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!

 

In which I had a massage appointment today!

About a year ago, a couple of women set up their massage practices in a building a few doors down from where I work and promptly started coming in for lunch enough that I met them, and eventually I booked an appointment with one of them and have been going every month or three since.

I don’t know exactly what the style she does is called, but it’s some variation on deep tissue. She’s Thai, so odds are non-zero it’s sen line work. Let’s just say it hurts, but a lot less than that German one that requires a dozen appointments where they dig their thumbs into your body like you’re being interrogated.

Anyway, as I was lying there experiencing the touch and subjective feelings of nurturing and care of a massage, it occurred to me that a lot of people have never had a professional massage in their entire lives, let alone enough of them to have opinions about the various styles, and I felt really kind of sad about it. Getting a massage is, well, good for you. Not to sound like a “wellness” peddler, because I’m not, but it truly is a net benefit to get body work even if you’re not particularly injured.

The first time is a little nervous-making, because you’re doing stuff you just never do in the course of your regular life: undressing in a strange room, lying naked under a sheet while a stranger rubs you, experiencing all the endorphins that you have, until now, only ever experienced in the presence of your intimates: people like your mom, or your child, or your very nearest and dear-ests. And it does take a few sessions with each new therapist until you can just lie there and take it without worrying about reciprocity, farting, or sweating on the sheets.

But OH MY FUCKING GOD, IS IT WORTH IT, and for a whole list of reasons.

Continue reading »

 

In which it must suck to be a first responder.

It’s the 4th here in M-F, which means at least ten amateur large fireworks displays within a half mile of our house. It’s insane. I can sit on the patio and see four without even turning my head, it’s loud as hell, and even in the dark there’s a massive smoke haze.

Heard about four sirens half an hour ago, and then another two or three shortly after, so I assume all the first responders are already out dealing with fires and blown-off digits. Went ahead and ran the big sprinkler on full blast in the dry back yard so that if (when) a shell lands it won’t set the entire property on fire.

Note to self: next year, figure out how to hose down the entire roof by, oh, 8:45. Just in case.

It’s a truly enormous amount of fireworks out here every year. Just 360 degrees of noise and smoke and pretty lights. I don’t mind fireworks, but I can totally see how this night would suck ass if you were back from Iraq with PTSD or whatever.

I tried to take a photo of the view from the patio, but cell phones aren’t great for that sort of thing. Just know there are A LOT OF FIREWORKS VISIBLE FROM OUR HOUSE RIGHT NOW!

 

In which I can’t fucking cook AT ALL anymore?!

Yesterday, I hurt my back walking across my kitchen. Just walking. (After doing several other things, chores, window cleaning, and dropping something and startling so hard I somehow actually caught it: that was probably when the twinge really began. But we’ll say I was walking. Because I was.)

It was fine by bedtime, but sleeping fucked it up. Getting out of bed hurt, a lot, and would have looked ridiculous had anyone been present to see it. Sitting on my chair through CCP exam prep hurt like hell, so halfway through I texted work and asked if anybody could come pick me up (because I doubted I could get on my bike, and didn’t want to have to walk).

They told me they didn’t need me and to just take the day off, since I have to work Sunday anyway. So I did!

Lying down hurt, I nearly died trying to get up to pee, and sitting hurt too. But standing was okay, comparatively, so I decided to make tamales. Tamales! Yay!

I’ve had the ingredients for literally a year, because I just kept not making tamales. The cotija was nicely aged and really delicious. I put it in the mini-chopper because fuck grating by hand when you’ve got electricity.

I doubt it was the same can of artichoke hearts; pretty sure I made some dip and replaced those once or even twice, but the masa is definitely a year or two old—I had to sift it to get the clumps out.

Soaked the very dry corn husks in hot tap water for two hours, but they probably could have used three. I don’t really know, because I’ve never used corn husks before (this is maybe my third attempt at tamales, and the other times I just used parchment paper).

I made sauce from scratch from dried chiles and garlic! Because I’m cool like that! And I know how!

Except I very nearly reduced it all the way down to ash, but luckily walked back into the kitchen just in time to take it off the heat and add a little water to bring it back. Thank God.

Get you a friend who gives you an entire set of Pyrex bowls that once belonged to her grandmother because she “doesn’t use them, and you will” like I did, and then you too will have an entire set of kick ass retro Pyrex bowls! Look at that shit! Nesting bowls! Pyrex! Retro! Free!

It’s been two and a half hours, but I’m all ready now! Inexpertly assembled my artichoke and cotija tamales with masa that I suspect, from my extensive watching-Mexican-chicks-on-YouTube tamale training, was just slightly too runny. But still viable! Husk, masa, cotija, and diced artichokes. Yum! Gonna be so good! Got them all more-or-less upright on a mat of additional corn husks, on a trivet, inside the Instant Pot, over two cups of water. Yes.

They spent 40 minutes in the pressure cooker, and when I let the pressure off so I could open the Instant Pot, it didn’t smell deliciously corny and savory with cheese and artichokes. It smelled ever-so-slightly of… Playdoh.

So here’s the thing. We all have bad habits, right?

Well, one of mine is occasionally using oil out of the fryer. Do I know this is stupid? Yes I do. Do I do it anyway? Yes I do. Has it ever come back to bite me in the ass? No it has not.

Not until today.

My masa recipe calls for six tablespoons of vegetable oil, and since I keep my vegetable oil in the back of a floor-level cupboard, and my back is fucked, and I didn’t know if I could get down onto and up off of the floor without crying, I opted to just use the oil in the fryer instead.

It’s relatively new because I recently replaced it, the oil, that is, and the color was fine, so I genuinely didn’t think twice about it. I do this shit all the time! All I ever use the fryer for is falafel anyway, so the oil might actually add some subtle flavoring to my boring, lard-free vegetarian masa recipe. Win-win, right?

Wrong.

Turns out the oil is rancid. All my work (and not-entirely-unrelated pain!) was basically wasted. Well, not really, I mean, they’re edible. I ate two. But only just barely.

If that oil were an hour older, these things’d cause cancer from all the free radicals.

So, now I have a dozen tamales, which normally I’d freeze with pride for future fast and super delicious dinners, that took hours to make, and to which I was looking so very forward because it’s taken me over a year to get around to making them, and I got an unexpected day off and needed to stand up anyway, that taste pretty bitter and bad.

Oh, and Monday I made dal makhani, but for some reason added nearly an entire teaspoon of methi powder, so even with a Hail Mary addition of sugar and extra cream it’s still bitter overall and fairly disappointing. Why the fuck did I do that?!

Conclusion: I can’t cook anymore.

I used to be able to, but now I can’t. I will now be forced to survive on salad and freeze-dried Indian food from Cumin Club.


UPDATE: It’s the next day and it wasn’t the oil. It was the masa itself. I tried to eat another tamale, it was gross, and the bag of masa flour was sitting right there, so I opened it and stuck my hand in and smelled it AND IT’S THE FLOUR, THE FLOUR IS RANCID. So I tossed it. And all my tamales. So sad.

 

In which I realized yesterday that I’ll be 60 in five years.

On Wednesday mornings, I attend a 2-hour class, via Zoom, for ACS CCP exam prep. Right now we’re covering milk, specifically acidulants used in cheesemaking, and even more specifically the difference between acids like lemon juice and acidity caused by the addition of cultures. I have my camera on but with a piece of tape over it, and I’ve just sat here in front of my computer and put on my makeup.

Not only is my entire face continuing to melt right the fuck off my skull; not only is my face’s already pronounced asymmetry getting much, much worse due to this process; not only do I now have two tiny, fine eyelashes growing out of the inner corner of my left eye for no goddamned reason; but it’s hard—so hard it verges on literally impossible—for me to use my own fingers to open compacts. My nails are now so thin and fine they break rather than grow, my fingers are weak compared to a decade ago, and a lot of my makeup products are samples, so they’re particularly small.

So, in order to open a tiny eyeshadow compact, for example, I have to use a tool. Specifically, a pair of tweezers. I can’t open tiny compacts without an auxilliary tool now. That’s how fucking old I am.

I keep expecting my body to still be 35. Whenever I witness some new process I’ve developed to accomplish something, like using a pair of tweezers to open a compact my fingers aren’t strong enough to open, I feel like I’m somehow failing. I should be stronger, I should be in better shape, this is all my fault.

But then I remember I’m literally pushing 60. That’s a really important data point. I’m much closer to 60 than I am to 43, let alone 35. Of course I have a weird method of getting out of bed; I’m old, and our mattress is still on the floor! Of course I need one of those sticky round things to open jars; I’m old and my hands were already tiny and comparatively weak to begin with! Of course I’m stiff for several minutes after getting up from sitting on the floor during an entire episode of ‘Picard’; I’m old and Westerners my age typically don’t sit cross-legged on floors for an hour and half at a time. (I’ve been a floor sitter my whole adult life, but it’s no longer easy as it once was now that I have no ass. Hormonal changes rearrange fat deposits, and collagen loss means one’s sit bones are virtually unprotected, so now I really need a folded-up blanket to sit comfortably.)

Although I no longer have Facebook or Twitter accounts, I do still use Instagram, and it keeps feeding me the Tiktok videos of some woman doing Gen X content. And every time I see her (which is more than once per session, alcorithms being the way they are), I think, “Gen X? I’m Gen X. That lady’s old.” And a split second later, I realize she’s probably a year or two younger than I am myself.

I’m old. I’ve finally aged into the dumb way I dress, with all the long skirts and flowy tunics and shit. My general shape and amount of remaining post-menopausal collagen are the result of genetics, not a personality flaw! It’s fine! I am worth more than the way I look!

Well, to myself, at least, if not to a society driven by an obsession with youth and sex. But that’s another rant.

And there have been compensations: I have a man who loves me anyway, an interesting job that’s also part-time, and we have a house I think is really cool-looking and wonderful and comfortable. I can buy groceries without checking my balance first. I have a vase full of red tulips from the yard sitting on the kitchen table. We just had the HVAC serviced, and the new capacitors have made an obvious difference. Birds are singing in my yard right this very moment, and I can hear them because it’s fine enough out to have some windows open! Life is good, even if I’m slower and weaker than I once was. I just have to remember that I’m not 43, I’m pushing 60, and that’s okay!

But Christ I’m old. Honestly. It’s so weird.