In which I’ve gotten up from a nap hungry.
Apropos of nothing, I have a sudden and intense desire for a fish sandwich from McD’s?!
What the hell! They’re terrible! Every time I eat one (this happens once or twice a decade, on average) I regret it.
—
Update: For the record, I settled for an open-faced tuna salad and tomato on toasted Ezekiel bread. It was delicious.
In which the internet is stupid. But it’s also awesome!
Made the mistake today of looking the house up on Zillow, and that bastard of a site had the nerve to estimate the value under what we paid for it only eleven months ago!
Well, I looked at recent sales of similar houses in the area, and they’re going for, like, $313k, so prices are still high and people are still paying them, which means their estimate is garbage. So screw you, Zillow!
—
Everybody at work thinks I’m some sort of diva for being afraid I can’t pass a test with no official text books, practice tests, or sanctioned goddamned course of study, and which features a pass rate of under 50%, but I know I can’t know what I don’t know I don’t know.
So I went online and asked r/cheese about study groups, and through the kindness of a stranger and a circuitous route of emails, I got admitted to an official STUDY GROUP for the Certified Cheese Professional test!!!
It starts a week from tomorrow, is conducted over Zoom, and is free. And now I think I have an actual chance to pass the test.
It turns out I’ve already read, or own and have begun to read, all the books the teacher recommends in the welcome email. So that’s a relief!
I did no studying at all this weekend. A mini-break before class starts!
—
I just can’t keep my nails done now that I’m menopausal.
I don’t know if it’s lack of collagen or what, but whenever I try to wear press-on, or even gel, nails, any moisture whatsoever that sits anywhere near the nail plate (which always happens at work, primarily because I have to wear gloves all the time) makes my nails lift. They just separate from the nail beds! It’s gross! And it takes months to grow them out and it sucks. I love the occasional manicure! And now I just… can’t have them anymore?
It’s bullshit.
And they’re far too thin for old school acrylics. If anybody took a Dremel to my nail plates it would go right through and hurt like hell.
Plus I’m terrified of what would happen if I smacked an acrylic nail against a cheese rack or something real hard. What if the entire nail came off instead of just the acrylic overlay?! How gross would that be?!
—
The Pendleton blanket — well, throw, really; it’s not a whole blanket — has arrived, and it’s glorious and beautiful and I love it. Here it is at the foot of the guest room bed.
I also got a Pendleton wool scarf, and it too is fantastic.
—
The diet is tedious and a pain in the ass, and I ate 2,607 calories on my cheat day because I was fucking starving and just wanted to be able to eat freely.
I managed to give up cocaine overnight but not eating food is a whole ‘nother level.
—
I suck at anniversaries, but I do have a basic understanding of the passage of time and it occurs that the Yeti and I have known one another for a decade now.
And we’ll have been living together for nine years on April 16th. Really doesn’t seem that long at all, but time contracts more and more the older I get. Still, I begin to suspect that he’s a keeper!
—
I’m having the kitchen painted semi-gloss white on Friday.
Life is too short to hate your kitchen walls just because you chose a stupid matte color last April.
In which I decided to blog. So here’s a blog post! Enjoy! It will not be interesting.
My contact lenses showed up a few days ago, so I’ve just sat down to fill out the rebate. (The only reason I ordered this new brand of contacts was that the optometrist’s office told me they’d be cheaper — $280 for a full year of lenses versus $312 — but I’d have to complete a rebate. But it’s easy now, because it’s online!)
The rebate form is, in essence, a data scraper: you have to upload your purchase receipt, the barcode off the product itself, and your doctor’s invoice showing the date of your last exam. I mean, I realize Google knows far more about me than Alcon now does, but honestly the receipt itself should be ample proof that you both got an exam and bought lenses?!
ANYWAY, the point of all this is that my exam, which I swear I just had, was actually on 22 November?!? Three months ago already?
WTF, time?
—
I’ve decided that I made a mistake painting the kitchen flat pale yellow, and now I think I’m going to re-paint it gloss white.
And maybe do a subway tile backsplash. Because I like subway tile, for some reason?
The rest of the house is really colorful anyway, perhaps too much so if I’m honest, so I think a white and wood kitchen would be just fine. And most of my stuff is blue and white anyway, and the appliances are white, and the countertops are white. So why not.
Also I’m starting to hate all the mismatched ceiling lights in my kitchen. They were amusing for a year, but now? Maybe living in the lighting section of a Lowe’s isn’t as funny as I’d originally thought? Over the sink is a ‘modern’ brushed nickel triple halogen light, the 90’s behemoth in the middle of the ceiling is gold and white with ash fan blades, and the dining table one is floral and brushed bronze from the 80’s! None of the fucking things have anything in common beyond all being ceiling lights!
I am probably too cheap to replace two perfectly functional ceiling lights just because I don’t like the way they look. But it’s my house, and I can bitch about it all I like! They look fucking terrible!
—
I’m on a diet.
Logging everything you eat is a fucking pain in the ass (unless all you’re eating is pre-prepared stuff with barcodes you can scan). I just ate a meal the way I normally do, and it took nearly as long to log it as it took to eat it: homemade man’ouche, labneh, a few red grapes, a few smokehouse almonds, a radish. A cup of tea with cream.
A fuckton of data entry for 359 calories.
Dieting is bullshit and I hate it, but I’m old now and the weight won’t stop piling on so I’m going to starve myself for a few months, WHAT FUCKING FUN, even though dieting doesn’t work and the results are never permanent.
Mostly what’s happening is that I sleep a lot, because you’re not thinking about food (or going out for empty calories in the form of cocktails) when you’re asleep. And I watched so much video during the Covid years that zoning out in front of the TV doesn’t really work the way it used to, sadly.
—
We still have leftover Christmas money (my aunt is insanely generous with cash gifts), so I splurged on something decadent that I’ve always wanted: a genuine Pendleton blanket!
Should be here next week. I love wool! It was on sale at about 60% off, somehow, so I also got a set of plaid mugs (what. we only have four mugs, or maybe six? MUGS ARE USEFUL, OK) and a scarf that were also in the online version of the discount bin. Very excited to own a Pendleton.
—
Are modern glasses more prone to dirt, or did I just always walk around with filthy lenses in the past?
My last couple pairs of glasses are forever greasy and smudged and impossible to see through; I’m cleaning them at least once per day, usually more.
Is it the coating? Or that they’re plastic now? Or both?
Thanks, I hate it!
—
I need to prune the rose bushes.
I have the right kind of shears, and I know to sanitize them. I’ve read several articles and watched a few YouTube videos. I feel that I could prune them with relative competence. Should have done the one out front today, but I was enjoying puttering around inside in the warm and wasn’t feeling motivated enough to put on more clothes and go outside.
Still utterly overwhelmed by the enormous size of the backyard and all the time, labor, and money it will take to turn it into something pleasant. I’m not a yard work person. I just want it to be 50% anything-other-than-lawn and be pretty without having to spend four thousand hours and twice as many dollars out there.
What feels weird is being a 50-something woman who says things like “I need to prune the rose bushes,” let alone “I’m starting to hate all the mismatched ceiling lights in my kitchen.” How the fuck did I turn into this person?
I’m old enough to be somebody’s g’ma. What a riot.
In which it’s the Super Bowl.
Let it be known that three o’clock this Sunday was the first time I’ve seen rainbows in my living room in 2023. Window prisms are the best!
I made my TV re-scan for channels, but we don’t get Fox in this house so I guess I’m not watching the Superb Owl ads this year. I could probably find some way to watch online, but I don’t care that much*. We did get Fox in the house across the street, so a slightly bigger antenna would probably work, but I don’t think I ever watched anything but football on Fox anyway.
Slept until two, had beans on toast** and a latte. Considered going out, if not to watch the game per se but more to just be around people, to participate in the holiday: the neighborhood bar with the cheese tots? A tasting room, maybe? Los Rocosos or Watermill? La Ramada?
. .. … …. ….. …. … .. .
Spent, oh, much of an hour looking at stuff to make boba tea. Tapioca pearls. Recipes. Fat straws. People, I very nearly bought a bunch of stuff to make 30 glasses of a drink I’d only want one or two of? This happens a lot. I frequently take deep dives into stupid things like bubble tea, learn all about them, fill a cart someplace, and then very nearly drop the hammer on the purchase… and then I don’t. It’s basically a hobby? Almost spending money on things? I guess it’s the internet form of window shopping, without the leaving the house or all the healthy walking and fresh air.
Decided I can’t be bothered to go out. He won’t go because he’s an introvert who won’t go anywhere (well, anywhere that isn’t a quick errand) without being strong-armed into it, and going alone sounds meh. Sometimes I really enjoy going somewhere alone, with my traveler’s notebook and maybe the Kindle or some cheese test stuff to study, to sit and eat and drink, but I guess I’m not feeling it this afternoon.
. .. … …. ….. …. … .. .
We lost our manager at work; her husband got laid off and they’ve moved to the Southwest to chase jobs. Another manager had been hired to replace her, but decided to take her previous job’s apparently generous counter offer, so now we’re short a fully-trained full time worker. I fully expect the place to descend back into the kind of chaos that results in regularly running out of mission critical items (because nobody’s in charge of ordering them and everybody else is part-time and under-trained). I offered to work F/T until someone can be hired, but so far my schedule’s the same. Guess the cheesemaker’s gonna wing it for the time being.
I do have to go in tomorrow morning to make and give out a pre-ordered cheese platter, but it’s always me when there’s a pickup outside regular shop hours, so that’s not unusual.
. .. … …. ….. …. … .. .
On the subject of the en suite bathroom, which we totally weren’t discussing: it’s less drab now! Yay! Entirely by accident, I found wall decals on Temu [basically an Amazon-killer superstore site and app, it sells everything cheaper because it ships directly from China eliminating the Amazon markup] that, amazingly, match the colorway of the en suite’s floor, baseboard, and trim, not to mention the bedroom itself’s lavender walls!
They’re abstract shapes in various shades, the exact same semi-gloss as the extant paint somehow, and installation took only minutes.
I bought two sets of decals at $1.68 each, plus a couple of small fuzzy rugs, and a matching set of wash cloths small enough to fit in the weird hanger next to the sink, and now the room no longer strikes me as cold and ugly.
Been struggling since last March trying to figure out what to do with that odd bathroom without having to invest much time and money, and it turns out to be a cheap-ass sticker set that I bought on a whim, thinking it was a different colorway entirely because the images on the site aren’t terribly accurate?!
I doubt it’s cool, using cheap and tacky stickers to make an accent wall, but hey! Because of them all the disparate features match now, and I like it! (I’ll never know why there’s gray and black tile in an otherwise entirely cream and sand brown room, but whatever.) Much better than ripping out the tile around the sink, which is what I was considering before. The same flooring and baseboard run throughout most of the house, so they weren’t gonna go anywhere. But because one of the shades of the decals is marble grey, and two more match the floor and baseboard exactly, IT ALL MATCHES. Sticker-covered accent wall! (“Wow. It looks like wallpaper,” he said.) Fucking amazing! Who knew?
*Turns out that Fox lifted the paywall this year, so it was easier than expected to find the game.
**Not English-style beans on toast; I don’t like baked beans. (Nor white sandwich bread, really, for that matter.) I eat this weird dish of generic canned (meatless) chili beans over toasted, buttered Ezekiel bread with grated cheese. It’s cheap, quick, and filled with fiber and protein! Yum!
In which there’s a soup tureen.
I keep my garlic in an old-ass soup tureen my aunt shipped us, along with a teapot, teacups, and some antique lace, when we lived in Minneapolis. It’s a great garlic keeper because it’s dark inside, but it doesn’t match my kitchen (it’s green) and takes up a bunch of counter space (it’s heavy stoneware).
So I moved the garlic into a stainless container (a tiffin, actually) and then thought, I don’t think I have ever, in my entire life, eaten soup that was served out of a tureen?
Why do I even know the word tureen? When have I ever needed to know the word tureen?
I make and eat a lot of soup, but even when I take it to the table, it’s still in the pot it was made in. I mean, a heavy stoneware tureen would probably keep soup warm a few minutes longer than a cooking pot, but, like, tureens are even sillier than gravy boats.
Tureen!
In which there is no thematic element, just a random, sloppy post.
Somebody finally moved into our old house across the street! Naturally this means I’m sitting on my couch, right in front of the plate glass window, with the drapes wide open, watching him wash his car, in completely blatant “nosy old white lady” fashion.
His car is CLEAN as FUCK, guys. He’s got a hose attachment, detergent, chamois and everything. After he dried it, he put it in the garage and covered it! Who puts a car cover over a car in a garage?! Absolutely fascinating.
It’s a chilly and grey November day, with splashes of sunlight, and lots of breeze and golden leaves gently spiraling… picture-perfect autumn. I should probably go rake leaves or some shit, but this couch is damn comfortable.
We went out to brunch earlier at The Sunny Side, which is next door to the liquor store, so I grabbed myself some Oregon-made vodka and a couple mixers. I may be starting cocktail hour pretty early. Like, any minute now, or whenever I decide what I want: bloody Mary? Vodka soda? Vodka cran? Screwdriver? Lemon drop? Vodka gimlet? Little bit vapor-locked with all the potentials, here.
Speaking of time, FUCK DST, IT’S SO FUCKING STUPID, WHY CAN’T THE FUCKING FEDERAL GOVERNMENT KILL WHATEVER IT IS THAT KEEPS STATES FROM BEING ABLE TO OPT-OUT TO STANDARD TIME?!?! The entire left coast has voted to kill the clock changes, but we can’t opt out unless we go to permanent DST rather than standard time. I hate it.
The shop is doing more business every month, and my boss told me that “a lot of that is thanks to you,” and I’ve never been so pleased. I love that little cheese shop, and I’m pleased and proud it’s doing so well. Yesterday was extremely busy (for a tiny shop in a rural town of 9,000) and honestly, I had a blast. Lots of lunch customers, lots of grocery customers, locals and tourists alike. Really enjoyable! I’m so lucky to have a good job: one in which I have responsibilities I actually enjoy, and where I am not treated like ignorant, replaceable shit.
Honestly, I think I have some genuine PTSD from working low-level corporate America jobs. Comcast, Home Depot, places like that are truly abusive and awful. If I can manage it, I will NEVER take any job ever again that isn’t operated directly by the owner. (It’s so much harder to be an abusive fuck if you actually have to look your employees in the eye every day.)
Apropos of nothing: I bought a new vape mod last weekend, and I love it. The box said it was “mint green,” but it’s actually metallic-peacock-blue-shading-to-bright-teal. It’s actually quite pretty.
I think I forgot to water the dogwoods at all this week? I have “water dogwoods” in my planner last Thursday, but I feel like I wrote that to remind myself and then never did it. I love these little trees and want them to thrive, and the internet and my aunt Kathy both say we need to water them deeply on a regular basis for at least the first entire year, so that they can grow deep roots, and I really don’t want to fuck it up!
My dad’s leaving the country for a month, to vacation in Costa Rica, and we’ll be sitting his cat. I’m really excited to have a temporary cat guest! I don’t really want to commit to a pet, mostly because they always die, but having a visiting cat? Fucking fantastic! I hope she settles in quickly and likes to cuddle, I haven’t been purred on it quite awhile.
In which there are bugs!
There was, again, an earwig in the sink this morning. I fished it out and dropped it into the compost bucket on the counter, which is what I (nearly) always do with random earwigs.
I say nearly. I keep a small bowl of flour on my counter at all times. I bake, and pulling down an entire bag of flour just to get a few teaspoons to dust with while shaping a loaf is a pain, so I just leave a bowl out. Last week I scrubbed my kitchen spotless and went to bed, and in the morning there was, in the center of the spotlessly clean long counter, an earwig, absolutely covered in flour, about ten inches away from the flour bowl, just standing there, waving its antennae in what seemed like utter bafflement. I mean, this insect was clearly so exasperated it made me laugh out loud.
I didn’t drop that one into the compost, I just let it be (as it had clearly already had Quite The Day). Who knows where it got to, but I can’t imagine trying to escape a pool of white flour the relative size of an Olympic swimming pool before breakfast.
Anyway, they’re harmless and slow and weird-looking, and I don’t mind them much as they’re sort of little sanitary engineers, with beneficial little jobs, but they tend to always be directly in the damn way. Every single time I’ve gone to pick something — a rose, a tomato, a sprig of basil, fucking anything — there’s an earwig nestled into it somewhere.
Pick a tomato? There’ll be a crack, and in that crack, AN EARWIG. Cutting a rose to put on the kitchen window sill? In between the petals of the bloom, AN EARWIG. Curled up under the basil leaf? AN EARWIG. These little shits are like tiny dumb sheepdogs, somehow.
Apparently they are, like moths, attracted to light, so apparently they amble over to doors and windows at night and somehow make their way inside, maybe on a person’s clothes, or just by walking, who knows, and end up under kitchen towels and things in the morning.
Did you know they live about a year?!
Say what you like about the royal funeral, but there are a lot of cool outfits and weird rituals.
In which it’s good.
There’s a comedy sketch show called Aunty Donna’s Big Ol’ House of Fun and it’s utterly fucking brilliant and totally the descendant of Monty Python, Young Ones, and Fry & Laurie, and you should watch it.
That is all.
In which I’ve been considering the size of Oregon lately.
I have recently learned that Oregon is about the size of the United Kingdom.
The entire United Kingdom, which is, like, three countries. Oregon’s actually got a few square miles more space than that.
What the hell. How are all those people and towns and countries in an area smaller than Oregon?! I’ve been in the habit of watching Escape to the Country in the evenings and there seem to be endless numbers of houses for sale in the UK. If a similar show were taped in Oregon, would it last fifteen seasons?
Actually, the population density in Oregon is about 17 people per square mile. In the UK it’s 281. We have a lot of empty space.
—
The closest Amtrak station to my house is in Pasco, WA, which is 51 miles away.
There is no Amtrak service from Pasco to Seattle; you either go via Spokane or Portland. This boggles my mind.
If I wanted to get from my house to, say, Astoria, I’d have to take a municipal bus from Saager’s Shoe Store (half a mile from my house) to the Amtrak transit center in Walla Walla, then take an Amtrak bus to Pasco, then transfer to a train to Portland, and then transfer to another bus to Astoria. It would take almost two days to go 327 miles.
Meanwhile, there’s some British guy who makes videos that are all “how far can you get from London by public transpo in a single day?” and the answer is: VERY. In fact, YOU CAN GO BASICALLY ANYWHERE IN GODDAMNED EUROPE, because those guys have useful, interconnecting public transport infrastructure and Oregon… doesn’t.
I mean. Buy a stupid, expensive, ugly, climate-destroying personal vehicle, you hippie. Or walk. Because fuck you.
—
Our country’s utter lack of will to put in efficient, useful public transportation drives me nuts. If you could just walk to the corner and step onto a bus, YOU WOULD. Because driving fucking sucks.
Owning a car sucks. Parking sucks, insurance and maintenance suck. It all sucks. People think it’s convenient and freeing because they’re totally ignorant of any other way, but I guarantee you that any time you hear someone gushing about a charming vacation spot they love, they love it because IT’S WALKABLE.
People love Disneyland’s Main Street USA because it’s walkable, they love Boston because it’s walkable. They love New York because it’s walkable, same for Seaside and most of Europe: IT’S WALKABLE. People loved college because it was walkable.
Cars make you miserable. They stink. They’re stupid. Car infrastructure makes towns and cities ugly as fuck. Buildings surrounded by parking lots are hideous, and you know in your bones that most of America is distressingly unbeautiful which ultimately makes you depressed. Looking at ugly shit all the time is not what you signed up for.
—
As an aside, if you try to book a Pasco, WA (PSC) to Vancouver, BC (VAC) trip on the Amtrak site, it crashes. You have to do PSC to PDX, and then PDX to VAC, and then it can’t figure out how to offer round trip options so you have to do them all manually.
I don’t know if I want to go to Vancouver BC, but as the Yeti changed jobs recently he probably can’t get time off next month for us to vacation together. So I’m considering a solo train ride!
—
I imagine a light rail through Milton-Freewater. It would go to Walla Walla and Pendleton, and at each end there’d be transfer to other trains so people could get to work. If there were frequent train service to both towns, households on my street wouldn’t have to have between two and seven fucking cars.
Imagine if each household only needed one car, and that they could, if they wanted, hardly ever use it. If it was easy to get to Walmart and back, why would you ever drive? Or if the train ran in such a way that you could get to and from your Walla Walla job easily? How fucking great would that be?
Ugh. I hate fucking cars, and I hate not being able to get anywhere without one. If there was a light rail to Walla Walla, I could take my bike to the mechanic tomorrow and wouldn’t be limping along on bike tires that won’t hold air for more than an hour.
—
Yes, I drive sometimes. Yes, I’ve even driven to work and back, which is barely half a mile. It’s fun to have access to a car. What I’m bitching about is needing one in order to be able to function in your own goddamned society because there’s no even vaguely reasonable alternative.
Example: there is a bus from here to Walla Walla. But it only goes twice a day, it barely gets within a mile of my destination, and there’s no bike rack. So, while I could technically get to the bike shop tomorrow, it’s not reasonable because this one, simple errand would take something like five hours.
—
Dunno why I’m so furious about car culture today! Probably because my bike’s needed new tires for weeks and I’m feeling sorry for myself because I can’t just drive it over to the shop, because the Yeti’s always got the car when the shop’s open because, well, it’s his car, and he works in the opposite direction.
Anyway. What’s fun in Vancouver BC?
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4 random books from my Library!
