I've been buying less and less meal boxes from Martha Stewart and Marley Spoon because... A) They are expensive, and... B) It's sometimes tough to find two new recipes I want to try on the same week. Most of the older recipes I like have been made numerous times on my own for less money, so it's only the new ones I really care about. This week finally had two that I wanted to try, so I coughed up the money to pay for them.
Tonight was Indonesian Vegetable Nasi Goreng with Crispy Shallots...
I was dubious about the taste because the sauce has ketchup, vinegar, teriyaki sauce, chili garlic sauce, salt, and... sugar? But it was actually very good.
Last night was Black Bean & Quinoa Taco Bowl with Crispy Tortilla Strips. And I guess I owe an apology to Martha Stewart. I ordered this one even though I don't care for quinoa very much. I do love me a good taco bowl though, and it sure looked great in the photo...
It was a lot more work than I expected, but hey... TACO BOWL FOR DINNER! Then I got to the part of the recipe where you slop marinated romaine and tomatoes OVER HOT QUINOA AND SPICED BLACK BEANS! And I was all... BLECH! The lettuce is going to wilt immediately and I'm going to end up with a gross, sludgey, toxic mess. Bad Martha! But NOPE! Martha is always right, and I should have known she wouldn't endorse a bad recipe. This was ONE PHENOMENAL SALAD! Absolutely loved it, even though mine didn't look as nice as the photo...
And while it wasn't as good for my leftovers lunch as it was fresh, it was still pretty good...
Boy, gotta hand it to Martha's meal service... she's opened me up to so many amazing recipes that I never would have found on my own! And now I have two more. Both of which might actually be good for me? Say it isn't so!
Now that's some food for thought.
Because thought has to be put somewhere now-a-days.
Well, maybe not so much "love" as "acknowledgement." An acknowledgement that they too are a living creature on this earth and deserve to be cherished as any living creature should be.
Which is why I don't kill spiders or flies or anything else if I can help it.
All Hallows' Eve was a depressing affair. I bought Halloween candy thinking that I would figure out a way to pass it out in case trick-or-treaters showed up. But, alas, I ultimately decided it would be better to close the blinds, turn out the lights, disconnect the doorbell, and drink. In the near-five-years that I've lived here I've never had the blinds down. I didn't even know if they worked...
I ripped down the blinds by the cat tree so the cats wouldn't get caught up, so I had to board it up. Jake was not happy...
The drinking had more to do with ending Daylight Saving Time than being depressed at how shitty my Halloween had become, but you probably knew that already.
When I woke up Sunday morning the first thing I saw was a tiny fuzzy spider on my bedside table lamp. I took my chocolate graham crackers out of their Ziploc and used the bag to trap the little guy. And I do mean little, as you can see by the grain of sugar on his back...
It's a nice warm Fall day so I set him out in the sunshine, make sure he could walk okay, then took his picture...
It wasn't until I got back inside my home and looked down to admire my clean floors that I noticed I was in my underwear. I didn't think that I saw anybody out there with me... but didn't know for sure. Can they call the police for indecent exposure if you're outside in your drawers? Probably...
And now I guess it's time for me to willfully ignore Election Night coverage. I've voted and that's all I can do. Whatever happens happens and I'll find out about it tomorrow... or next week... or next month. In the meanwhile it's once again absurd how all these sites are forecasting a runaway election for Biden. I know better. We've been through it all before.
Friday night when I got home I decided to make the Linguini Walnut cream Sauce that I had been craving all week. I never made it because I was too tired after work to even think about cooking or cleaning up the mess. Friday was no different, but I decided to do it anyway because I was tired of frozen burritos and peanut butter sandwiches.
I've made the recipe so many times that I just do it all from memory. Chop the shallots, add garlic and butter to soften, add crushed walnuts 'til toasted, cook pasta, add pasta, parmesan, mascarpone, sour cream, pasta water, salt, and pepper. Serve with parsley and parmesan. As usual I made extra so I had leftovers for a couple meals.
After cooking I threw together a salad and decided to post my amazing dinner to Facebook so everybody could be jealous that I was eating home-cooked fabulousness on a Friday night...
...and was mortified that I couldn't find a clean spot on my kitchen floor to photograph against. I had spilled stuff, dribbled stuff, and even had a leaky tub of ice cream which made messes that I wiped up but never truly cleaned. Eventually I gave up and zoomed in close so my dirty floor wouldn't show...
The following morning I took a hard look at my floors and couldn't believe how bad things had gotten. I'm meticulous about keeping my countertops spotless but, without guests to impress thanks to quarantine, I had been neglecting my floors. I hadn't steam-cleaned them in months, so I guess it was time. Once I was done I removed the cleaning pad and... holy shit...
THAT'S JUST FROM MY SMALL KITCHEN ALONE! Remember when I first got my steam-mop how mortified I was seeing the pad AFTER CLEANING MY ENTIRE HOME? This is what grossed me out after steaming a kitchen, living/dining room, two bathrooms, a laundry room, two hallways, and three bedrooms...
I've always been obsessive about keeping a clean house... especially my kitchen. It's highly disturbing that I've used the pandemic and subsequent lack of houseguests as an excuse to just "let things go," and this is where it's gotten me.
But I'm going to try and not beat myself up over it.
Like everybody else, the mental toll of being isolated while the world goes to hell has changed my perspective when it comes to things I allow myself to beat myself up over.
Eh. You know what I mean.
Today was "Flu Shot Day" at work. I got it for years, then stopped because I so rarely get sick, then started again when my doctor said "Tens of thousands of people die each year from the flu, but you do you." Physically, the shots never bother me. I used to get three allergy shots a year for decades. It's the psychological game that does me in. It's like I can FEEL those tiny amounts of weakened flu strain viruses whooshing into my arm... along with my body going "Oh shit!" and creating antibodies to battle it out. I can't really, of course, but that's my imagination for you. Creating a horror narrative where none exist.
And speaking of a horror narrative...
As I think I've mentioned a few times, I have "themed" months for the movies I watch. October, of course, is devoted to horror films. It's not my preferred genre, to be sure, but there are gems to be had. Last night I finally got around to watching Doctor Sleep. And since HBO had the extended "Director's Cut" available, that's the one I went with...
I liked it. I liked it a lot.
It's light on genuine frights, but has some truly disturbing moments. One of the moments is so disturbing that I question how they even managed to film it. Acting is acting, but some things are just too "out-there" even when you're pretending.
Doctor Sleep is Stephen King's follow-up to The Shining. The sequel book was excellent, and very much worthy of the original novel. Even as a King fan, I find some of his books miss the mark for me, but this was definitely not one of them. It continues the story of Danny Torrance, now all grown up, after what he went through at the Overlook Hotel. Some of the beats are predictable (Danny is using drugs and alcohol to dull his "gifts") but there are still some good surprises to be had. Along the way he is contacted by Abra, a young girl with shining powers that eclipse his own. There's also a spooky group of villains in "The True Knot" who hunt people with the shining so they can torture them, kill them, and extract their power as life-extending "steam."
King infamously hated the Stanley Kubrick film adaptation of The Shining. I was disappointed in the changed that were made, but found Jack Nicholson's performance more than made up for it. This was one of those rare instances where I liked both the book and the movie... but for different reasons.
The Doctor Sleep film is kinda strange in that it's not a direct sequel to the movie, though it definitely takes its cues from there. It's also not a true adaptation of the book. It pays homage to both and I think is better because of it. Suffice to say that fans of both will find things to love and to not love so much.
The best part of the film is the casting. Ewan McGregor as Danny is flawless. He has an amazing knack for being able to draw on the haunted narrative that his character demands, and I don't know that many other actors could have done as good a job of it. They also struck gold with Kyliegh Curran as Abra, a critical role that would have ruined the movie if they cast somebody up to the task. But the real standout to me was Rebecca Ferguson as Rose The Hat. She completely nailed the role. You walk away from the film hating her. In a good way...
There wasn't a minute she was on screen where I wasn't wanting her dead.
I think the movie is approachable even if you didn't read/see The Shining. Though, of course, you'll get a little more out of it if you've seen the Kubrick film). If you're looking something to watch to get in the Halloween spirit, this is worth a look (and see the Director's Cut, if you can find it... HBO Max has it as an "extra").
And now, if you'll excuse me, the battle for flu virus supremacy continues in my bloodstream. I was told this year that they are giving out higher doses, so I guess we'll see. It's 2020, after all.
It was a day where so many things went wrong. Which is no surprise, because this has been the year where so many things went wrong.
12:30am — I have been trying to get more sleep, so I went to bed at half-past midnight. I fell asleep around 1:00am, which is very good for somebody who usually goes to bed around 3:30am. Any sleep I was going to get was short-lived, however.
1:10am — Remember how I paid extra for a kitchen faucet with the sensor under the neck where my cats couldn't turn it on?
My cats rarely jump up on my kitchen counters, but apparently Jake not only did that... but he accidentally found out the hard way how to turn the faucet on. It would automatically turn off after four minutes, but I didn't know what was going on, so I ran downstairs to see if anybody was hurt.
3:30am — I finally fell back asleep at 3:30am which, ironically, is my usual bedtime.
6:30am — I was awakened three hours later when the alarm went off to feed my cats breakfast (I'm easing them into the end of Daylight Saving Time).
7:00am — After taking a quick shower I plugged my shiny new 14 Terabyte backup drive into my NAS. Just try telling my 1986 self that a 14 TB drive would fit in my hand, be available to the public, and cost under $200. Incredible...
9:00am — After getting everything set up, starting my backup, and working for a bit while making sure everything was backing up, I headed off to work. The first thing I did was call up my NAS back home so I could grab the files I was working on... ONLY TO FIND OUT THAT EVERYTHING WAS DISPLAYED IN ITALIAN! And I could not find a way to change it back to English! My filenames were still as I made them, but all the commands and such are Italian now for some reason. I studied conversational Italian when I ended up going to Italy so often... but that's not at all helpful to me when trying to read technical stuff. I ended up using my memory, best guesses, and Google Translate to get my work done.
10:30am — I learned of another friend-of-a-friend who took their own life after being furloughed from their job due to the pandemic. That makes two. I did not know either of these people, but they were important to people I care about, so that makes them important to me. I honestly don't know what the final straw was which led to something so tragic. If I had to guess, it would be the end of the month being right around the corner and having no money to pay the bills. After not being able to find a job despite months of looking, their only hope was a stimulus check, but Mitch McConnell shut down Congress after shoving an inexperienced bigot into that vacant Supreme Court seat. So here we are.
11:40am — The sun started coming out, so I decided to take the rest of the day off to install some
12:35pm — Well, I didn't fall off the roof, so there's that. But, alas, the cable ended up being too short to reach the outlet, so I had to run into The Big City to get an all-weather extension cord. On my way out of town, I was reminded of the horrible news I had gotten just two hours earlier. BECAUSE HA HA HA HA! SUICIDE IS HILARIOUS!
12:45pm — And... I get pulled over by the State Patrol. I was not speeding, so I had no idea what the fuck I did to deserve that. Turns out my tabs were expired. Fortunately I had my receipt showing that I bought them online back in August... I just never got them in the mail. Weirdly enough, the officer told me that they were showing in the system as "unpaid." He said he wouldn't give me a ticket if I promised to look into it with the DOL. Nice guy. Even though he was unmasked the whole time.
1:25pm — I stopped at Petco so I could refill all my kitty litter buckets to get my cats through the winter. Alas, they only had enough to fill two of my four buckets... so I ended up having to buy two new ones. There's $6 I'll never get back.
1:40pm — I pick up the extension cable I needed. Whee.
1:55pm — Since I was in the neighborhood, I decided to stop by Burger King for an Impossible Whopper. There wasn't a special going on, so I had to pay full price. Full price! Thanks, 2020! I got my order
2:30pm — Before pulling back into town, I make a detour to a licensing office to pick up my tabs. Since they too have no record of the payment going through despite my receipt, I end up having to pay the $68.00 + $2.25 credit card fee. This is turning out to be an expensive day.
2:45pm — I sit down for a minute. My plan was to figure out why my NAS is speaking Italian, but instead this happens...
3:00pm — After wrapping and taping the extension cord connection to keep water out, I zip=tied everything to the gutter struts to keep it out of the trough. Then I plugged the gutter cable and the roof cable into a "smart" outlet switch so my house can turn them on when it snows and the temperature is below freezing. Looks like I'm good to go for winter.
4:00pm — Before it gets dark, I install cameras in the cat shelters I set up last week, then change batteries on the WiFi temperature sensors. This way I can keep track of Fake Jake to make sure he's doing okay as the temperatures drop below freezing. Then I cut back my hydrangeas, loaded the dishwasher, and figured out how to get my NAS speaking English again.
5:15pm — I am tired. My back hurts. My feet are cold. So I grab a sandwich for dinner and put my feet up on my heating pad. I have it to myself for all of ten minutes. Despite having his own heating pad, Jake takes over mine every time...
9:15pm — Fake Jake calls it a night and is all comfy in his shelter. Tomorrow I'll shorten the berms so he'll be a little more sheltered from any wind...
9:30pm — Bloggity blog blog blog. Let's hope I can get to bed before 3:30am tonight.
The other day I was headed home from a quick run to the grocery store and, because it was just after 5:00, I decided to take "the back roads" home. This sounds more dramatic than it is. I live in a small city, so it's not like I'm avoiding a highway or anything... I'm just deviating from the "main" route that I'd normally use 99% of the time.
As I was crossing the railroad tracks, I had a flashback that hit me like a punch in the gut...
I had moved my mom to a facility on the coast in September of 2016 because she required a level of care I could no longer provide. At this point she still recognized me, so my visits every-other-week were especially painful. In my heart I felt like I was abandoning her every time I left even though my head knew that it was the only option available. After making the two-hour drive home from her birthday dinner in December, I saw that snow removal was happening on the "main route" so I turned to take "the back roads" in the hopes that I would get home quicker.
As I was crossing the railroad tracks after sundown, the right side of my car fell off the road and dropped between the tracks below. Turns out that when they plowed the street they plowed way too far to the right, so the road I was driving on was not actually the road, it was just snow pack. Snow pack that could not support the weight of my car, so down I went. It was such a sudden and unexpected jump that I remember biting my tongue.
In the photo above, it doesn't look like much of a drop, but when you look at a photo from the opposite angle, you can see it's quite a height to fall...
It was a drop I had no way of seeing because it was plowed even to the road, everything was white, and it was dark out.
At the time my financial picture was dire. I had to come up with a significant chunk of money to get my mom into her new place and I didn't have two nickels to rub together... let alone have money to pay for auto repairs. I remember sitting there behind the wheel with my car off the road feeling utterly defeated. My mom's health was declining. I was overwhelmed with work and having to travel. And my credit cards, which I had worked so hard to pay off, were likely going to build up again because there were just too many expenses piling up.
Now this.
My car is front-wheel drive, so I was pretty much stuck. Trying to slowly back up just caused my tires to spin out in the snow. So I got out and took inventory of everything in my trunk. I had kitty litter, which I sprinkled under my left-front tire for traction. I also had a bundle of rope and some blankets, which I gathered up and stuck under my right-front tire. Then I
"Well that sounds expensive" I said out loud to nobody.
In the morning I backed out onto the driveway so I could try and see what was dragging. All I could tell was that it wasn't the muffler because the noise was coming from the front end.
Turns out it wasn't quite so bad as I had feared. Because cars are cheap crap now-a-days, it was a big piece of plastic which, apparently, was there to shield the underside of the motor from getting splashed by road grime. At first I tried to just rip it off the car but it was too well bolted on the back-side. My solution was to use zip-ties to pass through the holes in the plastic shield where the bolts had ripped through, and basically fasten it back to my car's frame.
It worked just fine and cost me $3.00 cash money.
A couple of years later I was driving down the highway when the zip-ties finally fell apart. So there I was all SCRAPE! SCRAPE! SCRAPE! again. This time with lots of people around. Fifteen minutes down the road I pulled off to an Auto-Zone so I could buy another bag of zip-ties to get me home. Though this time I spend $5.00 so I could get the industrial-strength version.
Those zip-ties are still holding my car together to this day...
And since it seems to be working, I guess I won't bother paying to have the plastic repaired or replaced... though I probably should at some point. Having people stare at me as I go driving by while my car is going SCRAPE! SCRAPE! SCRAPE! is enough to make me want to die from embarrassment.
And if I were to die?
Guess it only takes an 8-inch fall to kill you, as unlikely as that may seem.
Not a great day to be Dave, just sayin'.
I worked a half-day on Sunday so I could be ahead of the game when I walked into the office this morning. That was absolute folly, because I was confronted by or Horrendous Monday Problem the minute I sat down and checked my email. Nothing that was my fault or the fault of anybody I work with, mind you, it was a 3rd party problem which is now my problem. In all honesty, I wouldn't be upset about it if I didn't have so much work already on my plate, but here we are. Oh well. It's not like I have anything piling up on my social calendar. Though I really, really need to clean my house.
Other than the impending cascade of work which will be falling on my head over the next several weeks, my mind has been focused on one thing and one thing only today...
Yep... next Saturday before bed we will be "Falling Back" an hour because we're fucking stupid like that. And I am already mortified at the idea of it because after the change all the daylight hours will be happening while I'm at the office. Instead of getting a small slice of sunshine at the end of my work day, I'll be getting jack-shit and total darkness. Which is buckets of fun when it starts snowing heavy.
Honest to God I don't know why people aren't in open revolt and advocating anarchy over the government forcing us to dick with the clocks twice a year. At the very least politicians should be voted out of office for refusing to do anything about it. NOBODY WANTS DAYLIGHT SAVING TIME TO END, SO JUST MAKE IT PERMANENT OR WE WILL FUCKING END YOU! Is that what it's going to take?
Oh probably.
In today's non-calling-for-the-heads-of-our-politicians news... NASA announced there's water on the sunlit surface of the moon. As in our moon. As in THE moon. It's not like a lake full of water, it's a relatively tiny amount of water... and it's apparently trapped in glass bead or some crazy shit like that... but it's still kinda a big deal. Water is heavy. Getting water off the surface of the earth is difficult, expensive, and takes a lot of energy. Being able to get it off the moon somehow would be a game-changer for space exploration and building a human colony on the lunar surface.
Given how we seem to be intent on fucking up the planet with the Supreme Court "justices" we're installing, the moon may very well be the only source of clean water we'll have left.
Until we fuck that up as well.
If there's one thing I'm confident of, it's that we will continue to burn down the planet because it's inconvenient to try and save it. If there's two things I'm confident of, it's that we will continue to burn down the planet because it's inconvenient to try and save it... AND we're going to be stuck with senselessly fucking with the clocks forever because politicians are too big of fucking assholes to give a shit about what US citizens want or need. There's lobbyist dick to suck for cash and reelection to think about, and that's all that matters to the pieces of shit.
And to us, apparently, since we keep reelecting them.
I read yet another article calling me stupid because I have cloud internet security cameras. It's all BUT WHAT IF PEOPLE HACK YOUR CAMERAS AND SPY ON YOU? Well, first of all, my interior cameras automatically turn off when my iPhone detects that I'm at my house. By the time I walk in the door, all the cameras have switched off. In order for them to turn on again, I either have to leave my home or manually turn them on.
Second of all? Even if somebody hacked my cameras, what would they see? Me partying with cocaine and hookers while cockfights are being held in my living room?
I wish.
In actuality, the worst thing that they might see would be me talking to my cats...
This is me telling Jake that he can't have my bread because it's my food and he just had his dinner. I then go on to explain that bread is probably not a good thing for cats to eat because it's people-food and might make his tummy hurt. When none of that works, I just tell him a story about that time I was partying with cocaine and hookers at a Vegas cockfight.
And, yes, I manually turned on my camera to get that photo. It's okay though because the hookers and cocaine is in the kitchen and the cockfight doesn't start until midnight.
And don't get all judgemental... we'll totally be masked for the cockfight.
I get enough judgement for having cloud security cameras.
I've been walking to work whenever possible in order to fill in the "Activity Rings" on my Apple Watch so it won't bug me about being a potato. Few things are worse than sitting on your couch watching television and eating Cheetos when your Apple Watch buzzes and says "You can still do it!" At which point I get all mad at my watch and tell it "Stop bothering me! Can't you see I'm watching TV?
And, oh yeah, apparently it's healthy to get some exercise from time to time.
EXCEPT WHEN YOUR EXERCISE TRIES TO KILL YOU!
This morning on my way to work I tripped over some twine that had been discarded in the field behind my house. And it wasn't one of those "oopsies!" moments, I bit it pretty hard. Lucky for me, my security camera captured the whole thing. I've cropped into the footage here...
Hurt my wrist. Hurt my elbow. Really hurt my knee. And hurt my pride... because, seriously, am I so old that I'm going to have to get one of those LifeCall alerts now?
Oh probably.
And since I'm The Olds now, I know I'm not going to heal as fast as I did in my 20's. Nope... this pain is going to be with me for a while. What's weird is that it doesn't hurt very much when I'm moving. It's when I've been sitting at my desk for a couple hours then try to move that's the killer. The pain in my knee is breathtaking. As in it literally takes my breath away.
Something else that took my breath away?
My Apple Watch, which is supposed to have "fall detection," didn't detect shit. Didn't beep and say "Holy shit, are you okay?" Didn't ask if I wanted to call for an ambulance. Didn't even have a laugh at my expense. Not sure what's going on there, but it's irritating to know that this feature will not be having my back if I need it. Or having my knee, as the case may be.
So that's my hump-day today. How're things with you?
I've written about how Jake crawls all over me while I sleep but, by some miracle, I don't wake up. I say "miracle" because I am a light sleeper.
But it doesn't work the other way around.
Probably because he's (relatively) small and I'm (relatively) big, so me bumping into him is quite a bit different than him bumping into me. Poor guy, I woke him up a half dozen times last night. Here he is wide awake after I rolled onto my side and ran into him...
But that wasn't bad enough. I was exceedingly restless and was pushing the poor guy around all night...
He looks like a Weeble. Just look at that face. He doesn't know what happened...
But does he go find a calmer place to sleep? Nope! Curls right back up against my legs.
I'd feel bad, but he sleeps all day long while I'm slaving away at work, so I'm sure he's all good.
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