Category Archives: Life

Happy National Sports Holiday!

Blurbs, Life

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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

About halfway through decal installation. Cute new rug! Need to replace that switch plate.


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!

Tureens

Blurbs

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!

It’s November already?!

Life, Work

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.

Earwigs

Life

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?!

DID I TELL YOU MY SHED BLEW AWAY?!?!

Life

In which I guess I haven’t posted for two months?! What the hell, man. How is anybody this lazy?

Twitter permabanned me.

No idea why. I replied to some Stonekettle tweet or another with “lol don’t hold your breath” and Twitter permanently suspended my account. (Probably got mass reported by some asshat enraged that Stonekettle called him a sissy or something; who knows.)

I appealed twice, but their idiot algorithm says I violated their TOS. With “don’t hold your breath.” Computers are stupid.

My account was something like 13 or 15 years old, and they deleted it for no reason. This is why you should keep your content where you can control it! If you want me, I show up here once a week or so.

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The cheese convention was awesome. My bosses paid my entry fee, drove me to and from, paid me most of my missed regular hours, and covered my (very nice) hotel room. Unbelievably generous! I enjoyed myself a great deal, learned a lot, and bought a couple books, a t-shirt for the yeti, and a pair of convention socks. Brought home a pretty bitchin’ swag bag (it’s an insulated lunch tote) full of brochures, stickers, samples, a water bottle, and even a bento box.

Work is awesome. I have an amazing and fantastic job, but (you could feel the ‘but’ coming) I need a goddamned vacation. My attitude is slipping, but this isn’t the time for it because we just lost our assistant cheesemaker and a couple part-time employees so we really do need to be pulling together. I keep having to come in on my days off for little things and normally I’d love it but lately I feel grumpy about it. So I think I’ll book another October trip to the coast. We had so much fun last year! I was considering going the other direction this year, back the way we came, into Idaho or Montana, because it’s gorgeous out there and a cabin vay-cay would be nice, but, like, THE OCEAN IS BETTER. So I’m thinking a week in maybe Seaside or Bandon or something, or Astoria and Ilwaco?

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I reactivated my Ipsy subscription and they sent me an amazing razor (it’s got four blades and a moisturizer strip that actually works) so I’ve been shaving my legs for the first time in most of a decade. It does feel nice, really.

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We had some severe weather last week. Thunder, lightning, high winds, and 1/4″ hail. It blew our entire fucking shed off its foundation, over the fence, upside down, and into the irrigation ditch. We had to have it hauled off!

RIP, shed. We didn’t really need you, but I hear you’ve been there, according to our ex-landlord, “for thirty or forty years.”

UPDATE: They put it in the local paper!

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The neighbors to the rear put up a big-ass privacy fence.

I hate it, but at least it’s wood rather than plastic! Fucking people and their dumb privacy fences. YOU’RE NOT THAT INTERESTING. NOBODY’S LOOKING INTO YOUR STUPID FUCKING YARD. THIS IS THE GODDAMNED DESERT, WHY THE FUCK WOULD YOU BUILD BARRIERS TO BREEZES.

Today they’re having their back yard graded with a little tractor.

Why the fuck they’re doing all of this in the wrong order I’ll never know, but apparently they’ll be re-doing the entire yard before cutting down and hauling off their very big, very dead tree? (You can see the big dead tree in this very photo, taken before the stupid new fence went up.) I mean, why the fuck would you put up a brand-new fence before having the enormous dead tree removed?!

People are dumb as hell. And now I have to figure out what to plant along the entire goddamned fence to hide it so I don’t have to be enraged every time I go outside!

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We have too much yard. I need to put at least a third of it into gravel or native grasses or something. It’s too big for non-gardeners.

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It’s official: I’m menopausal. My last period was a year ago last week.

I was just looking something up in my old Flickr account and was reminded that a few years ago (okay, six years ago actually) I was too exhausted and/or low energy to walk a single block to I Am Coffee on Lyndale and 28th. My desire for an iced coffee that I didn’t have to make or clean up after was nothing in the face of overall inability to work up enough enthusiasm to throw on some shoes and walk the short side of a single city block and back.

Most of the peri-menopausal experience was like that. No energy. No interest. No desire. I spent most of it at home, fucking around on social media, and much of it feeling guilty about not doing any hobbies or having a social life. No reading, no knitting, no journaling. Some cooking, a little baking, and the bare minimum in terms of domestic chores. Worst of all: absolutely no desire to do anything about it. Awareness of having gone in the space of a year from a person who biked everywhere and had adequate energy and a giant social life to someone who just… spent all her time at home, doing effectively nothing but recovering from work.

Occasionally, very occasionally, like, maybe twice a year, I’d get a wild hair and get The Yeti to take me out for a meal, but most of the time I didn’t even have the oomph for that. (What luck to live in the era of Door Dash and Bite Squad! I can’t even begin to estimate what I’ve spent on delivery fees and tips in the past five years.)

But lately, it’s been lifting some? I want to do stuff sometimes now? Sometimes it’s reasonably easy to get my to-do list done. I’m starting to get over giving a fuck about how my body is now: fat, achy, triple-chinned, weak, slow, and in no way vigorous or youthful. (I’m not over how terrible it is to lose all sense of vibrancy and vitality — that’s utter bullshit — but I’ve started to not care as much about the injustice of becoming a crone against my will.)

I’ve heard symptoms described as “a fog,” so I’m tempted to say that “the fog is lifting,” but I don’t know that I ever felt vague or foggy as much as just utterly devoid of energy or drive. My intellect worked the whole time, and I don’t think I felt brain fog, per se, so I’ll say it’s more like light the end of a tunnel. I woke up today feeling refreshed and capable, and got up and started acting like a normal person: made the bed, put on music, wrangled the laundry, sang to myself, make an iced espresso, did two sinks of dishes!

Of course I did all this in a body that looks like a potato and feels half as strong as I think it should.

But it’s better than it was.

I think.

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Apropos of nothing, I really miss hash brown patties. My local stores have been out of them for half a year. My kingdom for a stupid oval-shaped greasy potato thing!

I suppose I could just, you know, go to McDonald’s or something.

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The Yeti won’t eat goddamned leftovers any more, so now that I’m caffeinated I’m off to clear half my fridge straight into the trash!

THE ENTRY FOR THE MONTH OF JUNE

Life, Media

in which there’s a post completely free of theme or structure

THE BOYS, a television show on amazon

so these dummies saw homelander literally nursing (as in drinking actual breast milk) in season 1 and thought, ‘yeah, this is a powerful man, power is being able to do whatever you want, this guy is the hero of the show’

the boys subreddit is in chaos right now

homelander lets an entire plane crash, kills multiple times in petulant rages, and is clearly a sociopath/deranged fascist, his girlfriend is literally a nazi — let’s face it, the writing is hardly subtle — and these white boys thought YEAH, THIS IS THE HERO

and this is why cutting humanities from the schools is bad, these fucknuts don’t know that being a lead character isn’t the same as being the hero (which actually does rather require that the character be moral, right, and good)

honestly whole swathes of society have absolutely no hold at all on power actually being self-mastery, they honestly think REAL POWER is being a slave to one’s basest drives, that it’s being an abusive, selfish, horrific little cunt all the time and not getting punished for it

NEWS, in my local paper

the same sorts of woefully underendowed intellectuals are mad there was a drag show in pendleton and the paper covered it like it would cover literally anything else

10 or 15 years ago the average reader would have seen coverage of a drag show and simply determined they didn’t care for or about it; now, due to extreme brain-poisoning from the fox channel’s news entertainment programs and the internet’s danker corners, they’re angry and upset and offended and victimized about it and believe that society, which has LITERALLY ALWAYS HAD DRAG QUEENS, is in sharp decline

drag queens are frequently intimidating to people outside the community, sure, but everybody used to know they weren’t anything to get mad about

listen, if you hate drag queens but think rodeo clowns are totally fine and normal, you seriously need to go work on your personal shit lol

MASTER, in terms of bedrooms

the walls in the master bedroom of this house are painted lavender and i’ve been sorta struggling with it

obviously most normal people would just paint the room but i don’t want to because fuck painting, total pain in the arse

so i got a lavender blanket last week and made the bed with that and some chocolate brown sheets and a quilt from my mom and a throw, and dang! i think i’ve got a color scheme now!

dark brown and lavender look very restful and nice together, and the dresser is already dark brown, so really i just need a rug and some art, and maybe some sheers and BANG! it’s a room

but i’m here to tell you: there isn’t a single chocolate & lavender rug IN THE ENTIRE WORLD lol

(i found a great chocolate persian/oriental rug but the contrast color isn’t quite lavender, rather, it’s blue, and it just wouldn’t tie in the way i want, dang it)

anyway if you see any lavender and chocolate rugs please tell me immediately

DAD, the old pater

yesterday was father’s day, apparently, and my dad’s in town and this is quite possibly the first time we’ve been in the same town on father’s day in two decades

and i should have had him over for dinner or something but i didn’t know it was father’s day until today so there’s that opportunity wasted

happy dad’s day anyway

CHEESE CONVENTION, coming up soon

my bosses are taking me to BLAZING THE TRAIL FOR CHEESE, a big-ass cheese industry convention, in portland next month, but get this: they’re also covering transportation and lodging?!?!? they really don’t have to but i’m amazed and pleased

i think paying for entry is a reasonable employer thing to do, but gas and hotel? amazing

I am GOING to a HUGE cheese convention!!! how exciting is THAT!!

green!!!

Blurbs

dudes i’m gonna put sage green sheer curtains in a bedroom with mint green walls and i will not be taking any questions

but if you have any opinions about holdbacks i’d like to hear them

dude my fucking house is so fucking cute

Life

in which there are house pics!

so the longer i live here the more i dig this place, it’s awesome

i have prisms in the kitchen and living room windows, so i’m getting rainbows TWICE A DAY which is just the absolute best:

and i never would have decided to have a red living room, but there was a red accent wall and i just went with it and it’s the BEST:

it’ll be fucking amazing at christmas time, i’ll tell you what.

here’s dinner from the other night:

and the little rose bush out front is ORANGE, i love it so much:

there’s a pink one in the side yard:

i got a laundry thing, it’s amazing:

there’s still an empty drawer in the kitchen, that’s how much storage space the place has, and there’s still tons of space in the bathroom cupboards and drawers. the office closet is stuffed, and the guest room closet is a third full, but mostly of half-empty boxes i will eventually consolidate. the guest room’s curtains and rug are ordered, but we still need to get a bed, dresser, and night stand.

i’ve got pictures up on the walls! not a lot, but having rented nearly all my adult life i just never got into the habit of hanging things (why bother when you’re going to move in a year or two) so even just putting up a cork board over my desk was SUPER exciting! i even pulled out the old cardboard tubes and took my prints out to measure them; HOLY FUCK FRAMES ARE EXPENSIVE! but since we’ve gotten cash gifts from a few of our relatives, i’ll probably just splurge and get some art on the dang walls, too!

sitting on the patio is a joy because you can hear the creek gurgle, and also the chimes when there’s breeze. we’re not doing much landscaping because we want to see what’s here and what’s what (they just cut everything to the ground for the sale, so it’s interesting to see what things are turning out to be: half are roses and the other half are massive brambles from hell!)

put in a few pansies and two tomato plants, but that’s about it for gardening this year, i think.

the place has excellent cross breeze so i’ve had the front and back doors open most of the past month. the fridge and stove (which came with the place) both work fine. we’ve had an electrician in to bid on some work but it’ll be months before we can use the clothes dryer.

there’s really no place for a dishwasher, but there’s just two of us and i can deal. dishwashers do a shitty job anyway, really, and i’ve grown to like doing dishes when my hands are cold.

listen, there are like nine ceiling lamps in this house so i bought some fancy fan pull pendants. don’t judge me. can’t wait ’til they get here!

i love this house, i love the window in the bath, i love the cross breeze, i love the covered patio and the weird-ass workshop/shed thing and the chain link fence and the gates. i love the creak of the hardwood floors and the layout and the light and all of it. could not be more pleased!