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Category Archives: Admissions
Bitter
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.
Everything is hard
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.
ranting about work!
in which i stayed an hour late tonight because of reasons
there’s new staff at the creamery (we lost five people in a single week a couple months ago) and they tend to leave their shit all over the work benches even when they’re not using them
“shit” in this context is buckets, scissors, slicers, knives, pens, vac bags, labels, tape, notes, and cheese. all these things have places they belong, and those places are NOT on on a work bench other staff need to use
nothing wastes more time than having to clean both before and after i do a task; workstations should either be actively in use or CLEAN, not abandoned and dirty
anybody starting a task should be able to do so from a fully reset kitchen, every single time, which means everybody needs to fucking clean as they go
when i went to slice and package charcuterie today, i had to clean the fucking slicer first, and then i had to clean & sanitize the bench, and then i had to clean the vac sealer
the number of times i have had to wash the wire cutter and knife and planer and bench and scale before i could even start cutting cheese lately is, well, too fucking many
i do too many dishes and bench resets for other people. like, i DO NOT mind helping out when it’s crazy busy, but this happens every single day now: i have to clean equipment and work areas before i can start to do my own tasks
i had to return an entire cart worth of buckets and molds (at least they were clean, i’m grateful for that!) to the creamery, where they belong (and where they traditionally sit to air-dry), from the kitchen, where they didn’t, just so i could clear enough room on the drying rack to do somebody else’s dishes after they left without doing them
all but one of the morning staff left without finishing their cleaning and dishes, and i staged their overflowing trash for them by the exit to go out but they all just walked past it so i took seven bags out myself tonight
i need to figure out how to communicate “clean as you go” and “take the trash out when you clock out” and “do your fucking dishes so i don’t have to wash equipment before i can work” and “don’t take a break until you’ve cleared your work area” without sounding as annoyed as i actually am
two of them have repeatedly told me they’re “so busy,” but they’re also standing around talking for the bulk of the first two hours of my shift; now, i know you’ve been there for hours already when i arrive, and i don’t mind if you sit down for awhile, please do take a break, but IF YOU FUCKING RESET THE KITCHEN FIRST, MAYBE I CAN ACTUALLY START DOING WHAT I NEED TO DO instead of waiting for a clean workstation and clean equipment or cleaning up after you again
i’m very glad i no longer have to package the hundreds of pounds of curds they do every week, and, as i said, i’m absolutely happy to pitch in WHEN NEEDED, but i don’t like having to clean the whole goddamned kitchen before i can do my job because everybody’s decided to just not clean up after themselves
so today i basically faffed around the shop for a couple hours when i got there, decorating for christmas, because i didn’t feel like doing everybody’s dishes and trash and bench resets, but i ultimately ended up cleaning the entire kitchen after they all left anyway, then doing my own work, and then closing (aka cleaning the kitchen again so it’s ready for them in the morning), which is why i clocked out an hour late
lol YES, I KNOW this is just another short stanza in the eternal open-versus-close-staff war, and basically, in spite of the above bitching and attitude and do-not-like nonsense, i’ve decided my approach: i’ll just fucking clean! i’m not too good for it, i’m not above it, i don’t need to have ego about it, and i’m just gonna set the standard and keep it myself without being invested in how other people respond, because the bulk of this rant is, i realize, just ego and attachment and judgement
yes.
confession
in which i rage a little
you have no idea how much time and intention i put into overcoming that shitty “everyone is stupid” attitude smart people often fall prey to and which turns them into assholes, only to end up in this timeline where a third of the population is demonstrably, irrefutably stupid
i mean i used to say that people may look stupid from the outside, but if you understand their actual specific circumstances, most people’s behavior and decisions are actually rational in context
but here we are!
…adults railing against wearing masks and getting vaccines during A DEADLY GLOBAL PANDEMIC, because some bullshit about their “rights” being infringed
…people voting on the single platform of provincial, ignorant fucking racism (see: trump and brexit) and nostalgia for the fake era of 50’s american prosperity
…we just had a record-breakingly insane heat dome and shit’s on fire (as of the time of writing, cle elum has an evac order) AND we’re in a drought. plus most if not all of both WA and OR have official moratoriums on fireworks, but motherfuckers are out there BLOWING OFF FIREWORKS aka this neighborhood sounds like fucking afghanistan in 2010 because LET’S RAIN DOWN SHIT THAT’S EITHER ON FIRE OR JUST MERELY VERY GODDAMNED HOT on dry grasses
…if you watch broadcast TV, which you don’t if you’re under 45, because why the fuck would you, and you lack sufficient critical thinking skills, you probably think that a lot of those snake oil products you see advertised are actually legit because they’re on TV and you don’t know that whatever regulatory bodies that should be protecting you from such garbage lack the funding to do so
…the preponderance of our citizenry really feel that they not only can but should drive everywhere, all the time, because they lack the ability to imagine any other way, like, people will straight up fucking drive a tenth of a mile and back rather than walk or cycle simply because society is so incredibly, horribly, wastefully car-centric and while i have sympathy for thinking this (there are so many mechanisms in place to cause people to think this way) i also require people to FUCKING DO BETTER
Gah.
in which there’s a complaint
being old sucks because everything hurts all the goddamned time for no reason and i get uglier day by day
but at least there’s rampant government and corporate corruption, grift, a global pandemic, and the climate to make me feel worse!
racists, anti-vaxxers, MAGAts (i cannot imagine finding the former guy intelligent, capable, and a good leader; the man’s a venal, ignorant, racist fucking moron and i have rocks in my yard smarter than his rabid followers), BUT WAIT! a billionaire class that could feed and shelter everyone AND give us all healthcare but just chooses not to because they hold us, their own species, the very one that made them obscenely wealthy, in contempt because they honestly believe their disgusting greed means they’re better than everyone else
I need…
In which I need.
I need to quit being so old and fat.
Because it’s constantly uncomfortable. Jeez. The joints, the ankles, the ugh. However, problem is, I dislike diet and exercise a great deal and also time appears, in this plane, to be linear, so apparently I’m fucked.
Such a pain. A pain in the ass.
TWO FUCKING DECADES AGO
In which there is an anniversary.
Two fucking decades ago, on the 9th of March, I registered this domain name.
I was working as an engineering assistant at a small ISP in rural Iowa and since part of my job was second and third-tier technical support, I was encouraged to learn HTML. So I did.
Goblinbox has been online ever since, with fewer than a few days of downtime (caused by moves and DNS delays as I changed jobs and hosts over the years).
GOBLINBOX IS TWENTY FUCKING YEARS OLD, which puts me into my fifties.
Jesus.
It’s gonna snow: ugh
In which there’s an update. Yawn.
I’ve been watching Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Disenchantment lately. Fun TV.
Today in cooking, I packed chili, a baked potato, and sour cream and cheddar into a bento for lunch. Turned some beans leftover from making the chili into refried beans, and made Taco Bell-style red sauce, and put them into burritos. I was going to do pita bread and an elaborate Middle Eastern bento, but eh. Baked up some lemon bars from a mix which are currently sitting on the garage floor to quick-cool. (If you’ve never had the wonder that is the Krusteaz lemon bar, buy yourself a box. It’s fucking amazeballs.)
Apparently we’ve got weather coming, up to nine inches of snow between Thursday and Saturday. All I want is for it to be the type of snow I can ride a bike in, and not that bizarre impossibly dry snow that happens around here sometimes that is so fluffy and weird bike tires can’t get any traction.
I get both The Union-Bulletin and the Eastern Oregonian because I believe it’s my duty to support the Fourth Estate at the local level but read them less than half the time. However, one paper had an article stating local foodbanks are overwhelmed and need cash, so I wrote a check (lol) to CAPECO to mail out tomorrow. They run the food bank around the corner from the creamery; I might buy 20 pounds of cheese from work and drop it off, too.
In continuing Aging While Female news, I no longer sleep in single sessions. I go to bed, sleep for two to four hours, wake for one to six hours, and then sleep another five to seven hours (if time allows). It’s fantastic, I fucking hate it. I have, in the past month, been to work on less than four hours sleep more than once, and it sucks. Luckily my job’s flexible enough that I don’t end up doing delicate stuff when I’m tired as hell, but man I really don’t like any form of insomnia after an entire lifetime of being able to sleep just fine.
Here’s a list of my weekend accomplishments: cooked several meals, cleaned the kitchen several times, did dishes twice, did three loads of laundry, changed the bed linens, paid bills, bought groceries, and cleaned the toilet. Also: bought weird stuff online, including a bento box I absolutely do not need.
All this was intended to help me KEEP my dental appointment, not lose it
In which I’m currently quarantined.
This entire post is tl;dr but I’m going to write it anyway because I’ve got nothing but time for the next 3 to 7 days.
Wednesday I woke up, felt fine, got dressed, packed up my stuff, and was making a sandwich to take to work when I had that sensation that means I’ll be needing a bit of time on the toilet, if you know what I mean, but I was also supposed to be leaving for work in minutes, so I texted everybody to let them know I’d be a bit late.
And it went downhill from there. Fast. Cramps, nausea, aches, chills, diarrhea. Two hours later I gave up hope and texted to say I wouldn’t be in. By mid-evening I felt fine, and the next day I went to work.
Thursday was a little low-energy, but otherwise perfectly normal. Didn’t think anything of it. Too many Del Taco burritos, too much wine, just normal weird gut behavior, who knows.
Friday I woke up at dawn feeling normal but annoyed, because waking up these days often means staying up and not getting back to sleep before having to go to work. Then I got a headache, but did manage to drift off, so thought it’d be gone by the time I had to get up for work.
It wasn’t gone. It was splitting, and I had aches and nausea too. But not that bad, really, so I got up and got dressed and packed my stuff and left for work.
And turned around two blocks later and came home and called out sick again because my fucking head was killing me and I honestly felt really gross.
When he got home he told me it sounded like Covid-19 and that he’d sleep in the living room. I checked the CDC site and lo: diarrhea and chills are now symptoms. I emailed work that I’d be out yet again, and that I’d call the doctor the next day (because that sounds like the responsible thing to do when you work in a food manufactory during a global pandemic). I slept even more.
Well, I have a dental appointment on Tuesday, and I REALLY WANT TO KEEP IT. I was going to make it back in March — even filled out all the paperwork — but there was the pandemic, see, so I didn’t actually make one until three weeks ago. But they’d fucked up somehow, so I didn’t get seen and they never called me to reschedule like they said they would so when I called them three days later the next open slot was Tuesday. So it’s an appointment three weeks in the making, and my mouth is a disaster and I WANT TO KEEP IT.
But I also know they’ll ask me if I’ve had any symptoms, and I have, so I decided to call the clinic and ask them if they thought I needed testing. Because I only have 5 symptoms on a list of 11, and none of them are fever or cough, I thought they’d say no, sounds like the crud, drink fluids, rest, etc etc.
But what she actually said was, “With those symptoms, I’d say you need to be tested for Covid-19.” And then she told me where to go to get tested, which is at the Fast-Track drive-through at Providence.
So I went.
And it took over half an hour but was otherwise relatively easy, and they gave me paperwork and told me I’m quarantined until I get my results… in three to seven days. I’m not cleared to work before then.
And I’m also NOT CLEARED TO TAKE MY DENTAL APPOINTMENT, and have to call and reschedule.
Today I’m not that sick, just fatigued (which honestly I think is related more to my gum disease than anything else) and intermittently nauseous and headachey. The diarrhea only lasted a day (though that’s certainly long enough), with maybe a reprise Friday morning but it’s hard to tell because I was much more concerned with the blinding headache.
My mouth, though: I have gum disease. I used to get prophy three or four times a year but I haven’t had a cleaning in over six years now, for various reasons, most of them laziness. (I did try to see dentists in Minneapolis, but it was always hard finding one I could get to easily, without busses or Ubers, and then the one I could bike to didn’t take my insurance and wanted me to pay cash, plus weather and work schedules and blah blah blah… I just haven’t been seen in too long.) Which is to say that there’s bacteria in my jaw bones now. They burrow town into your sockets and down the roots of your teeth and into your upper and lower jaw bones, and I know I’m there because I can feel it. I get intermittent gland swelling, too. I need goddamned planing & scaling and they’ll probably put me on antibiotics, too.
This is all gross, I know, but that’s the joy of being embodied, right?
Long story short, we need my test not to be positive, because if it is, it basically shuts the entire creamery down for ten days while everybody gets tested, and that would be awful, plus it’ll push my dental appointment back even further.
All I wanted was my fucking dental appointment! I don’t know why I’m sick and I don’t feel bad enough to really worry, it’s just the crap you get from time to time. I’ve been sick about every two months since we moved out here, and that’s always normal for me: move across the country, catch absolutely everything for the next 10-12 months. Happens every single time. But I gotta say, during a pandemic it’s complete bullshit!