In which I’m already planning next year’s tomatoes!
While there is a back yard on the west side of the house so enormous it could support an absolutely giant garden, there’s also a huge shade tree back there, and tall fences, so I’m not really sure about sunlight.
Plus, to put a garden in the back, I’d have to do a lot of work, from rock picking to soil improvement to renting a tiller, and to be honest I just don’t have that level of interest when all I want are a few tomatoes and some fresh herbs.
There are already raised beds out front, plenty big enough to grow food in, so that’s what I’m going to do! They’re on the east side, but I think they’ll get plenty of sun, at least in the morning, even with the big tree in the front yard.
Right now, the raised beds are in shadow, but it’s late October. I think in the summer they’d be getting some sunlight this time of day, even if indirect, through the tree.
So I’ve been reading up on container gardening. Apparently I want to compost and mulch the beds about this time of year, so the soil can improve over the winter. Hopefully next weekend I can run to Ace or Home Depot and grab a few bags of each. Might also stab the dirt some to loosen and aerate it.
I’d like to find some sort of shrubby tomato breeds, maybe something called cherry cascade, and maybe one each of Better Boy and roma, too. Also edible flowers like nasturtiums and violas, some lettuces that can be harvested leaf by leaf, like endive, maybe a pole bean plant, and then fill it out with herbs: parsley and mint for tabbouli, cilantro for Mexican and Indian dishes, and basil and oregano for Italian. Perhaps some lemon verbena or thyme, too.
Just enough to be fun and interesting without becoming a misery to maintain. If it gets enough light!
zone: 7a
In which there’s sodium citrate, aka melting salt, in American cheese, so it makes great nacho cheese sauce.
You may be a human being who, from time to time, thinks to yourself, “I want some freakin’ nacho cheese sauce.” But when you look up nacho cheese sauce recipes online, they’re all roux-based, which is basically cheese gravy, and you’re like, screw this, there must be a better way.
WELL, THERE IS. THERE IS A BETTER WAY.
It’s really easy, too. It’s, like, stupid how easy it is:
1/4 c. milk or half & half
5 slices of American cheese, quartered
1/4 c. shredded any other cheese you like (how about cheddar, maybe)
1/2 c. can green chilis
salt, to taste
Put the first two ingredients in a bowl and nuke them for, oh, 40-45 seconds or so, then stir well, and nuke again for another half a minute or until it’s bubbling up a bit.
Stir in the cheddar until it’s incorporated. Stir in the chilis. Taste and add salt if needed. Serve.
If your nacho cheese sauce sets up while you’re doing other nacho-related stuff, just nuke it again for 25 seconds or so.
In which I love this goddamned appliance, okay?
I cooked three full meals in this kitchen today, for a total of eight courses, and I have not done the washing up.
Look at it. Just look. It’s spotless. No dishes anywhere. THEY’RE IN THE DISHWASHER, off the counter, out of sight.
It’s amazing. I never wanted a dishwasher, but now I doubt I could stand life without one.
This kitchen has tons of counter space, I could easily fill them up entirely with dishes dirty or clean — but I don’t have to! Because: DISHWASHER!
This house is so great.
In which I just don’t enjoy Facebook anymore because it’s full of disinformation and depression and conspiracy theories and none of that’s any fun.
Just logged into FB for the first time in a couple of weeks and my last post turned into the biggest conversation on my page in years.
I find this funny, for some reason?
And no, I don’t think you suck, babies. You’re all welcome to post whatever comments you like here, no censorship, or, hell, I’ll even give you a login if you want to post actual entries, I don’t care, but I do think Facebook sucks and fuck their AI and their algorithms and their entire whatever!
—
Update: scrolled the main page for half an hour and it’s still a dumpster fire. Headlines that are immediately seen to be garbage if a person’s even mildly rational. “Rifles” are not the problem in mass shootings, mammograms do not “cause cancer,” and no, CBD oil doesn’t “cure” autism. I wrote and deleted three replies, because “this is demonstrably untrue” isn’t fun or interesting and just ends up making everybody butthurt.
Delete the internet, it’s stupid!
Oh, AND I found out my college roommate has died. Facebook is depressing, y’all.
In which I’ve moved to Oregon, a state I haven’t lived in since the early 90’s!
We found a house in Milton (or is it Freewater?) and have moved into it. It’s an eight-block walk from the cheese shop for me, and I’m grateful that it cuts his commute in half.
Big old tree in the yard! Brick flower boxes along the whole front (in which I will probably plant food — tomatoes and herbs)! Tons of parking (there’s more around the far side you can’t see in this picture), in case we have, I don’t know, a small concert?
Our neighbor to the north is a creek and an apple orchard.
Our street is adorable:
Six houses on a dead end! No through traffic! Cute and quiet, and we’ll never see another fender bender! So far, the loudest sounds we’ve heard are dogs (this town is rife with canine Americans; there are at least a dozen who woof at me on my walk to and from work) and the engines of our neighbors’ vehicles.
Guys, THIS HOUSE IS SO GREAT. It’s so great. It’s positively lovely and I guarantee you I don’t deserve it. It has every amenity we could want, from two bedrooms to a garage to a second bathroom. There’s a dishwasher, tons of cupboards, a coat closet and a linen closet, and a built-in curio cabinet!
(The owner told me she’d kept Precious Moments in it, back in the day, and isn’t clear now why she ever did, but there it is: a place for my teapots and other random ephemera.)
Look at the light in this, the main bathroom! I love it! (And the fan actually works. It’s like a hotel bathroom, with a high shower head and plenty of room and shelves for products.)
The second bathroom is full-sized, and has a window and a shower with a sitting bench in it. I don’t know that we’ll ever use it much ourselves, but it’ll be handy if we have guest.
There’s also an enormous back yard surrounded by a privacy fence.
There’s no exit from the house to the back yard (you have to go outside and through a fence gate to enter it), and when I look at it all I think is “YARD WORK,” but my aunt let us take an abandoned lawn mower from the shed in the yard of a house she owns and my better half seems to be fine with the idea of keeping it up, so I intend to mostly ignore the entire space since there’s so much front yard and porch and concrete apron to enjoy. We’ve already discussed getting a BBQ, which I expect we’d never bother dragging into the back yard unless we were having a large gathering.
If there are any flaws, they are these: there are very few grounded outlets, the stove is electric (I’ve already burnt three dishes), and the glorious kitchen sink window looks into the garage rather than at the orchard.
The garage has a window, thankfully, but still, I’m sure the view was much better before the garage was built.
We don’t have any furniture except for the desk he bought for his computer, but the family is going to give us some chairs and a dresser!
The bedrooms have lovely wood floors, and built-in heating.
The LR has a heat exchanger in the wall and two windows. The place came with curtains, lace in the kitchen and living room and neutral panels in both bedrooms. So much storage. So well laid-out.
It’s so nice to be reunited with our stuff after nearly four months; I’m particularly happy to have my dishes and pots and pans, and the rest of my wardrobe. We’re 75% unpacked and very comfortable.
Yay amazing new house!
In which I’ve gone and turned 51, of all things, and here is a short paragraph about it.
I’m fat as hell, my feet always hurt even though I only work part-time, my skin has no elasticity and is just drooping like fabric on the bias, I have a nearly constant stabbing pain in the index knuckle of my right hand, my hips hurt, I have nerve issues in my feet due to, according to google hospital, either menopause or neuropathy that occasionally drive me bugnuts when I’m lying in bed trying to go to sleep, sometimes I can’t sleep, or I wake wide up for no goddamned reason at all, my teeth are yellow, my desire to go out and hang with people is nearly as low as my introvert better half’s, I’m more or less running out of British TV shows to watch, I’ve been so sedentary for so long that popping up two flights of stairs here in the house makes me pant for three minutes, whatever symmetry my face may once have enjoyed is well and truly over, HOT FLASHES, sometimes everything from ovaries to vestibule feels weird as hell because hormone changes and so-called sexual atrophy, there’s no fat at all on the balls or heels of my feet, vericose veins, I’ve actually sharted, something I always thought was either a joke or an affliction affecting only young, stupid beer drinking males, twice in the past three years, my hair is thin and brittle, my nails are ridged, I think about death a lot and find sex scenes and courting plots juvenile and annoying, I have actually heard myself say “nobody’s writing any decent sci-fi these days,” I’m freaked about the fact I’ve never made any money and owe more in student loans than I’ve saved for retirement, my nose and ears are enormous and are just going to keep getting bigger, my eyebrows have discovered what it is to be tufty, my ass has changed shape to such a degree that I now fart like a man, and my sweat smells weird and old.
But it’s also true that I’m not on any meds at all*, which I’ve been told by a doctor friend is “unusual” for “someone my age.”
*yet
In which where DOES the time go?
It’s September?!
I’ve been at the cheese shop for a month and a half now and really enjoy it. My friend got a job there too, so I have someone to ride to work with now that my beloved is working at the casino and can’t chauffeur me around everywhere.
We’re still at my grandmother’s house but are considering moving to Milton Freewater to shorten his commute and remove my need for a car. (I really don’t want to buy a car. They’re wasteful as fuck in terms of resources, and you have to throw money at them ALL. THE. TIME. Gas, maintenance, insurance, registration, parking. Yuck.) I also really want my stuff back, in particular my kitchen and the rest of my wardrobe, and we’ve been leaving the Ubox in storage until we’re fully settled.
I love living in this house in this neighborhood, but if we stay much longer I’m going to need a refrigerator and a hot plate and an area rug and MY CLOTHES and probably some other stuff I’m not thinking of right now. (I can and do cook in my grandmother’s kitchen, but rarely. I cook weird stuff at weird hours and I need my own kitchen space.)
I also want a proper desk and a second monitor and keyboard; I computer very little right now because it’s a pain in the ass. Mostly using my laptop for streaming, and do most of my internet fucking around on my phone. Could easily set up a workstation here in the basement, but keep not doing it because we might move out any minute AND OUR STUFF IS IN A UBOX IN PASCO OR RICHLAND SOMEWHERE.
I’ve seen both my parents, my brother, two aunts, an uncle, and of course my g’ma. I’ve seen TONS of friends and fans and gotten lots of hugs and kisses and emails and texts. I played at Marcy’s last Saturday and literally dozens of people came out to see me.
After living an almost entirely socially isolated life in Minneapolis for the past five years, I can’t even express how deeply fulfilling and satisfying it is to get to love on so many people!
I have a friend whose mom owns a restaurant, so I GOT CUSTOM ARTICHOKE COTIJA TAMALES, even.
It’s never what you know, and always who you know!
Plus the weather here, the goddamned amazing weather. Sure it’s hot during the day, but it’s dry, and it always cools down 20-30 degrees at night, so you can actually sleep even without A/C in the attic bedroom.
AND THE PRODUCE. OH MY GOD, THE PRODUCE. I’ve had a perfect peach, a couple of Hermiston melons, veggies from my aunt’s garden, and I made pico de gallo from heirloom tomatoes a cheese shop customer gave me — FOR FREE — because he didn’t sell them at market.
You don’t get produce like this in the city, you just don’t. There’s some amazing produce to be had in cities, sure, with co-ups and CSAs and stuff, but it’s nothing like living in farm country. You get stuff here that was literally in the garden that very morning, and it all tastes like happiness and sunshine.
We’ve been to a ball game, restaurants, bars, a couple shows, and people’s houses for BBQs. Look at this food I ate at Embo’s house!
We have A Social Life and it’s wonderful! We’ve been shopping, on Sunday drives, and across Stateline (between Washington and Oregon) too many times to count.
We’ve done more stuff in the past two months than in the past five years, probably, and it’s easy here because the whole town’s barely five miles across and the traffic is actually reasonable (rather than millions of passive-aggressive Minnesotans).
I’m so super happy to be home, to have people again, to have a good job, and my better half seems to like it here too! (I actually knew a couple of old online blogger people in MSP, but never managed to meet up with them. Somehow never felt like taking a few buses all the way to Saint Paul and back. Kind of regret it now, but obviously not enough to have actually done it in five whole years, so. I don’t know. Combination of distance and weather, I guess?)
Deeply looking forward to the season change, a proper autumn and sweater weather (there’s no fall in MSP, as I’ve complained for the past half decade), and then the holiday season rituals with family living nearby! We’ll probably GO to a Thanksgiving meal! Or a Christmas one! I’m so excited to be back that I probably won’t even briefly consider trying to get out of it this year!
If we’re in an apartment by X-mas, I might even splurge on a real tree, just for the hell of it!
In which AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!
Cycling rapidly between “This pile of boxes will absolutely fit in the U-Box container, no problem,” and “This pile of boxes WILL NEVER FIT IN THE CONTAINER, AND I SHOULD FREAK OUT, BECAUSE THAT WILL TOTALLY HELP!!!” and isn’t it cool how moving just never gets less stressful, no matter how you do it?
The kitchen cupboards and drawers are empty. The fridge is very nearly empty; I kept the cheeses, and a bag of walnuts, and stuff I was intending to eat for breakfast until I just now, while typing this, realized there’s no way to cook it since all the pans are packed.
(I threw away so much food today. Gawd. It feels terribly wasteful, even though I did try to make sure we ate as much of it as possible. We only decided to move five or six weeks ago. No way to eat ALL the condiments and random dry goods. But goddamn, I have thrown away probably $200 worth of opened boxes, packets, and jars.)
Bathroom is emptier than a motel bathroom: there’s only the shower curtain, one towel, one washcloth, Qtips, matches, and the toiletry stuff we use daily, in travel bags.
Bedroom’s as done as it can get before container day, I think. We still have clothes in the closet, but that’s just a few minutes to pack.
We have more lamps than I guess I’d realized, somehow. Five? I’ll keep any we have room for, but none of them are particularly cool.
Basement storage has been gone through and is about a third of what it was before, mostly just Christmas stuff now. (My man is amazing. Last week I mentioned sorting the storage was on the list, and he just went and did it.)
I’m essentially packed for my two nights in Atlanta. Most of the stuff’s in the suitcase, at any rate, in an untidy pile, and I know where the other stuff is. Honestly, the timing is pretty crazy (who decides to go on a retreat for two of the last three nights before a cross country move?!?!), but on the other hand, I’ll be in a great mental state for a long drive.
I’ve apologized several times for fucking off right before we leave for Washington, but he seems utterly unruffled and fine about quite possibly having to steam clean the carpet on his own. I’ll try to get it done before I go, but we might be fucking with the remaining furniture or something. (Nobody’s bought the couch or coffee tables, and there are two shitty office chairs and a desk that we need to do something with.) He’s so mellow, it’s just completely wonderful.
Every time I make a huge pile of garbage and recycling, he just gets up and takes it out. I haven’t taken a single thing out to the dumpster because he just handles it.
Any rate, I have a burrito in the fridge I made yesterday when I wanted to wash the dish the refried beans were in so I could pack it. I think I’m gonna go nuke and eat it!
In which it’s actually not that bad?
T minus four days and mostly packed! Here’s the pile:
There’s also the bed, half a dozen boxes in the basement, and another half dozen out of shot or not yet packed, but that’s the main bulk of it.
It’s really not that bad, but I keep vacillating between “Oh, we’re FINE” much of the time and a panicky HOLY SHIT THERE’S TOO MUCH AND IT WON’T FIT AND I’LL HAVE TO THROW SOMETHING PRECIOUS OUT because my mind’s an asshole.
I’ve watched the U-box video — you can get a LOT of stuff into one of those containers — and the specs say it fits 257 cubic feet, so intellectually, I know it’s fine. But. Ugh.
My original guesstimate was 40 boxes and ~800 pounds (not including the bed, the microwave cart, the microwave, and the aluminum shelving unit). I think we’ll come in below that number of boxes, probably closer to 30, and well under 2000 pounds, which is the U-box max.
Also, since we’re driving, there’s overflow room in the car. We’re taking our luggage packed with clothes/toiletries, our computers and devices, the one surviving plant, some kitchen stuff I’ll want access to (mostly my spice collection, espresso, and dry goods), and a box of mending so I’ll have something to do during the 24 hours of drive time.
On top of the move, I’m going to Atlanta for two nights for my annual Amma trip, which is less than ideal timing, but that’s the only time I could go. (I had originally planned to see Her in Dallas this year, but couldn’t get a nearby hotel room and didn’t want to have to deal with taking taxis back and forth at odd hours, or trying to hitch rides with other devotees.) He’ll probably be at a local motel those nights, unless he decides to sleep on the floor in the apartment — our bed will be in the U-box by then, on its way to Washington.
In conclusion, everything is under control but I feel unsettled and stressed anyway! Additional proof that feelings are mostly garbage data!
UPDATE: Okay, I’ve packed the rest of the kitchen and am freaking out again, TOO MUCH STUFF, OMG IT’LL NEVER FIT!!!1! *headdesk* Andy WHY do we have so much opened, unfinished, un-donatable food?! Such a waste! Why the FUCK didn’t I serve all this before now?! I KNEW WE WERE MOVING.
In which it’s not a real blog post, just moving notes.
To take IN THE CAR with us so we have access to it (packed mainly in luggage/duffels/backpacks):
– couple weeks worth of clothing
– shoes
– computers/monitors/electronics and power/chargers etc.
– basic toiletries/beard, hair & teeth stuff, vision, makeup, tweezers, shit like that
– documents file box
– instant pot
– gameboy
– spice rack, espresso & moka pot
– mending and journaling crap
– vaping crap (+ misc juice for bro)
– amma doll.
IN THE U-BOX, everything we can live without for a month or more:
– bed
– cart
– shelf unit? (if there’s room)
– big mirror
– clothing/coats/shoes
– kitchen
– bath
– microwave?
– linens, rugs
– electronics, TV, console/s
– lamps?
– books
– altar
– pictures
– fans
– toolbox
– xmas stuff.
Misc notes:
– pack extra clothes in the big hamper? rather than a box?
– wrap big mirror in blanket/s
– pack misc crap I may not be able to fit in the Ubox in a separate box so it can be mailed or trashed?
– repack the books, that box is too heavy
– figure out how to get rid of the couch
– finish getting crap together for final Goodwill donation.
Items in progress:
– bedroom closet
– kitchen
– packing for Amma trip 6/27-6/29
Completed:
– living room
– front closet (except chemicals: leave those for free?)
– bathroom (except curtain/hooks)
– my desk
– basement storage
