mousme | Entries tagged with cooking

1-State of the Phnee

I am at work, albeit very reluctantly tonight. The sleep deprivation is starting to take its toll, even though I went to bed reasonably “early” (shortly before 9:00am) and got up at 16:00, which means I got almost seven hours of sleep, which is way better than my average this week. Still, my eyes are sore in a way that tells me I can probably expect a headache later if I’m not careful. I do have Tylenol with me, so I will head it off at the pass if I can.

There’s not much to report on today, as I spent most of it sleeping. I didn’t get in a workout the way I’d hoped, so I will have to try that tomorrow at some point (ugh). I do have the treadmill out at work, and I plan on getting in a couple of miles tonight at least.

I will say that I miss the longer breaks we got at the RCMP during our night shifts. I’d gotten into the habit of taking a nap mid-shift, and that was a game changer in terms of being able to get through those rather grueling 12-hour shifts. We only have two 12-hour shifts at TC, but they come right after five 8-hour shifts, so the full effect is brutal. Sometimes I can get away with putting my head down on my desk for a few minutes with my eyes closed, but it isn’t at all the same as having a dedicated space for a full-on comfy nap.

2-State of the smallholding

I did manage to crowbar myself out of my very cozy bed at a halfway reasonable hour and went to the Martintown Market. The good news is that on Fridays they have an even better selection of fruit, and I was able to snag some celery, which I’ve never seen there on Saturdays thus far. I made myself a very tasty improvised “stir-fry” (I use the term loosely) of root vegetables from the market along with some garlic and soy sauce. I am quite pleased with how it turned out.

Otherwise, I didn’t get much done today on the home front. Night shifts are hard, and I’m really not sure why I keep expecting myself to be ultra productive during my night shift weeks. I guess it’s eternal optimism paired with perfectionism. 😉

3-State of the news

A poll has come out showing the results of the question: “If Canada were ever to face a situation in which the United States used military force against Canadian territory, what do you believe should be Canada’s primary response?” The numbers are surprising.

Nationally, 17% percent said they didn’t know/had no opinion, 24% said we should “avoid military confrontation and make concessions to prevent further harm,” and 59% said Canada should “defend itself militarily, even if the odds of success are uncertain.”

More interesting is how those numbers break down along political lines:

Liberal: 16%, 11%, and 73%

Conservative: 16%, 47%, and 38%

NDP: 14%, 8%, and 78%

Block Québécois: 23%, 31%, and 46%

I’m more surprised by how many people didn’t have a response than anything else, but it is VERY telling that the supposed party of law and order and military expansion are the very ones who want us to roll over and show our bellies to the USA. My belief is that it’s because they actually *want* the USA to take us over and make Poilievre into the governor of the “51st State.” Gross. Luckily the majority of Canadians still seem to have some common sense left. I may be a Quaker and a pacifist, but pacifism doesn’t mean letting fascists stomp all over you.

In further Canadian news, Carney has apparently brokered a successful trade deal with China. As far as I can tell the main deal is the removal of tariffs on electric vehicles from China in exchange for a break on tariffs for Canadian agricultural products. Gotta move that Canola oil, I guess! I think it’s overall a good thing that we’re moving away from dependence on the USA, even though China is potentially an iffy partner human rights-wise. But since our choice appears to be fascism down South or communism out East, we have to pick our battles.

Carney has also accepted to join the “Board of Peace” to rebuild Gaza. I am not holding my breath on that front.

Catch you on the flip side, friends!

Current Mood: tired

1-State of the Phnee

A shorter post tonight, I think. Yesterday’s got away from me, but today has mostly consisted of sleeping after my night shift. I was very, very tired after my OT because I hadn’t had the opportunity to take a nap right before work, so I got home, fed and watered the quail, and then (metaphorically) swan-dived into my bed for some mostly restful sleep.

Of course, I had to wake up early to meet with Mary from Ministry & Counsel to discuss the presentation we want to do reporting on the “Conflict in Meetings” workshop we attended last year, so I am not as well rested as I’d like. We had a really nice conversation, though, and have a game plan for the next week for how we’re going to manage the workload between us. Mary is a lovely woman, and I am hoping she and I will be able to get to know each other better in the coming months.

After that I improvised some dinner in the form of leftover goose, rice, and chicken broth for a not-quite soup. It was not as good as if I’d properly cooked it, but it was quick, easy, and tasted fine. If I have more time tomorrow, I may cook it properly in a pot, maybe with some aromatics, and see if that improves it at all.

One of my new coworkers is from Ukraine and he brought me homemade borscht for my late-night meal. I am very excited about this because I loooove borscht and rarely make it myself because KK doesn’t like it. My coworker makes his with pork, whereas my recipe is vegetarian, so I am very curious to see what it’ll taste like. As a thank you I brought him a carton of 18 quail eggs, because he’d mentioned before that he was interested in acquiring some from me. The girls aren’t laying super consistently because it’s winter, but I have more than enough quail eggs for now, so I’m happy to hand them out to folks who appreciate them.

My new treadmill also arrived while I was asleep! I haven’t had the chance to unpack it yet, so I will likely do that when I get home tomorrow and maybe give it a try in the evening after I’ve slept. I learned the hard way many, many years ago that trying to train or do exercise right after my night shifts is a recipe for disaster—I need to sleep before trying anything like that or I hurt myself. The last time, I was working with a trainer, and he was having me do the bench press. He put a weight on that normally I could manage with no trouble, and the next thing I knew, one of my arms buckled and I nearly brained myself with the bench press because the damned thing fell sort of backward. Anyway, the trainer was spotting me, so he grabbed the bar and all was well, but it was a definite learning moment. In short, I will sleep and THEN I will try the new treadmill. Yay!

2-State of the smallholding

I got seven eggs from the quail (in two days, I didn’t check for eggs yesterday, but still!) and Pixie stole one right off the table and ate it because she is a hooligan who can’t be trusted. *sigh* So far, the quail seem to be still doing okay, even though I am now super paranoid ever since the last female died because I just don’t know why it happened. With all the others I could make an educated guess (they got cold and wet, they overheated, they got snagged by a dog, etc.), but this death remains a mystery, so I don’t know what mitigating measures I should be taking. It’s all very frustrating. But yay, eggs!

I need to do some shoveling tomorrow if the weather holds up. I noticed things were warming up again today a little bit, which is perfect for shoveling because it means the snow will be wetter and I won’t have to fight with a layer of ice on the bottom. #CanadianProblems, amirite?

3-State of the news

It kind of feels like more of the same, which is both good and bad. Good, because it means there hasn’t been a new fresh hell to add to the previous fresh hells, but bad because the previous fresh hells are still going strong.

Trump has apparently declared the USMCA to be “irrelevant,” possibly forgetting that he took all the credit for negotiating it the last time he was in power. He’s basically throwing a temper tantrum because Carney is negotiating for trade with China, as far as I can tell

Iran is cracking down on protesters with a swiftness and ferocity that is breathtaking and terrifying. It has classified protesters and dissidents as “foreign agents” that need to be “dealt with.” Drones, CCTV surveillance, signal jammers, and a metric fuckton of propaganda have been their anti-protest tools of choice, according to CNN. They’re using the drones to spy on and record people in their homes, which is especially chilling, and managed a complete internet blackout almost instantaneously with military-grade signal blockers. State television also aired a report from a morgue showing rows of body bags, presumably as an attempt to deter more people from going into the streets to protest. And Trump, of course, is fanning the flames by posting inflammatory things on Truth Social, with no regards for the consequences of his actions.

The Narwhal is suing the RCMP in BC, alleging that they violated the rights of Amber Bracken, a photojournalist, when they arrested her in November 2021 while she was covering the RCMP trying to evict protesters from a camp on Wet’suwet’en territory. Alert readers may not even remember these protests because they were overshadowed by the [censored] Freedom Convoy’s antics in January of 2022, but for a couple of months this was a really big deal. The RCMP had tried to impose an “exclusion zone” that tried to bar people from the camp (including journalists, importantly) so that Coastal GasLink could build their pipeline without being bothered by pesky water protectors and other indigenous people. They arrested Bracken and seized all her equipment (camera, computer, etc.) and held her for three days before releasing her without laying any charges. This is going to be a precedent-setting case about people’s right to protest and the press’ right to cover the protests, so I will be watching the outcome with some interest.

Catch you on the flip side, friends!

1-State of the Phnee

I got called in for overtime tonight, as I mentioned in my previous post. The OT money is nice (albeit not as much as it could be since it’s “only” an extra four hours this week), so I will take what I can, when I can, especially since I might be unemployed come April. Every little bit of extra money helps, after all. (I’m totally not stressed about being unemployed. Nope. Totally fine, nothing to see here, move along.)

The supervisor on duty made a bit of an oopsie with the OT today, which is hilarious but also a little annoying. I am the “early” shift tonight, which means my shift partner arrives at midnight and I come in an hour before. I was asked to come in at 8:00pm to cover a few hours, but they forgot or didn’t notice that the person who was working evenings was ALSO the early shift, and therefore scheduled to leave at 11:00pm, leaving me alone for an hour with only a trainee as backup. OOPS. We are risk-managing the situation, because it would have meant approving another hour of OT otherwise, because it’s impractical to ask someone to come in to cover that one hour, since it would take them longer than an hour to even get to work. Yay risk management! /o\

Luckily tonight hasn’t been too busy, and weirdly enough this same situation happened to me at the RCMP AND we happened to have a proper crisis happen when I was alone with a trainee. I handled it like a fucking champ at the time, and I actually had a lot of fun (it was the kind of “crisis” where no one got hurt and no one’s life was immediately at risk, which is the best kind of crisis to have!). Whenever I go to job interviews, it’s my go-to answer for the almost universal question of “Tell us about a time when you had to manage a stressful situation at work!” and it never fails to impress people. :)

Other than that, there’s not a ton to report. I did find a suspicious rusty looking stain on my shower floor today, which makes me think either Octavia or Juno might have a urinary tract infection. I really hope not, but cats hide illnesses super well, and Juno hasn’t been gaining much weight back since her dental surgery at the end of last May, unlike Octavia who has filled out again nicely. So I bought some hydrophobic sand/cat litter and a couple of urine sample collection kits and my cunning plan is to sequester each cat separately to see whether I find bloody urine (KK tells me she’s found diarrhea in the litter boxes, but it’s impossible to tell who from) or anything else, and then once I have identified the victim I will call our local vet to schedule an appointment and bring a urine and/or stool sample with me. Ah, the glamorous life of a pet owner.

I keep swearing to myself that I will stop burning the candle at both ends during my night shift weeks, and then life keeps throwing responsibilities at me. It’s very annoying. So in spite of my best efforts, I will be sacrificing my sleep for several days this week. Tomorrow afternoon I have meeting with another member of M&C to discuss a workshop we both went to on resolving conflicts in Meetings, and we’ll be preparing a report to present first to M&C and then to Ottawa Monthly Meeting if there is interest there. Then on Wednesday at 10:00am we have a Worship Sharing for Health concerns, which is a fancy Quaker name for a support group for people dealing with both acute and chronic illnesses, as well as people who are caretakers for ill and disabled people. But since I’ll be getting home around 8:00am it means I’ll get maybe an hour of sleep before I have to attend, and then go back to sleep afterward, which makes for a pretty broken “night.”

Then on Thursday at 11:00am I have my three-month follow-up after my bariatric surgery (thank goodness it’s a virtual appointment, at least!). It’s the whole reason I went to get blood tests done on Saturday. I already got my results back, and my hemoglobin, MCH and RDW are all out of whack (albeit only marginally so), meaning I am probably back to being slightly anemic. *sigh* I’ve always struggled with my iron levels, and I knew this was a risk with the surgery. Boo. I will chat with the nurse practitioner on Thursday about what to do about this. I also have slightly elevated ALT (2 U/L higher than normal), which the internet tells me is potentially a sign of liver cell damage like fatty liver disease. Unfortunately, the internet’s solutions are to drink less alcohol (I already don’t drink anymore and haven’t in a year, and before that I could count on my fingers the number of drinks I had in a year), to eat more fruit and vegetables (yes, already doing that) stop taking OTC pain meds like acetaminophen (I haven’t had any in, like, two months), drink coffee (I’m not really supposed to drink much coffee now due to the risk of ulcers), and consume more folic acid. I will check with the nurse practitioner about that too, I guess. Stupid body, I am TRYING to take better care of it, and this is how it repays me! :P

Speaking of trying to take better care of my body, I got in another workout today using FitBod. The app is hilariously optimistic about how much weight it thinks I should be able to manage with my noodle arms. 15 to 18lbs for each exercise, whereas I can barely manage 10 right now. Luckily it allows me to modify the weights in the exercise, so I can track my progress a little better. I think I will be happy if I can progress to the prescribed weights by the end of the month. My hope is that by the end of the year I will be using the maximum amount of weight allowed by the locking dumbbells I bought a couple of weeks ago (which is 50lbs, for those of you following along at home). I think that’s a pretty reasonable goal over 12 months. I will be hitting the treadmill at work tonight as well, maybe in a couple of hours when the 2:00/3:00am blahs kick in, especially after I didn’t get a chance to nap before work today because of the OT.

I began experimenting with different forms of wraps today. I love wraps so much, they are often a go-to for me for breakfast, but my new stomach does NOT like flour-based tortillas. They make the new stomach super duper unhappy, to the point where I often have to lie down afterward for at least an hour and wait for things to stop hurting. It’s not ideal, but I keep hoping against hope that today might be the day I tolerate them again! Alas. Anyway, I consulted Reddit and got a bunch of neat suggestions. One person suggested I try egg wraps, and since I wasn’t planning on a grocery run today I decided to make my own at home, since it’s pretty straightforward: two eggs, 1 tsp flour, 1 tsp water, salt and pepper to taste, cook like a super thin omelette. Easy and filled with protein! Unfortunately this, too, was rather too heavy for my stomach to tolerate, so I am going to try different kinds of lettuce to see if they cooperate any better, and then after that move onto different recipes (there’s apparently a lentil wrap made with red lentils and chickpea flour that has potential) and maybe rice paper or nori. Experimentation, ho! I am also wide open to suggestions from my delightful friends here, too! Your suggestions for tuna salad were great!

2-State of the smallholding

I am having to fight off my tendency to build castles in Spain. My ambitions, as usual, far exceed my time, energy, and financial resources. Like, right now I am barely keeping up with my daily responsibilities, but someone on Facebook put up a halter-trained pregnant Jersey Cow and I found myself briefly tempted to contact the seller, even though I have no money to buy a cow, no vehicle with which to transport it, no barn, no equipment, and no fucking clue how to handle a 1-ton animal that can kill me with one well-placed kick. Good fucking Lord, self.

I am considering moving my tools to the garage from the workshop until I can figure out why the workshop doesn’t have electricity anymore. The garage isn’t heated, so I might have to invest in some thermal underwear and fingerless gloves so I don’t freeze to death, but it might at least give me the opportunity to get some woodworking practice in and maybe get a small project going before I start tackling the really large stuff later this summer. My main concern is the quail, because I think the sawdust is not good for their sensitive little quail lungs. I did spot a portable dust extractor at Lee Valley Tools (a very dangerous place to shop unsupervised!) for $475. Not the cheapest ever, but certainly in the realm of affordable (as long as I don’t lose my job) by my current standards. Having a portable one would allow me to place myself in the furthest possible corner away from the quail to try to limit their exposure as much as possible, and then when I get electricity back to the workshop I could simply move it back there.

My hope is to build a bunch of sturdy, weatherproof enclosures in the early spring and summer for more poultry and meat rabbits. If I start working on it all in March, that gives me a fair bit of time for trial and error during the cutting/preliminary assembly process and eventually for the full building/assembly process outside where I want the structures to be “permanently” installed. I use the term “permanently” very loosely here, as I am quite sure I will have different opinions over the years about where things should go.

I haven’t yet fully decided where the enclosures should go. Ideally, they wouldn’t be too far from the house, because it’s kind of terrible to have to trek all the way across your property in the dead of winter to do animal husbandry of any kind. The quail are right across the way in the garage and even that is kind of miserable, and this winter hasn’t even been that harsh! I don’t want future!Phnee to curse me for forcing her to schlep through the snow and ice at -35°C during a serious cold snap in the coming years. :P It would also be helpful if the enclosures were partially sheltered from the wind, so it might make sense to put them up near the house, but I also wonder if that might not have unintended consequences for the walls/structure of the house (bird droppings and rabbit urine and general moisture come to mind). It could be a problem, or it could be nothing, but I simply don’t know. I will have to talk to more experienced owners and get some educated opinions. I could also put the enclosures just on the other side of the garage, but since I will have to tear down said garage in a few years, I am loath to do it. Mind you, I could also just do that and have it be a problem for future!Phnee, as long as I accept that she will likely curse my name when the time comes. It’s a quandary, for sure.

Because I understand my propensity for building castles in Spain that are well above my actual capacity, what I am trying to do with this planning is to eliminate as many of the barriers I know can and will crop up that would prevent me from tending my animals properly: inconvenient clean-up is a big problem, as is access to water and electricity. I will have to make sure that all the enclosures are close enough to an electrical source so that I can heat the water dispensers in the winter, and also not have to schlep dozens of gallons of water super far so that no one dies of dehydration. The ease of clean-up will be largely dependent on the design of the enclosures, so I will have to do more research on the best designs that are also relatively beginner-friendly, or I may have to ask some of my more experienced friends for help with some of the cutting and building.

None of that is going to happen this week, of course. This may be a project for next week, which is my first week off after my night shifts, or it might have to be pushed to the last week of January, depending on time and energy levels and just how much “disposable” money I have after most of my paycheque goes to everyday expenses. Life has become very expensive indeed. *sigh*

3-State of the news

Well, Trump is still threatening to use military force to seize Greenland “whether they like it or not.” For fuck’s sake. Denmark’s Prime Minister is not having it, unsurprisingly, and both Germany and Sweden have spoken up in defense of Denmark, so things could get very interesting, diplomatically speaking. The NATO Supreme Allied Commander has also stated that alliance members are “discussing Greenland’s status.” Not ominous at all, nope.

I haven’t talked much about Iran, mostly because I am embarrassingly not fully up to date with what’s going on there. Right now almost 650 people have been killed in protests there since December 28th. As far as I understand it, the protests began in response to rampant inflation but quickly transformed into general protests against the country’s regime and spread across the country. The US has, of course, threatened to intervene if Iran uses force against the protestors, which has as far as I can tell only fanned the flames, although it appears Iran is making somewhat conciliatory noises in their direction. The Grand Ayatollah Khamenei has basically told Trump to mind his fucking beeswax, and of course Trump does not wish to mind his fucking beeswax, because his fucking beeswax is full of pedophiles and fascists and he would like people to not focus on that, please and thank you.

In the meantime, Prime Minister Carney is off to China to try to diversify our trading portfolio and attract new investors, since the US is becoming an increasingly volatile and unreliable trade partner. I’m a little conflicted about this, mostly because the Chinese government is, well… *gestures expansively* But it’s undeniable that China is one of the great global powers to be reckoned with, and they are pioneering a lot of green(er), environmentally sounder initiatives, among other things. Their foreign policy, especially with regards to Taiwan, is personally abhorrent, but I also understand why our PM would not want to snub them from an international relations perspective. It’s complicated, I guess!

BC is either flooding or under flood warning, depending on the area. The Chilliwack River area in particular has been hit hard by the floods, and the residents are under an evacuation order at this point. I hope everyone makes it out safely.

Speaking of BC, there’s a case going before the Supreme Court now that’s going to be challenging the constitutional validity of a provision that prohibits MAiD (Medical Assistance in Dying) in publicly funded faith-based institutions. Right now, if an institution is faith-based (i.e. probably Christian) they can refuse to provide MAiD on their property and force terminally ill patients to be transferred to another hospital in order to end their lives. Now, I have very mixed feelings about MAiD. I think that, in principle, it is an excellent idea: everyone should have the right to choose their manner of death if it’s feasible (sudden and accidental deaths being a common enough phenomenon). However, there has been a lot of evidence over the years that the system is being used/abused in order to target lower income and disabled people, especially those with long-term but not actually terminal diagnoses, and to pressure them into accepting MAiD in order to relieve the system of the “burden” of their care, and that is abhorrent. If it’s an issue that could be solved by better access to health care services, then MAiD shouldn’t even be on the table. Also, medical practitioners should not, in theory, ever suggest it to the patient, the patient needs to bring it up themselves. Since the system exists, however, I do agree that religious healthcare institutions, if they are publicly funded, have a duty of care to all members of the public. It’s for the same reason I firmly believe they should not be allowed to deny birth control or abortion care: health care should be evidence-based, not faith-based. Faith is wonderful (I am a practicing Quaker, after all), but it should be there to support people on their journeys and not needlessly add to their suffering. I am interested to see how this court case goes!

There was apparently a pretty massive anti-immigration rally in Toronto this weekend as well as a counter-protest, all of which ended up with eight arrests and 29 charges being laid. It looks like it started with a “Stop Mass Immigration Rally,” which is laughable because the federal government has already slashed immigration quotas and the country is suffering because no Canadian citizen wants to do the low-paying jobs typically taken on by foreign worker programs and other marginalized folks who have come to this country. Like, is the mass immigration in the room with us, buddy? Are you feeling okay? Do you need some water? Anyway, things got out of hand, police are blaming “both sides,” and everyone is scheduled to appear in court at the end of February.

I do NOT like the direction in which Canada is going. We’ve had a growing problem with the far right, exemplified by the so-called “Freedom Convoy” of 2022, and it appears nothing is being done about it. I must confess I’m at something of a loss as well about what I can do about it personally, but there must be something I am missing. Maybe I will check in with some activist friends and see if they have concrete suggestions for me. Otherwise I can easily see us going the way of the USA if the right “charismatic” leader comes along.

Oh, and in “no one is surprised” news, Ontarians have continued to drink way too much since the inception of the pandemic. Weekly binge drinking is up 3.6% since 2019, hazardous or harmful drinking (i.e. early signs of alcohol dependence) is up 3.3%, and symptoms of alcohol dependence increased by 4.7%. There’s also been a spike in the abuse of illicit AND prescription drugs, and a spoke in people reporting mental distress and poor mental health. Suicidal ideation increased from 3.9% to 6.4%, too. Gosh, I wonder why ALL THAT could be? The article, of course, blames it on social isolation from Covid, which is such contrived bullshit, I cannot even. We have not socially isolated in five years. People are getting multiple Covid infections a year, which is wreaking havoc on minds and bodies. Inflation is out of control, people are getting priced out of being able to live under a roof, let alone comfortably, and all around us people and governments are sliding into fascism. PEOPLE ARE STRESSED OUT BECAUSE OF COLLAPSE, BOB.

*rips out hair*

ANYWAY. In more neutral news, I wasn’t able to go to my town council meeting today because of the overtime at work. I have marked my calendar for the next meeting, and I will make a point of reading the minutes when I get a chance.

I wonder if I can find some good news on which to end this post. Otherwise, it does feel horribly depressing. Ooh! Apparently, there’s a generic version of a very expensive Cystic Fibrosis drug becoming available! From what I can see the name brand costs a horrifying $300,00 to $370,000 a year, which the pharmaceutical company claims is based on their trying to recoup the costs they incurred while producing it. However, a Bangladeshi pharmaceutical company will be offering a generic brand for about $6,750 a year for adults and $2,000 for children, which will make it a lot more accessible (although it still won’t be free, which would be the ideal scenario). This is very exciting news and I am very pleased that I found it so I can end this post on a high note.

Catch you on the flip side, friends!

Current Mood: frustrated

I’m backdating this post, and we’re all going to pretend that’s not what’s happening, mmkay? ;)

1-State of the Phnee

It’s been a pretty quiet weekend. Last week took a bit more out of me than I thought, so I did take it a bit easier today than I had initially planned, but I did get stuff done!

Starting with yesterday (Saturday), I got up at ridiculous o’clock to go get blood tests done. KK also needed blood tests, so we planned to go together, except she forgot to set an alarm, so we ended up leaving forty minutes later than I wanted to. I should know better than to rely on her for early morning departures—the only time she ever gets up on time is when she has to go to work or to a medical appointment for herself. We get our bloodwork done at a local lab which KK said only takes walk-ins on weekends (but that I learned after the fact does in fact take appointments, so I will know for next time), so I guess there wasn’t enough urgency in it for her to get up on time.

Because we got there 40 minutes later than I wanted (i.e. right when they opened), we had a very long wait. KK has been reading a supernatural romance/comedy/smut novel about a half-demon(?) girl named Clarissa and made a valiant attempt to explain the plot to me as we drove there, as we waited, and all the way back home. For a lighthearted romance it was very convoluted. :P

We took advantage of the road trip to stop first by Canadian Tire so I could pick up more extension cords (you can never have too many!), stopped by the bank so I could have cash on me for my later trip to the local market, and we also stopped by the U-Haul self-storage facility where KK moved all her stuff late last year which she had in storage in the city ever since she moved in with me. She wanted me to see the space, since there’s room left to store some of my furniture as well, which will be useful. I’m not convinced I want to use the space, but I suppose it makes a certain amount of sense since it’s available. I’m just leery of taking on yet another of her expenses, since I’m pretty sure it means she’s going to start reimbursing herself from the joint account diligently, and there’s already not enough money in there to cover our expenses as it is if I don’t supplement it with my own money. *sigh*

I went back to the Martintown Market for produce, and I am pleased with the quality of the produce on offer there. I don’t think it’s necessarily local produce, but they source it very cheaply, so I can buy almost all that we need any given week for $15. I also bought a pork shoulder for $20, which I cooked tonight in the Instant Pot. The meat itself was spectacular, but I made the mistake of trusting the recipe I found online despite my misgivings about their choice of spices, so the flavour was not what I was hoping for. Next time I will eschew trusting the process and trust my gut instead. Luckily the meat was so delicious and tender that it more than made up for the lacklustre and slightly odd flavour.

I stayed up way too late with my D&D friends chatting about the new campaign and joking about the fact that we were a pack of neurodivergent nerds just parallel playing as we created our characters for a while. I think we sat in near silence for almost an hour at one point while we were all looking up statistics and various bits of gear. It was a lot of fun, and I am jazzed about the upcoming campaign. I need to firm up my character’s backstory and then write it all down for the DM to exploit as he sees fit, and I have a little under two weeks to do that. I may bore you all at a later date with my character concept and stuff, but not right now, as it’s not all clear in my head yet. But yay D&D!

A hefty chunk of Sunday got taken up by Quaker Meeting for Worship, followed by Meeting for Worship for Business, which lasted until 2:30pm! Ugh. I understand that Quaker processes are important, but sometimes they feel unnecessarily ponderous and cumbersome. Oh well, it’s a good way for me to keep a finger on the pulse of the Meeting, even if I don’t participate super actively.

There’s a bit of a controversy happening right now, because a member of Peace and Social Concerns wants us to sign the Apartheid-Free Community Pledge written by the Apartheid-Free Communities Coalition (which is a network of communities—mostly spiritual—that joined together loosely in 2022 to work to end what the consider the crime of apartheid in Palestine, which I agree with) along with the American Friends Service Committee. However, there is a small group of Friends who don’t want to sign the pledge, not because they don’t think that Israel is committing apartheid, but because the pledge contains the phrase “We declare ourselves an apartheid-free community,” and those Friends have rightly pointed out that we as a Monthly Meeting, as a Yearly Meeting (Canada-wide) and as a country have a LOT of work to do to dismantle our own system racism, oppression, and injustice. When we still have Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG) massively overrepresented among victims, Indigenous people massively overrepresented in both the judicial and “child protective services” spheres, and dozens of Indigenous communities that still don’t have access to clean drinking water, I agree that it is a stretch to call ourselves “Apartheid-free.” Other Friends have said that the pledge should be aspirational (I paraphrase), but it does not sit right with me, the way it doesn’t sit right with the first group of Friends.

There is a “threshing session” about it this coming Saturday, but as I’m working night shifts, I don’t know that I will be able to attend. I already have to sacrifice most of my sleep on Sunday for the Worship Sharing for the State of Society Report, and working two back-to-back 12-hour shifts on less than 4 hours’ sleep each time sounds like an absolute nightmare, especially since I will be working nights all week this week with extra overtime to boot because we have people off sick and others doing training course so that there’s very little wriggle room left on the schedule. Extra money is nice, even if it’s just a handful of extra hours here and there for me. I am near the bottom of the OT list, so I know when they contact me it’s because they are kind of desperate, too.

2-State of the smallholding

I got stuff done! There was a thaw on Friday that stretched into Saturday, so I took advantage of it to clear all the snow and ice that had accumulated on the deck and got it perfectly clean and smooth and safe to walk on. Of course, it promptly started snowing again last night (Saturday) mere hours after I cleared it, and it continued snowing for the rest of the weekend. *sigh*

As I said before, a hefty chunk of Sunday got taken up by various Quaker things, but once that was done I made good on my promise to myself to start getting the house better organized. I didn’t make a ton of headway, but I DID unpack the last two boxes of books in my bedroom and tidied up everything except my desk (that might be a project for this week, since I think it won’t take more than an hour or so to do). So now I have a bit more floor space to work with, and the whole room is looking a little bit better than it was before. I got rid of some trash that had wedged itself in nooks and crannies (mostly rogue packing paper), swept the floor, and consolidated the laundry into baskets to be dealt with by future!Phnee.

The rest of my free time that day was taken up by making dinner and then having my weekly Zoom call with the parental units, who were in very good form, I am pleased to report. We have tentatively made plans for me to go visit them during the last week of January.

3-State of the news

I must regretfully admit that I spent the weekend under a rock and did not check any news headlines, let alone try a deeper dive into my usual outlets and sources. If you happen to know of anything important that I missed, please let me know!

Catch you on the flip side, friends!

Current Mood: accomplished

1-State of the Phnee

My new-to-me app gave me a “leg day” workout, and now my legs hurt. Who could have predicted this? I discovered that one of the muscles I engaged today is one of the same muscles I use when pressing the brakes and gas pedals on my car. Owie. Bodies are so, so silly.

I am working on integrating more protein into my diet, which is especially important after bariatric surgery (mostly so my muscles don’t atrophy and so my hair won’t all fall out), and I’ve been experimenting with tuna, because I love canned tuna. I know there are concerns with mercury, but I’m not eating it in quantities that are of concern since I’m neither pregnant, breastfeeding, nor a child. I’m perfectly happy to make a little homemade tuna salad, and my go-to recipe just involves diced celery, a little mayonnaise, and dill. Still, I figured there must be some pre-made tuna kits out there, so why not give some of those a try for days when I’m in a bit of a hurry? So yesterday I tried out the Ocean’s SnacKit, and was very pleasantly surprised (it comes with six rice crackers and a little wooden spoon!). Today I tried a Clover Leaf tuna salad with quinoa and olive oil, but it wasn’t nearly as good. I think the olive oil made it feel greasy in my mouth, and it was edible but not texturally pleasing. I have a couple of different Clover Leaf tuna salads to try, but I may end up sticking with the SnacKits for now. I should look up other tuna salad recipes to try out on days when I have time to make them at home. If anyone reading has a favourite tuna salad recipe, please tell me so I can give it a go!

Speaking of surgery, I need to go get blood tests done soon, because I have a follow-up appointment next week with the nurse practitioner. I will probably go on Saturday, because I have a Ministry & Counsel meeting at 9:00 tomorrow morning and I am not confident that the blood tests will be done in time for me to get to work if I go afterward. Cornwall is about a 35-minute drive from my house, which would put me there at 11am (give or take), and I have to leave for work from my house at 2pm in order to give myself a good buffer to be on time, taking weather and traffic into account. So while I don’t think it would take three hours to get a blood test done, I also can’t guarantee that tomorrow won’t be somehow really busy, so I’d rather go Saturday when I can be confident that I won’t be rushed.

In “let’s shorten Phnee’s lifespan” news, I got an email yesterday from the bank that provided my mortgage saying my insurance company notified them that my home insurance had been cancelled. Now, we DID have a payment not go through in November because KK didn’t put any money toward expenses in the joint account for reasons that I still don’t fully understand and which she’s never explained save to apologize rather halfheartedly but also didn’t tell me about until several payments bounced. I had to pay a lot of NSF fees in November, let me tell you. So, the insurance company threatened me with cancellation, but I was able to rectify that situation and I thought all was well. Turns out no, they sent the SAME letter to my mortgage people, but they only sent confirmation that it wasn’t cancelled to me. I called them today, and the nice girl I spoke to sounded somewhat embarrassed and apologetic and said it’s “just how they work.” So, yeah, that shaved about 10 years off my life, I’m pretty sure. At least I got it sorted out pretty quickly.

2-State of the smallholding

I don’t have much to report on the home front today. I’ve been working evenings all week and have done very little around the home. The quail are doing okay in spite of that one death earlier this week. At this rate, though, I may be on the lookout for more auctions in April to add a few more birds to my flock to diversify the bloodlines. I really hope the rest of them live through the winter and I’m doing the very best I can to keep them alive, but the learning curve has been rough on the poor birdies.

Apart from that, my plans for the weekend remain the same. Get some bloodwork done (blech), try to figure out the snowblower and why it’s not working, try to get the outdoor GFCI outlet reset (I still don’t know what KK did to trip it, nor why it’s refusing to reset, but I’m going to try flipping all the breakers and seeing if that fixes it, otherwise I’ll have to call the electrician about it), and then spend the rest of the time doing some tidying and organizing. Somewhere in there I will also very determinedly continue to get some exercise in, whether it be taking a walk or doing some strength/balance training.

3-State of the news

There’s been a fair bit of fallout after yesterday’s shooting in Minneapolis. As I said before, this was a Nice White Lady that was shot, so all the news outlets are still talking about it. ICE agents also shot two (not fatally, thank goodness) people in Portland, Oregon, and killed a 41-year-old black man a week ago. Minnesota governor Tim Walz, whom most of us remember better as Kamala Harris’ running mate for VP in last year’s presidential election, has apparently authorized the National Guard to start staging in the wake of the shooting. Several other Minnesotan politicians have spoken out strongly against ICE, and there’s a lot of online chatter about whether Minnesota and/or other states will actively resist the federal government. If that happens, we may well be looking at a civil war, or at the very least localized violence. It’s easy to forget that the United States is enormous, so fighting in Minnesota wouldn’t necessarily have a direct physical impact on other places in the country. There would be ripple effects, of course, but it’s the same as when BC and Alberta get wildfires while Québec starts to flood in Canada. Same country, very different regional impacts.

The Trump administration is also continuing its slash-and-burn approach to international diplomacy. The US is leaving 66 global organizations and has said a firm “fuck you” to anything to do with addressing the reality of climate change. *headdesk* The withdrawal from international climate negotiations is probably going to face legal challenges, but the entire administration’s motto appears to be “I DO WHAT I WANT!” so I guess we’ll see if the courts can make it stick. It’ll take years of proceedings to untangle it all anyway, by which point we may all have cooked to death regardless.

In news that will surprise absolutely no one who was paying attention, the Calgary water main break continues to be a shitshow. Calgarians have been urged to conserve water, and they have responded with “SHAN’T!” by the looks of it. Apparently, they’ve known about the weaknesses in the system since at least 2017, but every city council kicked the can down the road until they couldn’t anymore. There’s been a similar situation happening in Montreal, but it hasn’t been as dire there in terms of impacts to the population. From what I’ve heard from my parents there have been some water main breaks, but nothing on the scale of what’s happening in Calgary.

Doug Ford wants to build what sounds to me like another white elephant (correct me if I’m wrong, anyone who’s still reading this) in the form of an underwater electricity line for Toronto through Lake Ontario. Like, I get that Toronto is demanding more and more electricity, but this seems… well. Like I said, white elephant. There’s no better way to do this? It’s not nearly as bad as some of his other projects, but his track record isn’t exactly great.

I really need to find a less depressing way to conclude my posts. XD

Catch you on the flip side, friends!

I am just about halfway through this last night shift, and I am very ready for it to be over.

Last week was a bit of a mixed bag, mostly because I really hate having to give up my sleep during night shifts, but as they say in French: "À quelque chose malheur est bon!" Which translates roughly to "sometimes misery leads to good things."

I sacrificed more sleep today in favour of staying up long enough to make a split pea soup, which I will be freezing sometime tomorrow (well, technically today, I guess). I have several other soups planned, as I mentioned, so we will see how many I have time to get done before Tuesday night. The problem is not the soups themselves, but rather my limited number of containers in which to freeze/store them. I may just use Ziploc bags for whatever I can't put into the silicon moulds in time, so that way I will have plenty of soup even if it's not stored in the way I originally planned.

I also bought extra pre-made things at the grocery store just in case I want or need something that's not soup. I picked up some protein drinks (the Premier Protein brand) because it's particularly important that I get enough protein every day, and I rather suspect that I will struggle with that, especially as I won't be able to manage meat for quite a while. I also got some unsweetened apple sauce, and I picked up several more cans of beef consommé (which I adore, but as I understand it is not to everyone's taste).

I'm really hoping that I won't find recovery too arduous, because I have a couple of small cooking-related projects I want to get done, namely I want to make apple jelly before the apples I picked last weekend go bad, and also remove the hulls from the black walnuts I gathered last weekend and get them washed and into the dehydrator for processing.

Realistically, I have too much to do to be able to get it done in the next two days, even if I don't sleep until nighttime tomorrow (which would result in a Very Tired Phnee, Indeed), and I have priorities other than the apples and walnuts, even if the apples go bad.

My main priority tomorrow is the quail. Tomorrow I will be vent sexing all the adults now that they're old enough for me to be able to reliably tell what sex they actually are. Once I've done that I will band them, so that in the future I can make sure to avoid interbreeding them too much next spring when I start incubating more eggs. KK has promised to help me replace the screws on the roof of one of the hutches with piano hinges so that I can open it from the top. Right now the newest hutch is actually really difficult to get into with food containers and waterers. I have to angle the food containers in particular, which means a fair bit of spillage, which isn't ideal.

KK also promised to help me move the quail hutches into the garage, because the weather is turning cold at night. We've had two nights when the temperature dropped to below freezing, and I don't want to lose any more of them to their habit of flinging their water around and getting soaking wet. From what I've understood from the internet, quail are particularly stupid little birds who are determined to kill themselves. Yesterday morning I got home and found one of my four-week-old chicks face down in its waterer, eyes closed, completely unmoving. It looked like it had managed to wedge itself between the waterer and the cardboard box I gave them to hide in (quail like to have little shelters to hide in to help them feel safe). I assumed it was dead, but no, it was just stuck and being Very Dramatic, so I'm relieved about that. I confiscated the box, because hiding privileges have to be earned and can be revoked if you try to use them to die by suicide, GDI.

Anyway, yes. Moving the quail into the garage will provide them with more shelter from the elements and hopefully keep them from freezing to death even if they get a bit wet. I will have to install more lighting in the garage if I want the quail to lay during the winter, since they need lots of light to lay and the garage is very poorly lit.

I fully expect Operation Quail Displacement to take a couple of hours at the very least. There's the sexing, the banding, cleaning out the hutches, fixing the hutch roof, and then moving the hutches into the garage, which means clearing a bit of space in the garage to ensure there's enough space for KK and I to carry them in without tripping over anything.

After that it Operation Cook All The Soup will continue, which I fully expect to take the rest of the day, and possibly a good chunk of tomorrow. Somewhere in there I also need to do laundry so I'll have clean linens while I'm recovering from surgery, and have a Zoom call with my parents as well. I don't know if I'll be able to get to the apples and walnuts, but I also don't want them to go bad.

The good news is that KK's shoulder appears to have recovered from whatever she did to it last week. Or, if it hasn't, then she at least hasn't mentioned it to me in the past few days, so I am choosing to see it as a win.

So, yeah. Busy, busy, busy. We shall see how successful I am at making everything work. Catch you on the flip side, friends!

Current Mood: productive

Oops. In my defense, I was sleeping after my night shift. I've been out for over 20 years now, which feels wild to me. How has it been that long?

Coming out these days seems more fraught than ever, which breaks my heart. We went through a honeymoon period for a while there, where it was becoming safer for 2SLGBTQIA+ people to be open about who they are and have the same shot at happiness and safety as cishet people, but that's been increasingly less true for the past ten years or so. I'm hoping (although I'm not super optimistic) that this is just a brief hiccup and that people will start coming back to their senses before the end of the decade. Right now the flavour of the day appears to be transphobia, but as others have pointed out, our trans siblings are the canary in the coal mine: they are being targeted first, but we're all kidding ourselves if we think that the rest of us won't be next.

Once my weight has stabilized a bit after my surgery, I am planning to get myself one of these t-shirts:https://steviesafespaces.com/product/you-will-have-to-go-through-me-tee. It was made famous by David Tennant, and is actually made by a queer creator who lives in my province! I am very excited about this.

I've only been buying the bare minimum of clothing for a few years now, and I don't plan on changing that a lot, but I am likely to need a lot of new clothes by this time next year. I'm going to mostly stick with my work "uniform" of black pants and a solid-coloured polo shirt, but I think I may invest in some fun t-shirts to wear when I'm not at work. I seem to recall that, when I've lost weight in the past, I've gotten cold more easily, so I want to pick up some flannel shirts to wear as a second layer, too, which is something I've always wanted to do. I've resisted it up until now because I've never felt comfortable wearing more than one layer of clothing at a time due to body image issues. Wearing layers has always made me feel bulky and awkward, but I'm cautiously optimistic that I will be able to get over that hang-up so that I can embrace a bit more of a butch look. I won't be able to replace my entire wardrobe in one fell swoop, but I am looking forward to a bit of a reset in that department. Once I'm confident I won't need my larger sized clothing anymore, I will donate the stuff that's still wearable and cut up the rest for rags.

Anyway, enough about clothes. It's not my usual thing, but occasionally I like to think about what I wear. ;)

I am just past the halfway mark of this night shift, and after that I have only one 12-hour shift before my time off work officially starts. I am officially Extremely Tired(TM) and cannot wait for this week of night shifts to be over. I've had stuff to do every single day this week that cut into my sleeping time, and the weekend has unfortunately proved to be no exception. I am really looking forward to sleeping as much as I want to on Monday. It's Thanksgiving Day here in Canada, so all the stores will be closed and no tradesperson in their right mind would schedule anything that day. Whenever I get up I will make a batch or two of soup to freeze in anticipation of my surgery. Tuesday the plan is to make even more soup, and all that should carry me through to the end of October.

For now, I just have to survive until the end of this shift. I will, of course, but it's going to suck.

Current Mood: tired

I've been on a "liver-shrinking" diet since October 1st, which consists of meal replacement shakes, better-known in our household as "Sadness Shakes." I'm also allowed roughly the equivalent of two cups of raw green veggies a day (I've stuck to celery, broccoli, and green peppers) as well as clear liquids (water and broth, basically). It's fine, but I miss real food, so I've been coping by planning this year's Christmas menu.

I'm actually working over Christmas this year, so I will be resurrecting the UnChristmas tradition of yore. This will also be our first Christmas post-bariatric surgery for both me and KK, so I am trying to plan dishes that I can portion out quite small and/or that will keep well if I freeze them afterward. Last year I made a roast goose which was reasonably successful, so I'm going to do that again this year. With more room to work in the kitchen and the experience from last year, I'm hoping to improve on last year's performance.

So far this year's menu looks like this:

Amuse-bouches: asparagus mousse, truffle bacon and eggs, and parmesan lollipops
Entrée: creamy roasted red pepper soup
Main course: roast goose, wild rice, and lemon pepper buttery green beans
Salad: beet salad with goat cheese
Cheese: TBD, but it will be 3-4 cheeses
Dessert: Ile Flottante (it's my mother's favourite and doesn't look too difficult to make)

I also have to plan for the next couple of weeks after surgery, when I'll be on a mostly liquid and soft food diet, so on Monday I'm going to make some soup ahead of time and freeze it using my new Souper Cubes, which are silicon moulds that come in 1/2 and 1 cup sizes (also 2 cups, but I didn't bother getting those because both KK and I require quite small portions now. The cubes so far have been a game changer for food prep, almost as much as switching to a vacuum sealer instead of Ziplock bags (no more freezer burn!). Eventually I want to move away from the freezer as my main form of food preservation, but for the moment it's all been a godsend.

Depending on how much time I have on Monday and Tuesday, I'm planning on making split pea soup, squash soup, lentil soup, and maybe a potato-leek soup (I always call it Vichyssoise, but I think it only counts as Vichyssoise if it's cold). That should keep me in soup for a very long time, because KK doesn't eat most of those soups--the only one she likes is the potato-leek soup.

I originally toyed with the idea of doing something with quail for Christmas, but I'm holding off until I know for sure my current little flock is sustainable. I lost my last original female last night, which has made me very sad. She and her husband have a terrible habit of throwing their water around their enclosure, and last night the temperature plummeted to just below freezing, so I think she got wet and couldn't regulate her body temperature properly. I'm going to switch out their watering setup to see if I can convince the silly birds not to play water park with their drinking water and accidentally off themselves in the process.

All righty. Work is picking up, so I'm going to leave it there for now. Catch you on the flip side, friends!

Current Mood: busy

Tomorrow morning I have my appointment with the sleep specialist. I cannot emphasize enough how excited I am about this! The appointment is at 8:15 and they want me to arrive half an hour early, so I'll be leaving around 7:00 just to be on the safe side. I don't know what the traffic is like going there at that hour, and I don't want to be late. I hope that I'll be leaving with a prescription for a CPAP in hand, and it's my intention to get an appointment with a local provider I found ASAP. In fact, the plan is to call the minute I get out of the appointment and see how quickly I can get an appointment.

Have I mentioned that I am TIRED of constantly feeling like warmed-over crap?

Anyway, I am very excited about the appointment tomorrow. I hope it goes well. If it doesn't, I may very well cry. I wonder if I can get a same-day appointment. That would be ideal, but I'm not going to get my hopes up too high for that. I do hope I can get an appointment this week, though, and that they can accommodate a later time since I don't have a ton of time available to take off work. We shall see, I guess.

In unrelated news, the quail are still doing well. I changed out their food and water this morning, and once I'd closed the door behind me I heard some very loud and indignant tweedling. I initially shrugged it off, but the tweedling repeated as I went up the stairs, so I went back to investigate. I checked the quail's bin, and as I was puzzling over it I heard more loud and indignant tweedling and realized that one of the boys had managed to get out of the enclosure and was standing under the sink, making his displeasure known. I think he was mostly mad about being separated from his friends and girlfriends, or maybe he thought they'd make a break for freedom with him. Either way, I scooped him up and put him back, and he immediately settled down.

I now have four eggs! It's very exciting. I don't know which of the females is being such a good layer, but I am certainly not complaining. It might not be just one, either, but I have a completely unsubstantiated feeling that all the eggs are from one bird. I hope the other two get in on the action soon. Three small eggs a day is the equivalent of one normal chicken egg per day, which means a total of about five to seven eggs a week, if all the ladies lay regularly. I'm kind of excited for my first quail egg dish. I don't know if I should make a really simple omelette or if I should look up a recipe specific for quail eggs. I am tempted to at least do some research on that front. Quail eggs are considered a delicacy by many, after all.

I had my weekly Sunday Skype call with my parents. I tried to get them onto Zoom since Skype is disappearing in three weeks, but my mother especially is attached to Skype, so we're sticking with that to the bitter end, apparently. My mother is anxious about my move, and as usual her anxiety is translating into her getting super passive-aggressive and slightly nasty with me. This is not a trait I particularly enjoy, because among other things she tends to talk to me as though I am a developmentally disabled child who's playing with missile launchers. It particularly annoys me when she condescendingly explains to me that I will need to make a budget, and then tries to explain home maintenance to me while not knowing the difference between a septic holding tank, a propane tank, and a sump pump (literally the conversation we had today, no exaggeration).

Anyway, I have been dealing with my mother for 46 years now, and because I am an adult with good communication tools now and enough empathy to understand that it's my mother's rampant undiagnosed anxiety disorder causing her to act this way, I gently called her out on her behaviour and eventually redirected her energy to something more positive. She initially denied that she was being nasty, but eventually kind of grudgingly semi-admitted to it. The rest of the Skype call went much more smoothly after that, and she was in a much better mood by the time we ended the call.

I made a pseudo-roast chicken in the Instant Pot for dinner, and now I have leftovers for the week to go with my borscht, as well as rice, and a package of spicy lentil something-or-other that my friend Sarah gave to me last weekend. She's allergic to dairy and accidentally bough the packet even though it contains both butter and cream. Since it's spicy and has tomatoes KK won't touch it with a ten-foot pole, so that means I get to have it for lunch, which sounds delightful. KK tolerates lentils but only up to a point, so adding spice and tomatoes is literally a recipe for disaster.

I definitely need to step up my packing game this week. I've been feeling overwhelmed about things, so I think I will start in my bedroom instead of the living room, because it will (I HOPE, DEAR GOD) be easier to make decisions about de-cluttering and the like. I plan on significantly downsizing my wardrobe, which I've been meaning to do for a while anyway. I have a dresser and a night table that I need to empty, as well as my small library of reference books. I also need to get rid of my terrible broken air conditioning unit anyway, which should free up a fair bit of space for staging my boxes. I should probably consider paring down some of my linens, too. I need to let go of some of my prepper tendencies here and embrace some minimalism where it comes to my immediate possessions.

Okay. Time to get to bed so I won't accidentally oversleep tomorrow and miss my sleep appointment. Catch you on the flip side, friends!

Current Mood: optimistic

The quail laid their first egg today. I am very excited! The first egg is always the most exciting. I expected the quail to need at least two weeks to de-stress and feel comfortable enough to lay, but here we are, four days later, with our first egg! Quail eggs are so pretty, I love the speckling. I will put it carefully in an egg carton and wait for more eggs to appear now (it might take a while). It's about three quail eggs to make the equivalent of one chicken egg, so it's going to take a minute for me to have enough eggs to do anything meaningful. Once we've moved I'm going to buy an incubator and hopefully hatch out more quail, and I may look around for local suppliers to get different genetic material into the breeding pool, just to be on the safe side.

I am going to have to be careful about how much money I spend on the chicken math. ;) This move is going to be incredibly expensive (dear God, the lawyer's fees and land transfer tax ALONE make me want to weep), not to mention I need to get some furniture and equipment to maintain the property. I bought some packing supplies today, and of course things have gone up in price thanks to recent economic shenanigans. I remember when I bought my house in 2011 that it felt like I was hemorrhaging money the first 12 to 18 months of owning that house, and I suspect this will be no different, and probably worse, given how much more property there is and how much more there is to do. *sigh* Being an adult is HARD.

I spent most of today being useless with a migraine, which checks out. I don't get migraines often anymore, but they've always had a tendency to hit hardest right after a period of stress, once I've let my guard down. Once I was sufficiently recovered I pulled the beets out of the vegetable crisper and made borscht. The recipe makes a truly industrial quantity of the stuff, which is too bad because KK won't touch it with a 10-foot pole, and that means I am going to be eating borscht for the next week. XD I'm not too mad about it, but it would make life so much simpler if KK ate more "peasant" foods, not to mention how much cheaper it would be to feed the two of us. I'm hoping

All righty. It's time to take myself to bed. Catch you on the flip side, friends!

Current Mood: pleased

I am nearly done. Creeping up on halfway through tonight’s night shift (and by the time I finish this post it may be past that time, depending on how often I get interrupted for work).

I had a semi-productive day. KK asked me Friday night to help her move furniture when I got home so that we could launch the Roomba in the living room. Now, moving furniture after a night shift is not my first choice, but if KK is in the mood for cleaning, I am the last person to say no. So, when I got home, I cleared out the entire living room (except for the ottoman, because it’s big enough that it would block off too much of the downstairs before KK could come down with the dogs) and gave the floor a preliminary sweep. The Roomba is great, but it cannot compete with the dust capybaras in our house (they are too big to qualify as dust bunnies) since we hadn’t let it do its thing in a couple of weeks. I’m thinking of naming it Pete (the king of the rumba beat!), but I’m not fully sold on that name yet.

I also invested in a body pillow in the hopes that it will help with the eventual CPAP (I’m a side sleeper and I am a little concerned about the mask not fitting right) and also with the lower back pain that insists on coming and going. If I want to get my community garden plot set up right and not wreck my back the way I did last year, I’m going to have to be extra careful about managing it. I should look up my old physio exercises and start doing those again (blech), and maybe I’ll even set up some appointments to get a jump on this. Last year I hurt my back so badly that I was out of commission for weeks, and the entire garden plot went to hell in a handbasket. This year I would like it to be different. Anyway, the body pillow is less amazing than I was hoping for, but it might just need some extra getting used to.

In other news, my real estate agent has sent us a listing that checks off some of our boxes. It doesn’t have much land, and the neighbours are very close, but the house itself looks like it could fit us, it has some nice looking out buildings and is at a pretty reasonable distance from Ottawa. It would require some downsizing, for sure, but I think it could be workable. I’ll know for sure once we’ve had a chance to see it, which will be on Monday after KK is done with work. Originally, we were going to go tomorrow, but there’s an actual ice storm predicted for tomorrow, so the real estate agent rescheduled us for Monday.

I’m a little concerned about the ice storm, actually. There have been multiple severe weather alerts about it. For one, I am not thrilled at the idea of having to drive to and from work in that kind of weather. For another, I don’t currently have gas for the generator in the garage. I had gas stored but the ADHD struck and I kind of forgot about it, so now it’s too old to use safely. It would just gunk up the mechanism. So, if the power does go out I’ll need to buy a new container from Canadian Tire and fill it up that way, and I’m a little concerned that most of the people around here will be thinking along the same lines. For all my attempts at preparedness, I am apparently kind of unprepared for this current storm.

*sigh*

I need to get back into the swing of things, preparedness-wise. I have to fill the water containers in the basement and acquire more containers. My original plan was to have at least two weeks’ worth of emergency supplies: food, water, and basic energy. In terms of water storage, the rule of thumb is to have four litres of water per person per day, and then of course you have to take into account the pets. I had to do some math because the amount of water per day per pets is done in ounces per pound of body weight and came up with a total of three litres of water for all of the mammals in the house. The frogs also need distilled water, but we actually have a fair bit of that already stored up for them, and they go through less than a litre a week, so I’m not too worried about their water needs. So basically, we need a minimum of 11 litres of water per day, which is a little over half of each container that I’ve bought. I currently have four containers, so that would mean we’d have enough potable water for seven days, eight if we ration a little bit. In order to have at least two weeks’ worth of potable water I need three to four more containers, which is totally doable, albeit on the expensive side. Ideally, I would have enough water to last even longer than that, but two weeks’ worth seems like a good start.

The other thing I’ve been slacking on is figuring out shelf-stable emergency food supplies. The thing about stocking up on food is that you have to make sure that you will actually be able to eat whatever you’re stocking up on. As an example, I bought some canned chicken a while back, and it turns out the texture is super disgusting. This is what makes me laugh about the supposedly “hardcore” preppers: here they are buying 20 kilos of dried beans or nuts with no thought as to whether they or their family even LIKE beans or know how to cook them in a way that won’t make them want to slit their wrists after a week or two of eating the same thing over and over. Like, sure, you can stuff your bomb shelter full of canned beans and MREs, but then that’s all you’re going to be eating forever. Often enough these people also don’t know that they should be rotating through their food supply.

There’s also the question of how to cook it if you have no electricity. Back when I had a gas stove (God, I miss living in my old house, even if the landlady was crazy) this wasn’t an issue, but my current stove is electric. I did acquire a thermos shuttle chef a couple of years ago, so I should definitely practice making food in it so that I’m not caught off-guard when the power goes off. It’s actually pretty clever as a concept: you put food in it, bring it to a boil over a heat source, then place it in a larger “sleeve” for several hours, and it cooks the food over that time without using extra energy. It’s mostly good for things like stews, especially ones that incorporate a starch, like rice or noodles. KK isn’t a hue fan of stews due to the varying texture of the contents, but she can tolerate them reasonably well, and I know that in an emergency when we have no electricity, she’d be okay with that as a form of nourishment, which is encouraging.

I still have a lot of concerns about how to shelter in place if there’s a long-term power outage or a larger emergency that’s also accompanied by a power outage. My main concern is the dart frogs. They require controlled temperatures (between 18 and 25 degrees Celsius) and are pretty delicate, so anything outside those temperatures can kill them. They’re also pretty hard to transport, so if we have to evacuate, I will be facing a similar problem. At least at home I can keep them in their vivarium, but in the winter they could easily freeze and in the summer they could just as easily boil to death when the temperatures reach extremes.

I do need to invest in a few more shelf-stable food items, particularly peanut butter and maybe crackers or melba toast or something. Bread isn’t shelf-stable, but I can probably get away with making a flatbread of some kind if I have a heat source for cooking. I probably wouldn’t have enough heat to bake a loaf of bread, but I can at least generate enough to make flatbread. I tried making tortillas a couple of years ago and they didn’t turn out especially well, but I could definitely practice that skill. I’ve been meaning to practice more skills on a regular basis, but the no-longer-mystery tired has been keeping me in a vicious cycle of doing the bare minimum, collapsing from exhaustion while everything piles up, then trying to do more, exhausting myself more, and then being exhausted while watching everything pile up even more. Meow. Anyway, I am cautiously hopeful that if the CPAP works, I will finally be able to catch up on all the stuff I have been letting get out of hand all around me without constantly feeling like I want to crawl into bed for the next thousand years.

All right. Time to wrap up my musings and dive back into the books I brought with me. I got interrupted a fair bit on this post, so now I am pas the halfway mark of this shift. Four hours and forty-five minutes left until I’m done for the day. I am really looking forward to this week being over. For one, I’d really like to get some sleep, and for two, I am excited about the professional organizer coming over to fix my kitchen! Anyway, I shall now dive into The Care Manifesto until either more work comes in or it’s time to go home. If I finish it I still have two other books, including a new Mediterranean Diet air fryer cookbook which I hope will provide some inspiration.

Catch you on the flip side, friends!

Current Mood: busy

I got up at a reasonable hour two days in a row on the weekend, and I still feel as though everything went by in a total flash. It's been a productive weekend, no doubt, but still, where the hell did all my time go?

I got a load of laundry done for work, and fulfilled my duties as Greeter for Meeting. Then there was just enough time to run upstairs, grab some food, and then KK and I went off on our field trip to visit the cool house that used to be a bank. The house had been staged to highlight its historical past, with cool photographs of the old bank as well as the family who lived there once it was converted to a residence. There was a family bible, and lots of old Royal Canadian Mint coins from various decades set up in various displays.

It was definitely not the right kind of house for us, even if we had been interested. The basement was all but inaccessible thanks to some steep, crooked, and narrow stairs, although it was in good condition once you got down there. Getting down there was an exercise in not dying of a broken neck, however. The stairs going up were also extremely steep and narrow but were at least straight. The upstairs was lovely and bright, with most of the original flooring except for the master bedroom. There was a hole in the floor which was rather alarming, and the whole place needed a lot of cosmetic repair at the very least, which would have to be done in such a way as to preserve the historical nature of the home because I think it's been declared part of Canadian heritage, or something along those lines.

We left after about 15 minutes, and I got cornered in the doorway by a family with three kids (one baby, and two little girls around the age of six or seven, maybe eight at the utmost). They didn't intend to trap me, but small children tend to mill about a fair bit, and these were no exception. Their grandmother (I think?) was trying to get them to remove their shoes, and the littlest one was not at all keen on it because there was so much melting snow. She stood on her tiptoes, then looked me square in the face and asked: "Will you hold my hand?" So I did, and she was able to navigate past the puddles successfully. It was very cute. Luckily we keep hand sanitizer in the car, because even though I love kids, they are walking germ factories at that age, and I was not keep on bringing home more illness than strictly necessary.

I made lasagna when we got home and shoved it in the oven before Skyping with my parents. I just learned today that Skype is being discontinued completely after May 5th, which means I have to teach my 88 year old mother how to use a different video platform after using Skype to talk to each other for the past 11 years. *sobs quietly* Luckily I'm heading over there on Saturday for a visit, since it's her birthday on Tuesday (she will be turning 88 then), so I plan to set her up with a Zoom account and we will go from there. Hopefully it won't be too complicated for her to use. My father already uses Zoom with some of his university colleagues, so he's familiar with the platform.

I don't have any full work from home days this week, which is making things a little difficult with regards to medicating the chihuahua. KK is trying to figure out if she can manage some half days, and I have two half-days working from home but only in the mornings, which doesn't help us much, since meds typically have to be administered in the early afternoon. I'm sure we'll work it out, but it's a bit of a pain. It would be so much easier if Rika wasn't semi-feral and hated everyone except KK. She'll tolerate me giving her meds, but if she tolerated other people a bit more we could put her in daycare and just pay a bit of extra money on the days when KK has to be at work. Unfortunately she's a feral, vicious little beastie who won't let anyone near her, so we're kind of stuck for the moment.

On that note, it's time for bed. Good night, friends!

Current Mood: content

I love dinner parties, but good Lord, they are so much work! They'd probably be less work if my house wasn't an absolute disaster that looks like several tornadoes and a tsunami went through it.

KK and I had a really productive day, though. I got up early and got started on the roasted red pepper soup, then left KK napping on the sofa in order to take Peggy to the vet. The great news is that the vet says Peggy's bum has improved a lot since her last visit! The Gland-X finally appears to be taking effect, which is a relief for all of us. Having to take her to get her anal glands expressed every month is expensive for me and painful for her. So yay for Peggy doing better!

Next up on the list was advanced voting. I expected it to be a little bit of a hassle because I didn't get my voter registration card in the mail, but it turned out to be super easy. I only needed one piece of photo ID and to just sign a form with my name on it for their records, and that was it. I asked about the voter registration cards, and the very nice lady from Elections Ontario gave me the most long-suffering look and said "Yeah... this was a little rushed." Say less, dear Elections Ontario person, say less. Anyway, I have now cast my vote for the candidate I find least objectionable and the likeliest to perhaps win against either the Liberals or the Conservatives. I keep holding out hope that one day people will realize that they can vote for third parties outside the binary that has dominated our politics since forever, and maybe THEN we can finally change things up around here. I'm not holding out a TON of hope, but I am holding out some.

From the polling station we went to M&M Meats where I wanted to get some crème brûlée for dessert, only to discover that they've discontinued it completely, which is extremely sad. So we went to Délice Royale and picked up four pastries instead, and KK was kind enough to stop at the library so I could drop off a book that was due today.

The afternoon was a blur of cooking on my end and cleaning for both of us. KK put in a heroic effort and not only vacuumed the entire downstairs, she cleared the furniture out of the living room and programmed the new Roomba. It mapped the room, then vacuumed a couple of times, and then we set it to mop the floor. It did a very serviceable job, too. The tentative plan is to run it 2 to 3 times a week now to stay better on top of the cleaning. It's a bit of a hassle to move the furniture, but really it's just some chairs and the ottoman, so it's not too terrible. I cleaned the powder room just in case the guests needed it, and then we were off to the races! The dogs were DEEPLY unimpressed with the Roomba and spent the entire time chasing it, barking at it, and running away from it. It was very funny to watch them go. XD

The guests in question were my old boss and his boyfriend. They've been officially together for about a year, but I hadn't met the boyfriend yet, so I was pretty excited to get to know him. He is a delight, as it happens, and I think the dinner was a resounding success! The only thing I need to work on is my homemade mayonnaise--it was WAY too acidic, so clearly the recipe I used needs a fair bit of tweaking to make it taste better. We had a really good time chatting about their recent travels, catching up on what's going on at the RCMP (my old boss still works there but in a different department), and regaling the boyfriend about past work shenanigans. We went through a bottle of white wine, the guests made very appreciative noises about the food, and the evening wound down nicely over decaf coffee and pastries.

So, yes. I am calling it a resounding success, and I hope that I'll be able to have them over for dinner regularly.

And now it's time for me to go to bed. I handled the announcements for Quaker Meeting a little earlier, and tomorrow I've committed to First Day School at the Meeting House in the nursery room. I didn't think I was signing up for the nursery room, which is definitely not my preference, but needs must, I guess, and at least it precludes me having to come up with a curriculum, since the nursery room is mostly designed for free play.

I need to put gas in the car and also get to Meeting super early because with all the snow we've had I'm sure the parking situation is absolutely atrocious, so the earlier I get there the better. Meeting starts at 10:30, but I think I will try to aim to get there by 9:30, which means leaving around 9:00 or even a bit earlier to factor in the time at the gas pump.

All righty. Bedtime. Good night, folks!

Current Mood: chipper

I spent a very large chunk of today cleaning in anticipation of tomorrow's dinner guests, and I am (alas) not done yet. On the plus side, doing all of what I did today means there will be that much less to do tomorrow, which is shaping up to be a really busy day.

The professional organizer came by at 3pm, and I walked her through my "no place for anything and nothing in its place" house, and she didn't run screaming for the hills, which was nice. She's away for the month of March but I'm working all through then anyway, so it works out. She's back the first week of April, and I have booked a few sessions with her in that week to tackle the kitchen first. Hopefully I won't run out of money so that we can start on the garage and basement afterward. Fingers crossed!

The tentative plan for tomorrow is to get up (first step in any plan, really!), then clean the downstairs powder room and get started on the roasted red pepper soup so that it will just need to be reheated in the evening and I won't be scrambling trying to get everything cooked at the same time. Then I will prep the chicken (it requires several hours of marinating) and by then it will be time for errands. I have a vet appointment for Peggy at 9:45, and after that KK and I are planning to go vote early in our provincial election.

Incidentally, I am super annoyed at our government for A) calling this election at all, because it's a cheap political move and an obvious power grab, and B) for not sending my voter registration card in time for early voting for the first time in my 46 years on this planet. I don't think it's a conspiracy or anything, just the Ford government being its usual corrupt and inept self. ARGH. Luckily I can just go with two pieces of ID and it will be fine. The more I hear about voter suppression in the USA, the more grateful I am that Canada isn't nearly as bad in that regard. We are not perfect by any stretch, but we're also nowhere near in the same league.

With any luck advance voting will go quickly (it usually does, because there aren't huge queues as a rule), because after that we have three stops: one to pick up dessert, one to pick up a bottle of wine to go with dinner, and one last one at Canadian Tire so KK can buy some butane for her new butane torch. I am a little worried about using it for the first time right when we're having guests, but whatever. YOLO, as the youths say. Actually, I think the youths are no longer saying YOLO, that was a previous set of youths. I think the current youths would say something like DIFTP ("Do It For The Plot"), which is pretty hilarious. As a former writer, I approve.

When we get home I need to vacuum the living room, and then I plan to unleash KK on the living room with our new Roomba. It's not set up to do a deep-clean, which is why we have to vacuum first, but after that it should be able to do a second vacuuming pass and hopefully a couple of mopping passes before the guests arrive, thus sparing me from having to do it so that I can focus on cooking and setting the table.

If all goes well, I should have everything prepped and ready by the time the guests get here and not be *too* frazzled. That is the dream.

Speaking of dreams, it's time for bed. Good night!

Current Mood: calm

Another short entry, because I am still tired and all I want to do is go to bed. However, I am determined not to break my streak of posting every day, even if it's just a short and mostly symbolic post. It's not even the end of February, so it seems like it's way too early to give up on this particular goal, right?

Anyway, today wasn't much to write home about. KK and I attended the second part of the retirement course. The morning was all about maintaining your health after retirement, and it was the usual slightly gas-lighty, victim-blamey stuff you hear from people these days: most of your health is within your control if you engage in these specific behaviours! I'm not saying we should abdicate all responsibility for our health, but I swear to God, if ONE MORE PERSON suggests I try mindfulness, I will not be held responsible for my actions! Blah blah blah, exercise more and eat your vegetables, and 40% of cancer is preventable if you make good choices (that last one made my blood boil).

The afternoon was much better. Far less rage-inducing. We covered estate planning and what you need to write a will and some of the trickier legal things about financial and medical powers of attorney. Some of the stuff I already knew, but there was a lot I didn't know or realized I hadn't fully understood, so I was quite pleased with that. Sometime in the next couple of months I need to scrape together some money, hire an attorney, and have a proper will drawn up so that if I get hit by a bus, someone will be able to take care of my dogs. KK loves the dogs but she's physically not up to the task of caring for them, and has admitted as much, so another home will need to be found for them, one which can accommodate two high-energy hooligans. I wouldn't want them to be separated, especially for Pixie's sake: she's never known a life without her pack, and losing me, KK (whom she adores) and Rika and also Peggy would be scary and confusing and stressful for her. Peggy would also be stressed, but she at least has known life as an only dog, so she might be more resilient, but Pixie is a stage five clinger. With any luck, we will never need to find out.

Tomorrow I need to crisis clean all of downstairs because we're having guests on Saturday and I don't want to spend all of Saturday cleaning, especially since I need to cook dinner. It's funny because the professional organizer is coming at 15:00 and normally I'd want to leave all of the clutter and nonsense where it is so she can see the disaster she's getting herself into, but guests on Saturday absolutely trumps that. I might take some before and after pictures for her benefit. I'm fully expecting her to flee for the hills, but we shall see. The very good news is that she is perfecty happy to wear a mask while she's here, which is awesome. I appreciate people who are willing to do that these days, otherwise I wouldn't be working with her at all.

I have some semi-elaborate plans for dinner on Saturday. I am making green onion bread rolls as an entrée along with roast red pepper soup, then as a main course I have sesame chicken with curry rice and roasted asparagus planned, then a salad (Caesar salad because it's the only one KK will eat), and for dessert I plan to pick up something from a local patisserie, because the cooking alone is going to take quite a long time and dessert is not at all my forte. I hope it all turns out good!

On that note, it is time for bed. I have a big day ahead of me tomorrow.

Current Mood: hopeful

There are not enough hours in the day these days.

It turns out that the house I put in an offer on went for $70,000 over asking price with no conditions. *lies on the floor* There is no way I can compete with that. The friend-shaped house from last week went for $30,000 over asking, but with conditions, at least.

The real estate market is back to losing its mind, I guess. It was nice to have a period of time during which I didn't have to deal with bidding wars, but I guess that time has come and gone, thanks to slightly reduced interest rates. Don't get me wrong, the interest rates are nowhere near as low as they were in 2019-2020, but they're lower than the craziness we had in 2023-2024.

Anyway, the search continues. I may hit pause for a while to let my soul recover a bit and also to amass a bit more money for things like inspections (if I ever get that far again) and deposits and eventually closing costs and whatnot.

Today was super uneventful. I got to bed at about 2am and then had to be up less than four hours later to go get blood drawn, because the DynaCare blood services opens at 7am and there is usually a huge wait if you don't get there ahead of time. I arrived at 7am on the nose and there were already eight people ahead of me. Luckily DynaCare is very efficient, and even though the tech who drew my blood seemed a little confused (he tried to call me from the waiting room when I was already in a cubicle, then came in with someone else's paperwork because mine was already in the cubicle with me), I was in and out within half an hour. I did keep a close eye on him to make sure he labelled my samples correctly, just because he seemed so confused initially.

I had intended to get other things done today, but getting less than four hours of sleep and working an overtime shift last night meant that I desperately needed to get more sleep today, so a chunk of my day went to napping. I can't bring myself to regret it, because my eyes were burning when I got home, and by the time I got up I was feeling more than halfway human again.

I was also planning to make borscht today, but I didn't have a couple of key ingredients, so the borscht is now on hold until I can get those. I did try a new roasted balsamic turnip recipe, which I really liked, and made a very adulterated version of African Peanut Soup for dinner, which unfortunately KK found too spicy, probably because I used a new garlic/ginger/chili paste since the one I was using doesn't appear to exist anymore. So, note to self: use slightly less next time.

Tonight is D&D night! It has been a minute since I was able to play with this group, so I am excited to get back into the swing of things!

Current Mood: calm

So last year, right around this time, I stopped watching Critical Role. It wasn't a conscious decision, it was more that I was kind of busy with various things, and Critical Role is a hefty weekly time commitment (anywhere from four to six hours per episode), and I got a little behind, and then a lot behind, and then it just seemed like a lot of work to catch up.

I was reminded of its existence on Thursday, because that was apparently the Campaign 3 finale, and that kind of motivated me to start watching again. Thanks to their revised schedule of only airing three weeks per month and reserving the fourth week for a game that's unrelated to the main campaign, I don't have as many episodes to catch up on as I feared I might--"only" about 30 or so. So I've decided to go with roughly one episode a day whenever I have a chunk of time. I tend to listen to the episodes like a podcast rather than watch them, because I know the actors' voices well enough to be able to differentiate them. I do miss a lot of visual cues and moments that are much better when watched, but I don't mind too much. Whenever I know that I've missed something I tend to go back and re-watch just then.

Anyway, I blithely started watching Episode 89, and then 90, in which the party are on the moon called Ruidus, racing against time to save their world. It's an extremely tense arc, and so by the time Saturday rolled around I was more than ready for Episode 91 because it felt narratively like things were coming to the climax of the arc. Then, <details><summary>Click for spoilers!</summary><p>Fucking Sam Riegel broke my heart AGAIN because FCG sacrificed himself in a blaze of glory to save all of his friends from a TPK. I was at work, on a night shift, trying very hard not to cry in front of my coworkers, and everything was terrible</p></details>.

I JUST HAVE A LOT OF FEELINGS ABOUT D&D.

I'm a little annoyed that watching or listening to Critical Role is incompatible with my goal of reading more books this year. Obviously I can't listen to it and an audiobook simultaneously, and reading a book physically also isn't possible, for very similar reasons. So I'm just going to have to listen to it while I'm doing chores or knitting or something. It's fine. Hopefully this will provide me with enough motivation to actually get some cleaning done this week while I'm off work after my night shifts. If I play my cards right I can probably manage two episodes a day for the entire week. It's probably not great for my brain, but it's been a minute since I binged a show I really enjoyed, so that's something to look forward to.

In two weeks I've invited a couple of friends over for dinner. It's my old manager from the RCMP and his new boyfriend. He divorced his wife of something like 30 years back in 2021 (and good riddance, because she was an abusive, narcissistic bitch), and went to therapy, and finally allowed all the feelings he'd been suppressing all his life to come to the surface. I was the first person outside his family that he came out to, and I may or may not have barfed rainbows all over him when he did. ;) It's good to see him happy after all this time.

Having guests is always a good motivator to get the house clean, and also to try to come up with some fun recipes to try out. I haven't decided what to make yet, but I'd like to try my hand at some sort of fancy appetizer, at least. Maybe I'll try a Beef Wellington. That would be something, if I could pull it off! I'll have to poke around the internet and see what I can find as inspiration.

Okay, I think that's it for now. I may put in a grocery order to pick up for this week and just get that out of the way. I still have five hours left on this shift, and although I don't want to jinx myself, it's going by excruciatingly slowly.

Current Mood: awake

I used to joke about starting an asphalt company called Good Intentions, and at the rate I'm going, I will have paved a superhighway to hell by the time my life is done.

Today wasn't a total loss or anything. I did manage to crowbar myself out of bed much later than I'd intended, and then levered myself out the door to go to Costco. There are several in town, and the closest one to me is a Costco Business Centre, which has the advantage of selling grated Parmesan in bulk (not real Parmesan, but good enough for the kind of cooking I like to do). My regular Costco has also been out of paper towels for a couple of months now, or at least they've been out each time I've gone. So I was able to pick up a bunch of stuff I can't get at the regular Costco, but at the expense of not being able to find another handful of items I needed, so I'll have to go on a separate trip for those.

My original intention had been to go to both Costcos and the grocery store, then come home, put all the meat in the fridge, and then go to the basement to get my seeds started. In order to keep myself sort of honest, I scheduled a 2pm Google Hangout with some local people with whom I've recently started forging ties. We're all members of a Facebook group that's run by Sharon Astyk, whom I think I've mentioned in a previous post. That group is over 1,000 people strong, but I wanted to seek out the members local to me who were interested in forming a more practical mutual aid group, and since then we've connected over the Signal app (just in case social media becomes too unreliable or starts selling our information even more than it already is).

Anyway, I underestimated the amount of time it would take me to get through Costco on a Saturday, so my second trip and the grocery store trip both had to get cancelled in the interest of getting to my Google Hangout on time. I also didn't quite gauge how the Google Hangout would go ahead of time. We had a really interesting time, with a good but small group of people. Not everyone was able to make it, but three friends were there whom I've known for several years, and two other people who were new to me (in person, I knew their names from online). We talked politics, mostly Canadian but also what was going on in the US, and provided a Canadian Politics 101 explainer to a new friend who has just moved here from the US (they had previously lived briefly in Nova Scotia, but were mostly unaware of all the ramifications of politics outside that province). We also talked farming and mutual aid, and what values we wanted to uphold in our little group, and Covid precautions. It was a really good first meeting, and I'm looking forward to having more in the future--I just need to keep my ducks more or less in a row.

I didn't get my seeds started, but I did start two mushroom cultures (a pink oyster culture and a lion's mane culture), and I pulled out my grow lights and cleared off the shelves in anticipation of being able to start at least some seedlings tomorrow. I need to get to bed pretty soon (it's 10pm now, so 11pm is probably the earliest I'll be able to manage), and my hope is to get up early enough to get to Costco and maybe even the grocery store before Quaker Meeting tomorrow. It'll be really tight, because Costco doesn't open until 9am, and Quaker Meeting is at 10:30am, so I have no idea if I'll be able to get it all done in time. Maybe I'll try ordering the groceries either for delivery or for pick-up tomorrow instead of going shopping, and see if that saves a bit of time. I'm also contemplating putting off the second Costco trip to Monday, when I will have all day before my night shift to get that done.

I bought extra meat and eggs today, and I'll be buying some extra pork chops tomorrow (unless I go Monday). I expect some prices will be skyrocketing once the new tariffs are in place. We're going to have to get used to doing more with less, I think, so I'm stocking up a little now and will be working on stretching our food more than I have been. I also need to get into the habit of making bread at home more often. I am actually bad at baking bread, but I have a bread machine, and that makes things considerably easier.

Once the groceries are dealt with, I need to vacuum pack all the meat into portions so I can freeze it (much easier than freezing all of it all at once), and make a bunch of shredded chicken to freeze as well, for future use. I've found that the boneless thighs from Costco lend themselves very well to shredded chicken, which I make in my Instant Pot. I must say that my Instant Pot has been one of my better purchases in the past few years. I think I got it in 2022, if memory serves, and I've been using it pretty much weekly ever since then. It's pretty fantastic for making food in a reasonably short amount of time. I also want to make some borscht because I have some beets and cabbage in the fridge that are likely to go bad if I don't use them up ASAP. KK won't eat the borscht (because beets) but I really love it and haven't made it in years, so that's what I've decided.

I also need to wet-block the Hubris Shawl, and if there's time after that I will get some seedlings started. I need to find somewhere to plug in the grow lights, as the outlet expander that KK installed on the current outlet doesn't accommodate the plugs for the grow lights. Luckily (?) KK has an entire Rubbermaid bin full of power adapters and power cords and outlet expanders, so I'm really hoping I'll find something suitable. Otherwise, I'm going to have to move around everything in this basement, which will be an absolute pain in my backside.

Okay, time to head to bed. I can't promise a more interesting update tomorrow, but there will be an update. ;)

Current Mood: cold

I absolutely intended to update my LJ in depth earlier today, and instead I ended up adding a few kilometers of pavement to the road to Hell. Oops!

I spent most of today puttering around. I tidied up part of the kitchen and downstairs in general, and the rest of the time I went through my seed stash and not only organized it, but also put them all in a spreadsheet in my Google docs. It took a lot longer than I thought it would, but now I will have the information to hand no matter where I am, as long as I have access to the internet and to my Google account.

And then of course more seed packets arrived in the mail this evening. The irony was delicious.

KK got me a meat tenderizer attachment for our KitchenAid stand mixer (which I got on sale a couple of years ago) for my birthday, so naturally I took it for a spin this evening. I don't tenderize meat all that often, but I do whenever I make chicken schnitzel, so that's what I made tonight. After a false start because I still have trouble with the mixer (KK uses it a lot more than I do), we got it working, and I must say it was very effective! Not quite as satisfying as beating the meat with a mallet, but definitely more efficient, and the end result was a much more even slab of chicken.

( Read more... )

... and I'm going to call it "Good Intentions."

Okay, not really, but I still enjoy that joke a lot. Anyway, today's good intentions fell by the wayside in favour of a nap. I've been extra tired since I started working shifts again right before Christmas (I wasn't officially back on rotation, but I was asked to cover for other people's absences, so I've been de facto back on shift for about a month now, even before I was officially told I was back on shift), and I don't foresee that changing any time soon. What I will need to change is my response to it. I got used to being less tired, so now that I'm going back to baseline levels of borderline exhaustion, I will have to get used to pushing through it all again. It's getting harder as I get older, but I don't have much of a choice if I want to actually get anything done ever again.

I was also tired because Ben decided 5am was a great time to start screaming at me (he either wanted to be fed or let out of the room or both), and of course that awoke Pixie, which meant that I had to get up in a hurry or else face the Puppy Apocalypse. Pixie, unlike Peggy, is not the type to settle herself back down after a few minutes of crying. She barks and shrieks and howls, and then she thoroughly soils her crate because she's got herself so worked up, and then she thrashes around in her own poop for good measure. So rather than put myself through having to bathe the puppy at the ass-crack of dawn I scrambled out of bed to let her outside, and that meant that I was up for the day at 5am instead of 7am the way I'd planned. *sigh* So, yeah. Tired.

I'm strongly considering getting an Instant Pot, despite my reluctance to add another kitchen gadget to my inventory. The issue is mainly one of space in the kitchen (or lack thereof), but now that I'm cooking almost every day for me and KK due to her dietary preferences (I can't do what I used to do, which is make one big meal or two once a week and subsist on leftovers), I feel that it would save me a lot of time and effort to be able to just chuck things in the Instant Pot and not have to worry too much about dinner every single night.

I got two things done today: dishes, and bringing the dogs to training. I decided today that I'm not going to bring them to hunting training until the spring after this, though. When I went to pick them up, it looked like the trainer hadn't gone in all day, and left them without water for the whole day, which is unacceptable in my books. I think that no matter what he says, he's not really ready to take on clients after his big move last October/November, and so I'm going to give him until the beginning of April to get his shit together before I trust him with my dogs again. Even then, he's kind of on notice. You can't just leave dogs all day with no water, and the reason I'm paying him is not so that my dogs stay locked in a kennel all day--I pay him so they'll get training and exercise. I'm not best pleased.

Tonight I have locked Ben out of my bedroom so I can get a full night's sleep. The plan for tomorrow is to bring all the dogs to daycare (not training), then run a bunch of errands, and then if I have time I want to clean and rearrange my bedroom in the hopes of making more space in it. It's a very large room (17' x 12'), but currently it feels quite cramped as it's got my queen-sized bed, my night table, a small glass coffee table that used to be a side table in the living room that I moved when KK moved in, my dresser, a portable a/c unit (for hot summer nights), a small bookcase, both my CD stands, two large dog crates (one for Peggy, one for Pixie), my computer desk and chair, and two lamps, plus a large cardboard box of linens and a couple of plastic recycling bins stacked up by the foot of the bed because I didn't know where else to put them. The plan is to clear out the linens and the recycling bins, and maybe find a different home for the table and rearrange the lamps so they're less in the way. Then I want to turn my desk so it's facing the bed instead of the door in a bid to make the space feel larger even if it technically takes up the same square footage.

I don't know if I can get it all done, but I will at least try to get some, if not most of it done.

Current Mood: tired

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Page generated Mar. 6th, 2026 06:38 pm

Corner of Bourbon & Division

Her Words of Wisdom Scratched Into The Door

Entries tagged with cooking

January 17th, 2026

January 1th. 2026

January 12th, 2026

January 11th, 2026

January 8th 2026

A bit of a mixed bag

I missed National Coming Out Day

Food Escapism

One more sleep until (perhaps) better sleep!

Egg!

Randomalia

Where did my weekend go?

I love dinner parties

Clean All the Things!

I was tempted to skip today, but here I am

I need time to slow down...

Back to D&D

Paving a Superhighway to Heaven

Paved with good intentions, etc.

I'm going to start an asphalt company...

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March 2026

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