In which there’s bread and soup.
I went to the bakery down the street today and bought bread (a baguette and a rye boule), and then I served some for dinner with a pot of yummy soup!
Saw a meatless pasta e fagioli recipe online that called for lentils, so I threw in some Beluga lentils from the pantry. Other ingredients were olive oil, onion, garlic, celery, carrot, garlic powder, water, vegetable bouillon, a can of cannellini beans, stracciatella pasta from work, tomato, tomato paste, sage, rosemary, and salt and pepper. Also used some leftover store bought vodka sauce from the fridge.
Really hearty and delicious!
In which I cooked a lovely meal.
I have today off!
Slept in, got up, took some saag paneer out of the freezer to defrost.
Made rice and dal fry in the electric pressure cooker. Made carrot raita.
Here’s lunch!
Considered making some naan or papad, too, but didn’t. Four courses is plenty.
Yum!
In which this is a pain in the arse.
I’ve been using Flickr for image hosting since 2006, and have nearly 14k pictures there.
They recently announced they’re moving to a for-pay model, and even though I do like their photo editor, I don’t know that I like it enough to pay fifty bucks a year forever when I could get an image editor for Windows and edit locally before uploading.
I used to pay for Pro with them, but then realized it didn’t provide me anything — I’m not a professional photographer and didn’t need the stuff that their Pro accounts came with. All I ever wanted was hosting and the editor. Which are now fifty bucks a year. Ugh.
Well, I already have free hosting at both Google and Amazon, so even though their image editors barely function, well: they’re free.
So I’ve enabled auto-uploading from my phone for both services, and now need to figure out how to make desired images public and find a plug-in to show them here.
I’ll miss Flickr, though. All the titles and annotations I’ve written over the years, the various vacation and holiday albums, all the links from here to there. Once they start deleting my images next year, hundreds if not thousands of images will break and I doubt I’ll ever care enough to fix them. (Not to mention the various CC images linked elsewhere, all those will break, too.) Sigh.
In which I had the day off and did a bunch of domestic crap!
My beloved got a new job, which he started today. So he got up and went to work early this morning, and my lazy ass slept until 10:30. Whoo!
Then I ordered groceries, made the bed, and tidied up the apartment — got a bunch of crap off the coffee and dining tables finally, so that was a small triumph.
Remembered to water the avocado tree, too. It dries out pretty quickly, now that the heat’s on in the building.
Also made a batch of salsa, because the cilantro was getting a bit old and I didn’t want to waste it:
I boiled half a dozen eggs and deviled them:
And then, I made a pot of potato soup:
I also enjoyed a giant latte, wrapped three Christmas presents, and watched 1.75 bad Christmas movies on Netflix — two of which I abandoned because they sucked!
Tomorrow I might get around to washing the sheets. How great would that be.
In unrelated news, I am publicly announcing that I don’t really like sharp cheddars. I mean, I’d like to, but I don’t. Brought home some Tickler extra mature for my better half and I just don’t really like it. Would much rather eat a mild cheddar, maybe a lovely double gloucester instead.
In which there are fountain pens!
Five fountain pens and five inks.
Pens are:
– Wing Sung 3008 (color: green-tipped demonstrator*)
– PenBBS 266 (color: sherry)
– Moonman Wancai Mini (color: teal swirl demonstrator)
– Hero 1309 (color: orange)
– Moonman M2 (color: demonstrator w/red band)
Inks are:
– Seitz-Kreuznach: Tundra
– J. Herbin: Rouge Opera
– Diamine: Teal
– Noodlers Ink: Apache Sunset
– Diamine: Syrah
Paper is a blank page in the back of my 2018 Hobonichi Weeks annual planner, which is inserted in a spendy-but-worth-it Galen Leather wallet I bought with birthday money from my dad.
* a “demonstrator” is a transparent/clear pen
In which I found this recipe online somewhere and it’s fantastic.
This is the red sauce Taco Bell uses in their bean burritos and on their enchiritos.
Copycat Taco Bell Sauce
1 8-oz can tomato sauce
1/3 cup water
1/4 tsp chili powder
1 1/2 tsp cumin
1/2 tsp onion powder
1 tbsp white vinegar
1/2 tsp garlic powder
1/2 tsp garlic salt
1/4 tsp paprika
1/4 tsp cayenne pepper
Combine and simmer for 15 minutes.
It’s delicious.
In which I got sick as hell.
Sunday I got off work, came home, had some cape cods, Skyped with my friends, and went to bed. Monday I woke up late morning feeling normal, and within a couple-few hours I was sick.
I thought it was influenza. Fever, cough, aches, pains. Exhaustion.
Oh, it was nasty. And it kept getting worse: night sweats. The fever would break, then it’d come back again. Temperature was between 99-102F. Chills, then too hot, then chills. Kept waking up drenched and then freezing immediately.
Also had a number of really esoteric fever dreams, so that was cool.
Friday I made S. take me to urgent care because it was my 4th day in a row to wake with a fever and I felt sick as hell. So he drove me out to Saint Louis Park, the nice place he goes with his insurance, but they don’t take mine. They had a nurse see me real quick to make sure I wasn’t dying and then sent me to my own network.
I wasn’t dying. Temperature was down to normal (my fever had broken just before we’d left), blood oxygen was in the low 90’s, blood pressure excellent. He told me it could be the flu, or maybe bronchitis or pneumonia. So we drove back to Whittier clinic, which is literally four blocks from our apartment, of course, and I went in a made an appointment for 2:30 that afternoon.
Then back home, bed, and back to sleep for a few hours.
Then up, teeth brushed, back for the appointment.
Nurse got me from the lobby and took my vitals. Great blood pressure (everyone who takes my blood pressure tells me it’s “great,” so apparently my fat ass looks like she’d have high blood pressure), five pounds down (hadn’t eaten for shit in days), please wait here for the doctor.
Doc came in, asked me questions, looked in my nose, looked in my mouth, felt my throat/lymph nodes. My tonsils have disappeared sometime in the past few years without my even noticing, which is WEIRD AS HELL (doctor asked if I’d had them out. I said no, and later, at home, when I remembered, I stuck my fingers into my mouth and they’re just gone).
Flu swab came back negative, so diagnosis is acute bronchitis. (“You’re literally wheezing,” she said.) Doc gave me two painkillers (Advil and Tylenol), an Albuterol inhaler, and Tessalon (apparently a cough suppressant). They didn’t do shit. Well, other than the ibuprofen; that did help with pain, but my lungs were still super fucked and I didn’t understand the point of a cough suppressant when all I really wanted was a productive damn cough. Acetaminophen doesn’t do shit for pain, apparently? I’d never taken the two back to back while experiencing pain, but only the ibuprofen worked for me.
The Albuterol appears to be packaged for non-asthma users. I don’t know enough to know if it’s a different product or if it’s just like a regular inhaler, but it offered no relief, which was disappointing as hell. I took the meds for about 24 hours, then just dropped it all because fuck it.
So, more sleep, more aches and pains, more wheezing; more dry, unproductive cough. I ended up calling out for four shifts at work (luckily, they were fantastic and supportive, bless ’em) and was seriously considering another appointment on Monday because shit was not fine.
Oh, and five days of constipation, too, because no nicotine-via-vape, but that was really the least of my issues.
Finally, Sunday night, the cough came. Well, shit started coming up, finally, and that horrible tight, dry feeling began to ease — I’d been coughing the entire time, of course. But finally, after an entire fucking bedridden week, some progress! It was glorious.
The evening before last, I got hives. On my lips. My lips swelled up like fucking crazy, like Botox crazy. I don’t know if it was a drug reaction or just more Aging While Female, but it was weird as hell. I sat on the couch for an hour checking my tongue to make sure it wasn’t going to kill me and then gave up and went to bed. (Most of the swelling was gone in the morning, but it took all day yesterday to go away completely, and then last night I had two more hives, both small: one on my right index finger, and another on my right foot. Then I remembered I’d had one the week before, on my right wrist. So maybe not meds-related.)
Sunday I managed a couple loads of dishes, with lots of resting. Monday I actually cooked a meal for the first time in ages. Now it’s Tuesday evening and I’m feeling much more human; the tree is up, there’s a string of lights around the living room window, and I’ve made the bed. Still wheezing and coughing, but much, much better than Friday.
Long story short, BEING SICK SUCKS!
In which I do an op-ed.
There’s a Twitter feed, called Well Regulated Militia (find it at @Well_Regulated_), that posts about nothing but the gun-related incidents and accidents that befall our, well, “militia.” Here’s a common example of its content:
“A member of our well regulated militia sleeps with a loaded gun under his pillow. His 2 year old son crawls into bed with him, finds the gun, and shoots himself. He dies at the hospital.”
The takeaway is that guns kill, even without human intent. All the time. Totally debunks the whole “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” bullshit.
Guns have one purpose: to propel a bullet at high speed into things, particularly flesh. Yes, you can kill with a car or a plane or a knife, but all of those things — cars, planes, knives — have other, primary, purposes. You can’t get to work or Europe in a gun, or make dinner with one.
Guns are dangerous tools, and it turns out they’re unsecured a shocking amount of the time.
While there are very good reasons to own guns, a great many gun owners obviously do not need, or know how to properly use or secure, their guns. (Because if you needed your gun, it wouldn’t just be lying around, now, would it.)
There’s also a really long thread by members of the armed forces (under @iAmTheWarax, if you want to find it), who are rigorously trained to handle guns, who still fuck up regularly because even highly trained humans are, well, fallible. Guns should just not be lying around, for fuck’s sake, because they’re dangerous.
You need to get a license to drive a car; you should also need to get one to purchase, own, and keep a gun.
I don’t want to ban guns, or remove them from all owners, not at all.
But I do want gun owners to assert that they need one (even if it’s just to shoot rabbits in the garden), that they’re mentally competent, and that they’re trained to handle and secure one.
Submit some forms (your shooting certifications, your completed safety class, your gun safe receipt), take a written test. Re-up every decade. Bureaucracy, used for its proper purpose. Will the occasional qualified applicant be denied gun ownership? Probably. Will the masses who shouldn’t be own guns be denied? Yes.
Will some bad guys have guns anyway? Yes, but they’ll be outliers, just like unlicensed drivers are outliers, just like unlicensed doctors are outliers, just like unlicensed anythings are outliers.
But IT WILL HELP. We need to regulate gun ownership in this nation.
In which it’s November the 6th.
In which my eBay order from China arrived today!
Okay, okay, OKAY: I have far too many fountain pens now!
