In which IT’S HERE!
Week before last I was surfing Amazon and the reviews for the modern typewriter are pretty terrible. They’re made of cheap parts because to make them of good stuff would make them cost far too much, and nearly every model has a review that says “This is cheap shit, I hate it, just buy a vintage one because they’re much higher quality.”
So I emailed my family to ask if anybody had an old typewriter lying around, and no one did (save an aunt who had an electric that smoked when she plugged it in), so I found one on eBay and I bid on it.
And won.
It seems that old typewriters go for $30 to $800 dollars, and there doesn’t appear to be any fucking rhyme or reason—some are as-is, some are fully checked over by pros and certified working, some are rare, some are common, but regardless of status, somebody online is gonna offer you something for $675 that goes for $55 elsewhere. I assume greed and stupidity, since that’s what drives eBay pricing in general, I think.
Anyway, this thing was listed by a Goodwill in California, and the photos were weird (as in not taken by a typewriter guy) and the description was non-existent. I got it for $40 including shipping, so even if it was a paperweight I could still get that back just by selling the keys and platen.
It arrived today and it’s heavy as hell; I routinely carry 20 pound wheels of cheese around, and this thing is much heavier than that, so maybe 30, 35 pounds? I can’t be bothered to go weigh it on the bathroom scale, but it’s a lot for something you put on your desk.
It’s quite dirty and dusty, is missing a 4 key, and needs some work, but I think I’ll be able to use it after some TLC. Main issue is that I’ve only briefly gotten the keys to hit the platen. There’s some margin setting or other I haven’t figured out yet that’s preventing it from actually typing except during that brief period before I kept fucking with more settings, and there’s also something messed up about the key arms for 8 and J, but I bet that can be fixed with some judicious needle nosed pliering.
Oh, and it’s short one proprietary ribbon spool. Replacements, according to what I’ve seen so far, run about $35 each. OF COURSE. (But once you have two proprietary spools you can wind on any old ribbon you want, forever.)
Anyway, here’s the manual:
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- pg 1
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- pg 2
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- pg 3
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- pg 4
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- pg 5
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- pg 6
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- pg 7
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- pg 8
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- pg 9
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- pg 10
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- pg 11
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- pg 12
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- pg 13
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- pg 14
So pretty soon I’ll have a working typewriter, for some reason I can’t defend. I mean, I don’t need a typewriter, because I have a computer and a printer, and I’ll probably only use the thing for the occasional envelope I can’t be bothered to slot into the printer or recipe card I don’t want to hand-write, and it’s big and weighs a ton and would be an absolute bitch to get rid of again. It’ll be fun to clean and tune and get working again, as a project, but I already have several hobbies I’m just not doing…
Anyway, I’m going to go brush and vacuum it out and get to cleaning it a little before I go back to bed.
In which I slept until one o’clock.
The Yeti is off at Microsoft for a week-long tech conference, and I have a cold or something.
Started out yesterday feeling tired after a good night’s sleep, swollen glands, and a vaguely sore throat. Went to work, came home. Woke up today feeling so incredibly meh I don’t even have words for it; took the day off work and went back to sleep until the afternoon.
Now I’m vertical and outside a cup of pour-over coffee with fresh creamery cream, and about to finally do my morning meditation, once I’m done writing here. Then I’m planning to eat scrambled eggs, cheese grits, and sliced tomato.
I put in five tomato plants this year. Two are struggling and look pitiful, but one of them has given me three very nice and dearly won tomatoes. The other three plants are absolutely jubilant about their situation, and in a week I’ma have way too fucking many tomatoes.
I’ll probably freeze a bunch for cooking. (A thousand years ago, I stayed with a woman who was too busy to can one summer, so she just quartered her tomatoes, froze them on a sheet pan, and then stuck them in ziplocks. I cooked tons of chilis, soups, and curries with those frozen tomatoes over that winter, they were so handy and much more wonderful than canned tomatoes! [That woman later went on to move into my ex-house, bed my ex-husband, and hate me—there was some online bitchiness at some point—idk really, but they never returned any of my Christmas cards.] Point is, everybody has something to teach you, even if they later choose to weirdly betray you for mediocre dick.)
Just logged into my main credit card—the one with the awesome points that I use for absolutely everything—and there were two $16 charges from something called Maya Mobile, so I reported them as fraud… and now I’m cardless for five days, waiting for a replacement. All over barely thirty bucks. WTF.
Aaaaand I have to quit smoking again. About a year ago, I picked up a pack just to have one or two, for fun and nostalgia; of course that slowly, slowly escalated, until last week I was very nearly up to a pack a day again. So I very deliberately did not smoke one day, charged up my vape batteries, and am getting my head set to Quit Smoking yet again. Fucking pain in the ass, I dunno why I decided to do this to myself. Heh.
The Yeti bought himself a new computer, finally, after eight years, and I got the old one! It’s finicky, but to sweeten the deal he also bought me a second monitor, so it looks really cool and is far more computer than I need, considering I never compute and only use the browser these days.
After deciding I had to go to India to see my Sadguru because the inside of my head was totally full of shit, it was announced that She was coming here. (!!!) There were barely three weeks between the announcement and the Seattle programs, so I guess it was a fairly sudden decision. I went, and it was the cleansing, nourishing wonder I so desperately needed it to be. Five years without darshan fucking sucked.
I volunteered for greeter seva for the first program, and heard that we were only allowed one darshan per tour stop (I have no idea now if that was true or just a rumor), so I didn’t get a token the first day. After satsang I served lunch and then went to the kitchen and made a ton of puris.
My darshan was during Devi Bhava, and there’s no point in attempting to describe the interiority of it, but Her sari was gold, She said “My daughter, my daughter” in my ear, it was of typical length, and otherwise, externally, a completely average darshan. It was not like the time I got to be there in Her arms while she had a very long conversation with another devotee and some swamis; it was not like the time I was doing lap seva and suddenly the stage was mysteriously, impossibly, and incredibly empty for what felt like minutes while She made fun of Puffer’s awesome sari-fabric suit. It was just a normal darshan. And perfect. And seared into my mind for eternity. To know and be known, to love and be loved, to be grounded in That.
I kinda wish I’d just abandoned my job and my home and my life and just… gone on the rest of the U.S. tour, like so many others do, but I didn’t. I never do. I’m too shy of God to just blurt out “Let me COME WITH YOU, You’re the only thing that matters!” She’d probably send me home anyway. Go home and meditate, do your sadhana, silly.
I know most religion is political bullshit, that most people can’t tell the difference between politics and religion because of it, and that the majority of humans have yet to be able to want what it really is, but I no longer care. Most of my favorite people are atheist or agnostic, and that’s okay. I know an Avatar, I have seen God born into a human body and experienced what that is, and my gratitude is abject. Nobody else needs to care.
In which nothing.
I keep forgetting to blog because it’s 2024 and people don’t read blogs anymore, which means there’s no engagement, which means that thing in your head that tells you to blog is now telling you to spend three solid hours scrolling Bluesky instead.
Anyway, it’s Monday, my day off, and I’ve gotten through 8 of the 15 items on my to-do list, two of which required me to actually work my actual job (I do the bi-monthly newsletter for the creamery, and also I have some thing tomorrow where somebody hired me to do a half hour presentation sans AV equipment on cheese and serve a cheese platter, and nobody can speak extemporaneously for thirty fucking minutes without a slide deck unless they’re defending their pHd or whatever so I had to cram a little).
I have all the doors and most of the windows wide open but it’s not exactly warm enough for that so I’m wearing socks and a wool sweater and will shortly be drinking hot tea.
I made soup for lunch and ate it with some homemade bread.
I’m re-reading old Jeeves on my Paperwhite.
We watched Fallout together last week and it was good.
I ordered a second watch with a date display, because I keep looking at my watch when I need to know what day it is, for some reason. I’ve been staunchly anti-watch for literal decades but now I’m a watch guy, I guess? Anyway it’s a Timex and it was something like 63% off and it shows the day name and number and it fits the silicone watch bands I already have so I’ll be able to wear it to work without damaging the leather band it comes with. I’m pretty excited about Wednesday, which is when it’s supposed to arrive.
Apropos of nothing, here’s a meal I made and ate two months ago:
It was delicious!
In which there’s an update.
I used to find it much easier to post regularly when I both had things to bitch about and felt fine about bitching about things. But now I think it’s not that great a habit, and also whatever I might have to complain about is less a problem and more an incredibly trivial nothingburger. I mean, my habit is to login and complain (see my last few posts) and it’s a boring and dumb habit I’d like to break.
These days I don’t have much to bitch about. We have a house, we have each other, our jobs are nice, the weather’s comparatively mild (compared to Minneapolis). I finally bought myself a nice bicycle last year. Neither of us are unwell. All our bills are paid.
I do get annoyed by trivial shit, of course; I do have a mind, and it does decide to fixate on stupid shit from time to time. (Lately it tells me it’s unfair that my feet should hurt so much, that I hate hearing the neighborhood dogs bark, that my partner is stupid for not being able to read my mind, that I have to do so many dishes, and that work is exactly as it has always been which is suddenly somehow intolerable.
Minds are, if you really listen to them, quite stupidly invested in keeping you unhappy about shit.)
I’m excited about spring. Can’t wait to see the dogwoods in bloom! Somehow the tulips survived the landscaping and graveling of the backyard and came up through the rocks?! The first one has just bloomed, even! How the fuck did that even happen?
My aunt gave me two saplings, little ones that volunteered at her place, which I had planted last fall, a hardwood and a fast-growing shade tree, and I’m hoping they survived the winter. Those two extremely cold weeks last winter have me worried about them.
Looking forward to getting herbs and tomato starts out, too.
Not looking forward to the dog days, but they’re still months and months away. (I prefer the cold now, because you can layer up against it. But the heat in the desert at the end of summer is just relentless.)
Am so glad about the return of the light!
I think it might be time for me to finally go to India. Part of me feels like somehow I should have already been, and all of me feels like I’m certainly not getting any younger and travel’s certainly only going to get less comfortable as time goes by. And Amma doesn’t seem to be returning to world tours. And my job would almost certainly take me back after even a whole month’s absence. And I just got my passport renewed. So I’m really thinking about it, in earnest. And not thinking about how planes have begun to fall out the sky after decades of immoral stock buy-backs bullshit.
In unrelated, weird news, when I logged in to write this post I found three comments of the “go kill yourself you stupid fat bitch” variety waiting to be moderated, left on some old Covid-era posts. Some internet-poisoned, scientifically illiterate Rogan fanboi stranger has come back after literal years to follow up on his shitty comments on my blog!
Oh, well, I guess it’s my own fault for being a woman on the internet. My bad.
In which I’m tired of yard dogs.
I live in a very small town full of very large yards.
One should, I believe, do pretty much whatever one wants in their own yard. Rip out the turf and put in vegetables or wild flowers. Park a fucking car on blocks. Build a little free library. I don’t care, it’s your yard.
Except, truly, I wish your dogs would shut the fuck up already.
I just sat on my patio under a lap blanket to drink a cup of chamomile tea. It was ten straight minutes of all y’all’s dogs barking, endlessly. They never quit! Endless barking, from near and far. One dog goes off, then the dogs in the next yard go off, then the next block goes off. Back and forth forever. And, since it’s frozen out, the sound travels almost perfectly.
Maybe take your dogs inside sometimes. Train them to bark less. Oh, or here’s an idea: put them in your truck, drive to a path, and walk them for five miles, how about that?!
I’m so sick of barking fucking dogs.
In which I, with great originality, talk about the weather.
The weather has been shit! Utter shit! Like, Midwestern-style, cold-as-fuck, stupid shit!
Snow, freezing rain, and temps well below freezing! Fuck this shit!
When it’s in the teens, the furnace runs constantly. There are drafts in the living room (it has two plate glass windows). My feet are always cold. And I don’t know what the feral cats drink when the creek is turned off and all other water is frozen solid.
My last two cheese factory shifts have been cancelled (and I’m glad, because I don’t want to walk to work in this shit) and today apparently we never even opened the shop at all. The yeti’s job kept announcing late starts and then just closing altogether. Today he’s only there from 10 to 4 because they started late and are closing early. Because FREEZING RAIN.
This town needs to buy a goddamned snow plow.
Last night it warmed up ten degrees, and I gotta say the difference between 13 and 23 is pretty significant, even from inside the house. The furnace blower gets to turn off from time to time, and you can open the blinds during the day to get a little light without feeling a literal breeze off the cold old windows!
My feet are still cold as shit. Thankfully I can put them on the heating pad on the couch!
In which there’s complaining.
So I’m riding home from work the other day. It’s past four. It’s dusk. It’s foggy. So, it’s still light out, but only barely, and my colored bike lights are lovely. There’s a light rain. It’s in the 40’s, so, it’s chilly but not truly cold, and I’m properly attired. It should be glorious.
My work day is done, nothing but free time ahead, it’s damp and moody and I’m moving my body. I should feel vibrantly alive. I should have a heart full of abject gratitude, lifted in animal joy.
I can barely feel it.
My feet hurt always now, even when I get out of bed in the morning, and my legs do too, after work, for a few hours, and generally there’s some other low-level pain somewhere else, a muscle or a bruise. Nothing terrible, really, maybe a three or four on the pain scale, but is that little pain somehow dulling… everything? Like, I can remember—
Robust, radiant youth. Good, even excellent health. Intense sensations, both physically and emotionally. Zero pain, not a single twinge. Every breeze, every temperature variation, was picked up by my exposed skin: cheeks, wrists, throat maybe, or ankles. The exhilaration of just… being alive and biking home at night in the fog. Joy.
Now I don’t feel the joy or the physical sensations the way I did. I think I should, and I recall how I would have felt, if this ride home were happening, oh, say a decade ago, but IT’S NOT THERE ANY MORE.
I reached up, biking home in the rain and mist, and ran the back of my finger over my cheek, and guess what? I can still feel touch, of course, but it is, now that I’m really paying close attention, comparatively dull now?!
I hadn’t even noticed this loss.
Anyway, I know now why old people have stuff on their faces sometimes: they can no longer fucking feel tiny hairs or drips or crumbs or whatever. Because the fine sensitivity is gone, probably lost when the collagen went, and the nerve endings aren’t where or how they were in youth.
My other senses are duller, too. Hearing, certainly, but I expected that (standing on loud-ass stages in front of gear belonging to loud-ass guitarists, mainly), smell (I did smoke for a very long time), and I’ve never been able to see, really, but the surface of my motherfucking skin?!?! I’ve since realized that I no longer get goose bumps if I lightly touch the sides of my neck or ribs. I can feel it, sure, but it’s just… less intense than it used to be. Far less. Jesus.
I don’t know, I think I thought it was boredom or mild depression or something, my lack of intense reactions to things I once absolutely loved (going on vacation, an afternoon out, riding my bike home in certain types of beloved weather) rather than just, you know, the slow and steady decay of my literal, physical senses.
But, haha, it’s the slow and steady decay of my literal senses! And just a general lack of the vitality and vibrancy of being young and healthy as fuck. The information my brain is receiving about the world I’m moving through is just a whole lot less than it used to be, and that’s why stuff doesn’t feel as intense as it used to.
I’m fifty-five. And aging is nuts.
In which it’s been grey, overcast, and foggy for a few days but it FEELS like it’s been MONTHS.
We had T-day alone, just the two of us. Which is how we normally do it, because we spent so much time so far away from family. This year most of the family had mild medical reasons for not gathering together, and that suited us fine. I do the relish plate and the spinach & artichoke dip on t-day eve, for dinner, and then we eat the leftovers on Thanksgiving morning for brunch, and eat dinner in the evening.
Regular Thanksgiving dinner menu for us this year, except for meat I made him chicken thighs rather than ham steak, because they were already in the freezer.
Christmas decor is up! Used the tiny tree again because it’d be more hassle than it’s worth to get the Yeti to go and get a tree. Plus real trees drop needles everywhere.
Yesterday I did a fuckton of chores. Huge list. Domestic as fuck. House looks great.
Today I slept in, did my spiritual practices, and had a latte. Ate some leftover Indian food. Fucked around online.
The Yeti’s dinner is on the stove, and I have laundry to fold. I’m probably going to watch Star Wars shows all evening because I just signed up for Disney+ (It was $2 a month on Cyber Monday). I have tomorrow off again.
A few months ago, I asked work if I could temporarily take a break from closing. (After closing for four years straight, I just needed a break.) Cleaning the grill and closing the dipping cabinet and in general putting the place to bed every single night was getting on my nerves.
Well, they said yes, switched me to mid-shift, and… promptly cut my hours by 25%. I keep asking for more hours, but last week I got nine, and this week, nineteen.
While I do like my job, a lot, I do actually go there primarily for the money. I’m about to demand I get my old schedule back, because I’m a little broke. I think they think they’re being nice to me, and taking care of me with this new schedule, but what I need is more hours and fewer long shifts during which I never get to sit down. (My old legs and feet can’t do seven hours straight of walking and standing on concrete floors anymore. It fucking hurts, A LOT, and takes multiple painful hours—three or four after I get home—to recover from. I may think of myself as 43, but my leg veins? Are closer to 60.)
I’ve ordered the Yeti’s Christmas gifts, and will give local family the same cheese & crackers snack bags I always do. I personally don’t really need or want anything for Christmas, of course. I’m just glad we have a festival this time of year, when it’s so fucking dark all the time, at which it’s appropriate to hang fairy lights everywhere. I love Christmas lights!
Don’t forget you can run fireplace screensavers on your TV all winter if you like! It’s your house, you’re the boss!
In which I have letters after my name now.
Got the results email, for the cheese professional test I took in July, and am pleased and surprised to learn that I passed!
I thought for sure I’d failed. I mean, I got all the questions about Ossau Iraty wrong because I’d never eaten it and didn’t know what style it was or where it was even from! ALthough I did feel confident about all the cheesemaking questions, and vaguely alright about the markup/math questions. I dunno much beyond feeling very certain I did NOT pass. But I did! Amazing!
Anyway, now I’m an ACS CCP®! Whoo hoo!
In which nobody will find this interesting, but I’ma write it anyway because I feel like it!
One thing I thought, at first, was really cool about the whole MIU campus experience was the vegetarian (!!!) dining hall. Vegetarian! All of it! I’d gone vegetarian within, I think, half a year of moving out on my own, and like everything at that age, it felt new and right and fresh and moral and wonderful.
Every single meal offered at Annapurna, the MIU campus dining hall, contained rice & dal. So you might go in for a meal and find deeps on the hot bar containing rice, dal, and then mixed vegetables, and maybe veggie burger patties or tofu slabs or beans or whatever the regular menu was. Always rice and dal, every single day without fail. There was always a salad bar and a milk dispenser. Pretty sure there was fresh bread, too? At least there was always bread and toasters. There was always hot milk with ghee at dinner, so you could take some in a thermos back to your dorm to drink before bed (because apparently Ayurveda said boiled milk with ghee balanced Vata or something. It was supposed to help you sleep, at any rate, and there was a big pseudo-scientific explanation about denatured protein strands or something that probably wouldn’t hold up if I could remember it clearly enough to research it, but with a little sugar and a pinch of turmeric it was really tasty).
Breakfast always had milk and cereal, plus something hot, like toast and eggs and/or tofu scramble, but I basically never went to breakfast unless I’d been up all night. There were herbal teas available all the time, but I don’t think there was coffee, I think you had to make your own in your room.
Anyway, most of the food was incredibly bland and unappealing to me then, even the exotic stuff. The dal was always Jain-style (because the place apparently couldn’t discern between “students” and “monks”?) so no onions or garlic, just asafetida, which is super boring. The vegetables were always overcooked. Even Mexican night was inexplicably bland, especially for a place with a spice rack literally the size of a barn door.
I remember that, when I finally understood, after I’d been working first in the kitchen and then on the cook’s aisle for awhile, that the two people who ran the place were both, like, trained professionals, basically experts, who cared about the food and the quality and the taste, I was surprised. Because the food was not good and did not seem, to me, to be the result of caring or expertise? The place literally served “dal pizza” on pizza night, which was made of nothing but dough, leftover dal with cinnamon added (??!), and fucking raisins. Sure, maybe a couple of the self-hating guys on Purusha (a group for dudes who were really on the program: celibate, restrictive diet, extra-long meditations, etc., the fraternity of Mother Divine, which was the same but for women) ate it, but it was absolutely devoid of joy, let alone tastiness or even nutrition.
It turned out they were extremely limited in what they could do because of all the Ayurvedic and other strictures handed them by admin. At the time, the opinion was that Ayurveda said onions and garlic were too stimulating for anybody meditating twice a day, and furthermore required all the fiber boiled out of vegetables. Made for bland feed, especially for college kids, but I guess that’s what admin, faculty and staff, and very “on the program” people wanted, so that’s what they got, even though the paying customers (aka students) wanted tastier food.
Most of us survived on milk, rice with butter and soy sauce, toast, and cereal, and waited for our favorite meal to rotate by again. (Mine was what they served for Thanksgiving: tofu slabs, broccoli, and mashed potatoes with a really awesome vegetarian gravy I still make to this day.)
Anyway, that place was my introduction to Indian food, and I don’t think there was ever roti or chapati served at Annapurna, only rice. So I never learned to eat dal and flatbread back then, even though that’s probably how nearly all of India does it.
But now, thirty years later, I have, and I LOVE ROTI AND DAL!!! It’s so good! Especially for breakfast! It’s just completely delicious and filling and satisfying. And fast, if you make the dal and the dough in advance, then all that’s needed is to nuke some dal, heat up a pan and roll out a ball of dough.
I’ve also recently (recently? uh, within the past half decade or so?) learned how easy roti is. It’s so easy. It’s literally just flour, water, and a little technique.
ROTI
Combine whole wheat flour and water, enough to bind. Work into a ball, place in a bowl and cover. Let rest half an hour.
Heat a pan or griddle to medium high.
Take some dough, roll into a ball smaller than a ping pong ball. Dip in all purpose flour, then roll into a thin disc using as much flour as it takes to keep it from sticking to the counter.
Cook on the hot pan, undisturbed, for maybe 30 seconds, then flip. Press down repeatedly with a rolled-up dish cloth until the roti fills with steam and puffs up. Flip another time or three as needed to complete cooking.
Remove the roti to a flatbread warmer (or another towel), brush with ghee, and cover.
Continue until you have all the roti you want or are out of dough, and enjoy!
