do enjoy the season in its proper place and time.

I hope you're all well and warm and loved.

As of yesterday I'm back in the prime of my life.

Intro (technically "Fundamentals of GIS" but I've been calling it Intro) is done; I turned in my presentation (ten percent) last Thursday and took the final today. Mapping and ArcGIS are done except for the final (a two-part final in the case of Arc, half exam and half practical). I'm not totally sure what Rob's two stupid classes (Comp and Python) have left but it's at least one quiz apiece. At least I think they're quizzes and not an actual comprehensive final.

Rob's classes frustrate me for a lot of reasons. Comp in particular feels like a class that he's slapped together as an afterthought. I am at least unconcerned for my grades: this is all material I either already know or have picked up mostly on my own well enough to do (and, fair play, learn from) the weekly assignments. I've left him scathing course feedback which I expect no one will read for Comp and I'll do the same for Python later this week.

It's weird to think of the term as nearly over. I get a month, more or less, for winter break, and then I do it all again twice in a row (no break between winter and spring terms). And then I figure out what I'm doing for summer and the next year, when I'm taking one class a term plus the very large "project/practicum."

A couple of weeks ago I made myself two quiches, on account of having a) some cream and b) two storebought piecrusts in the freezer. They turned out well (including the one that I froze and thawed out this week for breakfasts) except for a metallic tang to the crust. That was unpleasant enough that I'm finally looking into making my own pie crust.

For my birthday I made a cinnamon creme pie, with a crust using this completely ridiculous recipe for French pastry dough. Seriously, "boil the butter in the oven". I can confirm that it works shockingly well but is maybe not an ideal pie crust. Then again for the blind-bake step I inexplicably turned the heat down to 350 instead of leaving it at 410 (I must have been thinking of the instructions on the storebought ones, or something), so that might explain the "doesn't cut properly, sticks a bit to the bottom of the pie pan." But the recipe does say it's not ideal for a "thin custardy filling" so maybe that's on me.

I also wanted dessert NOW so I made the mistake of cutting into the pie before it had cooled all the way from baking the meringue, and it lost some structural integrity. So: tasty but not at all photogenic.

I have my grandmother's pie-crust "recipe" that came on the bottom of the recipe card for the cinnamon creme pie. I put "recipe" in quotes because it's ingredients and temp and time, which is probably enough if you've made pie crust before. Thankfully the internet can probably provide actual instructions. I may try that next week sometime, I've still got some cream left for more quiches.

I had a decent dinner tonight (pan-seared salmon and caesar salad), and spent some time with a cup of tea and my book afterwards.

Left from last week I have: one lecture (Intro), three assignments (also Intro, GISComp aka 'create a basic web page,' and Python), and one test (Python). More than I'd prefer; I'd really rather be getting lectures at least knocked out the day of. But I'm not falling behind. I'll take it.

My concentration really is shot, though. I get to a mildly stressful point in my book and have to put it down for a few minutes and do something else. I don't think I was always like this; I think it's gotten worse sometime in the last 2-10 years. That is: it is noticeably bad since, say, last April, post-move and post-covid and post-new-job. And I was having similar trouble focusing on work within a couple of years after moving to Vancouver. (I didn't really notice it while I was at Simbatude, roughly 2016-2021 but that was a pretty slack job overall.)

Right now, though, I'm a bit tired from classwork but ... generally feeling relatively content? I'm not getting out and doing much, I'm not doing much just sticking around here. Nominally role-playing on Wednesday nights but that's falling off for various reasons. Most weekends I get out and do A Thing. I talk to Erin and Stephanie, I hang out with Mya once or twice a month and Julianne ... less often than that but I do talk to her on Wednesdays. I read, I feed myself and the cat. No musicking, no writing, few other hobbies. Right now that seems ... sufficient.

I doubt this is stable, but it does feel nice to enjoy it while it's here.

It turns out that when you're a grown-up you can just make yourself a coffeecake and a big mug of tea and rewatch She-Ra and feel sorry for yourself, and no one can stop you. It's pretty neat.

I did not make the coffeecake in the toaster oven, because I did not feel up to dealing with a failed coffeecake. Also coffeecake calls for 375F, which is a temperature that my toaster oven does not do. It does temperatures by button pushes, which is a little weird, and the temp settings are labeled in both C and F, which is a little weird... and they increment by 20C. So there's 180C / 355F, which is close enough to 350 that's fine, and then 200C/390F, and then 220C/425F which is at least a real number. "Quirky," the reviews said. I am inclined to agree.

A friend writes My goal since March 2020 has been "do not give anyone covid" and honestly same. Like, I guess my main goal was "don't get it myself" and then "don't get it again" but "don't give to anyone else" has been pretty high up there as well. So I continue to wear masks on transit and indoors in public places as much as I can, and I limit my going-out-to-things, etc etc. It feels futile at this point but not doing it would feel futile and defeatist, so I continue.

I've put in to adopt a senior cat from the New West animal shelter. There was also an article today in a local newssite about how the shelter is overcrowded, so I may have a cat by the weekend. He comes with the name "Tuppert" which is phonemically awkward and may need to be changed. Then again when Jonathan C-- adopted his latest cat Walter he reported "we were going to change it to something more in line with our other cats, something like Derp Gently... but it turns out he answers to Walter, so we're kind of stuck with it." Tuppert is a reasonably handsome twelve-year-old tuxedo-ish. We shall see what comes of it.

And now I have a workmeeting in ten minutes, to bookend the workmeeting at seven AM every morning. The joys of working with a team based in India. At least I'm still employed.

I have an appointment with a random doctor for tomorrow. (It is basically impossible to find one's own family doctor in BC. I had one before I moved north, and she got me my CPAP, but she's since left the country.) Plan is to talk about my breathing difficulty. Monday night I walked up the hill from the Skytrain, pulling my suitcase behind me, and was having trouble breathing for a good half hour after I got in.

I am pessimistic about this particular appointment. I expect it to focus heavily (ha) on my weight, since that's easy and obvious and I believe the appointment is for a ten-minute block. But I live in hope. And my CPAP is definitely giving up the ghost, so perhaps I can at least convince the doctor to write me a prescription there so that insurance will cover it.

Slightly more focused at work, I think, or maybe I just have definite and clear tasks this week. It's still not great.

I would really like for life to involve things other than "can't sleep" and "low energy/brain" but that does not really appear to be in the cards at the moment.

(I am not sure which frightens me more: that I have long-covid, or that I don't and this is all just a direct result of poor and difficult-to-impossible-to-reverse life choices.)

I did get a toaster oven a few weeks ago. So far I'm quite fond of it. It toasts bread and Pop-tarts acceptably, and makes frozen waffles quite well. I've also used it for toasted-cheese-and-roast-beef sandwiches, at which it excels. I keep meaning to try making a small batch of cookies but haven't gotten around to that yet. Maybe next week.

I have made it to Niagara for the Gathering, a week-plus of gaming. Also of sleeping in a real bed. I slept for ten hours last night, more or less, and it was wonderful.

My stuff did in fact arrive Friday morning. A couple of things were minorly damaged. Four bookcases (of eight) were completely destroyed and the backs of the other four came off and were probably damaged. I have begun the process of talking to the claims department (aka "Cheryl") about that. I am not optimistic; the paper I signed explicitly says they're not responsible for damage to particleboard furniture. If I had known that ... well, I probably still would have gone with them, because seriously, I've used four professional moving companies and three of them were careful and didn't break anything (the fourth broke one and a half bookcases out of fifteen, which is a high but acceptable attrition rate). Bah. Soon this will be only a bad memory.

Anyway, everything technically fits into the apartment. I'm in Niagara for a week now, and when I get back I will attempt to make the kitchen work and see what if any repairs can be made to the surviving bookcases. Then it's buying and building replacements and playing Rush Hour with the living room to get the bookcases into place and the contents on the shelves.

"April to move in, May to settle in" feels doable.

Also, as with last year I have acquired several boxes of frosted brown sugar/cinnamon Pop-tarts, which are inexplicably unavailable in Canada. Most of them are to go home; some are for breakfast while I'm here. I have no toaster in the room, so I eat them raw. Or, for the cultured, Pop-tartare.

After I found out that the movers weren't coming today I called Erin, who talked me down and through it. Which was very much appreciated. I'm glad I still have Erin.

Aspects exists. I just got an email saying that my ebook preorder has dropped, and my hard copy is en route. (Should be here mid-next-week, so, either it arrives while I'm in Niagara or I have a long-awaited book to read instead.) I am holding off on reading it in ebook; for some reason I want to read it in hard copy first. That seems important. Also I lack the brain and emotional resilience right now to read The Last Of Mike Ford. (

mrissa has some impressions of it. I am very much looking forward to this.)

Back in I guess November, when Kelsey came to visit, Erin rediscovered and introduced me to Bengal Spice Tea. Cinnamon and cloves and yum. So now I have a tasty thing to drink in the evenings. And I have my travel hot-water-pot, and the travel mug that my ex-company sent me a couple of years ago when they handed out swag in lieu of paying bonuses. So I have tea.

Laundry two doors down is not the same as laundry in the apartment, but it's a sight better than "laundry at the end of the hall and down a flight of stairs" or "laundry a twelve-minute drive away," which were the last two places I lived. (Technically the last one was "laundry at the end of the hall, also costing $4/load payable only in loonies," which is why it was a twelve-minute drive away instead.)

I went out this evening and bought myself a chair for the porch and a tray-table-thing, so now I have some furniture. The bar stool is good for perching on but no good for actually trying to work or anything. And sitting on the floor was getting old.

On Thursday morning my electric razor popped open and I lost one of the blades. I could order more, and will, but like Aspects they'd get here next week at the earliest. I could buy a new razor but I did that once already, my spare razor is packed and I don't need a third one. I could use an actual bladed razor but that is just an invitation to a whole lot of blood. So I'm experimenting with beardedness. It itches less than last time, at least so far. I doubt I'll keep it but it's nice to change things up from time to time.

The Indian place around the corner does a decent korma. The poutine place over the skytrain (less than a half-mile walk, though coming back is up a Significant flight of stairs) still has a delicious buffalo chicken poutine. River Market exists and I'll get down there eventually and have some barbecue from Re-Up, the only good barbecue I've had north of the Mason-Dixon line.

I have pots and pans. Mya, who came by to check on the place once a week while I wasn't there, found a decent set on Craigslist and left them in the apartment. I've also got an assortment of utensils: cheap measuring cups and spoons, a couple of forks from takeout, some misc stuff from the thrift store. So I can make breakfasts at least, and whenever I go grocery shopping for real I'll be able to make a few other things as well.

I don't like my situation at all, but it is not the worst situation I've been in.

Today's "well duh" discovery: biscuits with just barely not enough liquid in them get crispy-crunchy. Still tasty and edible, at least while warm and presumably also once cooled, but not my favourite. I even thought "you know, i bet this is not quite enough milk" and stopped anyway, because biscuit dough that's too wet is really, really obnoxious to work with. Now I know.

Eggs and biscuits for breakfast on my first day of work. Which day looks to be taken up primarily with reading up on the software I'll be documenting and having an orientation meeting. It ought to involve a bunch of HR-type paperwork as well but my laptop hasn't arrived yet, because it shipped from Houston TX on Thursday. And while that's a reasonable timeframe for it to get to Vancouver (and indeed it's been at the FedEx depot in Richmond since Friday morning), getting up north is at least an extra day, and getting delivered to a rural location (ie, Not Prince George) likely another.

That's if it gets here at all, of course, because someone (probably me but maybe them) put in the wrong address so it's going to unit 113 instead of unit 103. Thankfully rural life may mean that I get saved there: the delivery guy knows me and I can just say "hey, that's actually mine." Unfortunately when I pinged him yesterday he said it was probably going to the post office, when it doesn't even have a PO box on it. So I get to go talk to them again this morning and tell them to be on the lookout for a package that's misaddressed to me.

Fun times all around. At least they're paying me.

It is weird to not have to worry about Simbatude things, though. There's a certain conscious relief in the knowledge that I won't have to interact with Hector again, or bite my tongue when Pat (bossboss or possibly bossbossboss, it was unclear) neglects to convey to developers that they really ought to at least look like they give a damn about getting information to the writers on time. There's also a nagging sense hanging out in my backbrain that I ought to be checking in on something, making sure that there aren't any last-minute releases popping up or what have you. That'll dissipate in time.

What should I have for breakfast?

Ooh, I could make cinnamon rolls!

Or, I've got these limes. I could make lime rolls! Zest a lime into the dough, make the glaze with lime juice, and, hm, something for the filling, I'll figure that out later.

Whoops, the dough's just about done with its first rise, I should decide on a filling.

The Internet says "cream cheese, sugar, lime juice." Sounds alright but I'll have to go get cream cheese.

Cream cheese is in my basket ... but as long as I'm in the grocery store I should pick up a few other things.

Okay, dough is punched down to rest for a minute and groceries are put away, time to mix ... the ... cream ... cheese ...

What do you mean it's not in a bag?

What do you mean it's not even on the receipt?

In the event I just used brown sugar for the filling, and that seems to have worked out okay. Definitely want to try the cream-cheese filling next time, though.

Crossposts: https://jazzfish.livejournal.com/697034.html

A pop-up vaccine clinic showed up in town early this week, so I went ahead and got my booster on Wednesday instead of waiting til my appointment in three weeks. As with my second dose I spent that evening and the entirety of the next day with a sore arm and no energy to speak of. There was a great deal of sitting on the couch and petting cats, and not as much snuggling Erin as I would have liked since she had her booster the day before I did and was back at work. Today as expected I'm doing much better. Yay immune system.

One of the things about "unoccupied home" insurance is that they require that someone go over to take a look at the place every so often. I asked ex-roomie Mya if she'd take care of this, since she lives relatively close, and she said sure, so she's been doing that. Good thing, too: as of a week and a half ago the bathroom sink has been occasionally coughing up water and gunk. I really did not want to have to deal with this before I've even moved in. I tried the "ignore it and maybe it'll go away" route and instead there was gunk spilled on the floor when she went in yesterday. So I've put in a request in with the building manager and hopefully it won't take too much longer to resolve.

I've begun making a pot of tea in the mornings, since the apartment water is no longer so terrible as to quickly make a pot undrinkable rather quickly. As a bonus, I can reuse the leaves to make a pot of tea in the evening with minimal caffeine. It's been nice to have something warm to drink as the light fades.

I've been experimenting with making pizzas as well. Still looking for a dough recipe I'm happy with. I'd like to be able to start the dough around lunchtime and be able to eat the pizza for dinner, and most of the recipes I've seen want the dough to sit around for a substantial amount of time. It's keeping me occupied, anyway.

Crossposts: https://jazzfish.livejournal.com/696601.html

Small good things:

The bathroom is repainted (and Nic the assistant super cleaned it pretty well), the apartment windows are replaced. I've vacuumed and am no longer stepping on grit that someone else tracked in. Later today I shall take everything down out of the medicine cabinet and wipe down the shelves so I stop being annoyed by the white sawdust that drifted in through the doors.

I have figured out a meringue recipe I'm happy with. (Equal amounts egg-white and sugar, by weight; whip in the sugar a bit at a time so it doesn't just all sink to the bottom; when it's about done add a splash of vanilla and one of orange extract; spoon onto the baking sheet with small-eating-spoons; bake at 200F for two hours, then turn the oven off and leave them in there.) This is handy as it's Egg Season as of a couple of weeks ago.

I have three different RPGs that I'm actively excited about. Fate of Cthulhu, in which the characters travel back in time to stop a Great Old One from rising, is a version of Fate that I can comprehend. Spire has a straightforward mechanic and some genuinely interesting worldbuilding. And I recently picked up my old favourite Changeling and started reading through the 20th anniversary edition, and it still makes me happy.

I sent my tax stuff off to Chris the accountant, after spending half an hour last week trying and failing to find the last of my RRSP forms on various financial websites.

Two nights ago I slept for nine hours, with only a few brief interruptions.

Next week I begin working at 80% time, which will in theory result in me being 10% less annoyed at work. (I am taking a pay cut to do this, but it incorporates a long-overdue but still insufficient raise.)

And, perhaps most important: thanks to Erin being actually functional on Saturday morning and sitting on hold for awhile, I have an appointment for my first vaccine shot, for a week from Wednesday. I had thought the plan was for the vaccine to be rolled out by age group, but the powers that be seem to have decided that it's logistically better to just vaccinate everyone in small communities all at once.

I hope you're well.

Crossposts: https://jazzfish.livejournal.com/681205.html

I make crepes using an old inverted electric crepe maker. Or rather two; speeds up the process, so that it only takes around half an hour to cook a batch rather than an hour. Eggs and milk and flour and a little butter/sugar/salt, refrigerate the batter for an hour, pour into a pieplate and go.

My last few batches have been Problematic but I think I've solved that.

1) LIGHTLY oil the crepe maker. LIGHTLY. Oiling the crepe maker keeps the first one or two from solidly crisping onto the nonstick surface and needing to be scraped off into the trash, but instead has caused them to fall back off into the batter. LIGHTLY oil.

2) Room-temp milk (microwave 30secs) and eggs, so that the butter doesn't resolidify immediately.

3) Manually whisk in the flour and sugar. Take some time with it. I'd been using an electric mixer, which mostly but not completely gets the lumps out of the flour but puts a foamy head on the top of the batter. The whisk is both better at delumping and not vigorous enough to create foam.

4) Goose eggs? Probably not necessary, but they were tasty.

Dinner last night was crepes with apples and good cheddar, and cinnamon sugar (me) and candied rhubarb (Erin). Success.

Profile

Tucker McKinnon

Words are inadequate

Syndicate

Adventures in Mamboland

"Jazz Fish, a saxophone playing wanderer, finds himself in Mamboland at a critical phase in his life." --Howie Green, on his book Jazz Fish Zen

Yeah. That sounds about right.

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags

Words are inadequate

(the poor craftsman curses his tools)

Entries tagged with you gonna eat that?

sheet-pan crepe thing

doing things, mostly foodish

recipe for Spaghetti Carbonizeda

head up for a moment

extracting vanilla

let's see

time with greenie

food, also for thought

"The turkey is a turkey, you turkey!"

school and pie

noted: a decent mood

heroes for ghosts

still alive, still struggling

a real bed!

it ain't all bad

nuwork / nowork

my morning

misc

every day you get one more yard

crepe success

Profile

Syndicate

Most Popular Tags

Adventures in Mamboland

Expand Cut Tags