Category Archives: Life

Not much. You?

Life

In which there’s a post.

Got home from work and ordered a pizza. Quattro formaggi. Ate half of it and it was delicious. Now watching a movie on Amazon Prime.

Uh, let’s see. I bought rye flour and am going to bake my first ever loaf of rye bread soon. The house needs cleaned AGAIN. It’s been hot as hell but I’m either at work in A/C or at home in A/C or it’s night (love living out here again where it never fails to cool down at night).

It’s been picking up in the cheese shop; today was national cheese day so a station did a package on the creamery that ran this morning. Three different couples came in because they’d seen it, so I did the first-time spiel quite a lot today. Every time I point to the picture of the cows and say “…these are my co-workers, this was taken during an important meeting, I think it was about clover or something” it gets a laugh, which is fun. And everybody likes to look at the display window. Who doesn’t like to look at a ton of cheese.

The yeti is good, nothing out of the ordinary. Currently sporting my favorite look, which is long hair and a fairly new beard. Cute as hell. Oh, and my mom recently gave him a new quilt so he’s smug about that. Man loves a snuggly blanket.

Standing for hours straight at work has me thinking I now need to buy expensive compression socks; the cheap ones aren’t cutting it anymore. They never fit right, and the compression, I gather, isn’t properly graduated or whatever. Basically, my calves ache in a stupid way I don’t like after work, plus weird zingy nerve feelings, so I’ma buy fucking thirty dollar socks.

Aging is bullshit. I kid you not. Stuff that always worked without thought now doesn’t work AND hurts. Buh. Fucked up my back and shoulder last week sleeping, and had to be really careful at work not to twang it into total immobility lifting a wheel of cheese.

Read three or four books since the last time I posted, which is the most I’ve read in a very long while. Still have a dozen books on my Kindle to get through, but a start has been made.

Tomatoes are in, last year’s parsley is alive and bolted. I now have a couple of jade plant cuttings from Embo. The avocado is back outside and bursting into new growth.

This post reads exactly like an email from one of my aunts.

Ugh, this small town bank is driving me NUTS

Finance

In which fuck it, I’ve opened an account at Chase after all.

I’ve been using an excellent online bank called Simple for years. They paid killer interest, the app worked flawlessly, and it’s just been really pleasant, especially considering how infuriating banking has been for me most of my adult life (primarily due to poverty, but how insanely frustrating and expensive banking is for poor people is an entirely different rant).

Like everything nice these days, the Simple product is being killed because its parent company was bought out. It was doing really well, so I assume the decision to close is just more typical corporate raider bullshit, I don’t know, and I don’t care enough about finance assholes to go find out; what I do know is that an excellent, high value service is closing because some dipshits think CEO bonuses are more important than providing an excellent product, and now I have to move my money.

Naturally, I decided to open an account at the little bank down the block from work. That’ll be nice, right? Regional bank, easy access to a branch, should be a no brainer!

It took, and I am not kidding, THREE in-person visits, three phone calls, and FIVE FUCKING DAYS to open a checking account.

The process wasn’t unpleasant, it was just ridiculously complex and took forever. I imagine they pride themselves on their homey, small town appeal, but it’s 2021. Just open the goddamned account. Do not call me and leave messages. Do not make me come over there more than once. Just take my fucking money. It’s a checking account, not an organ transplant.

And after all that, they misspelled both my name and address on the counter checks and the account itself. I had to message them through the website (which, surprise, uses security technology from the 00’s and failed to change the temporary username I was given) to get the typos fixed, and even THAT took three days.

It took something like six business days for my initial deposit to clear, which is nonsense in today’s banking world.

THEN it took just as long for my first direct deposit to show up, and it was from my employer’s account, which is AT THEIR OWN BANK. It was AN INTERNAL TRANSFER, yet it took so long I had to send a message inquiring about it before it actually showed up. (There is no fucking way an internal transfer like that should take more than three days. None. They must be doing all this shit by hand. Like, with punch cards or some shit.)

Today I decided to transfer the remaining balance out of my Simple account (it’s closing for good on the 8th, “transitioning” to another bank with ridiculous fees) so I looked up my balance, wrote myself a check, and used the new bank’s app to deposit it.

Deposit rejected. Limit exceeded. The check was for WELL under five grand, so my new-account deposit limit must be in the range of hundreds of dollars? What the fuck?

Jesus Christ. I give up.

Logged into my Amazon-branded credit card account, which is a Chase account, and opened a checking account there. It took fewer than five minutes. No fees, similar interest rate, and my Simple account was already linked (it’s what I used to pay my card each month) so I’ve already initiated a transfer.

I’ll switch direct deposit from the local bank to the Chase account this week, and then probably just ignore the local account for a few months until I’ve got the stamina for the five phone calls and three in-person visits it will UNDOUBTEDLY REQUIRE to close a checking account I will by then have only used twice: once to open it and once to close it.

I’d much rather use the friendly, small, local bank, of course, but there are reasonable expectations a customer can have, ESPECIALLY in the finance sector. IN-HOUSE direct deposits should take three days at the absolute outside limit, and making me come sit in your drive-through on my bike for twenty minutes, twice, so you can explain checking accounts to me and hand me a printed packet I could much more easily read online? Forget it. No.

So now I’m banking with the big assholes, but at least I didn’t have to WAIT FIVE DAYS to open a GODDAMNED CHECKING ACCOUNT. The only benefit of the small local bank is that IF there’s a problem you should, ideally, be able to go in and speak to a person and get it resolved, but we all know that’s not how it works any more. There’d be an apologetic “I’m sorry, but” and all you’d have accomplished is wasting more time, because rules are rules!

I need…

Admissions

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.

Better late than never

Life

In which WHERE THE FUCK DID I PUT THE CILANTRO SEEDS?!?!?

Planted some seeds today. Should have done so the 1st, but whatever.

Hopefully they’ll germinate well. Had to re-order cilantro because I can’t find the seeds I got a couple months ago. Also ordered a compost bin thing for the yard and some compost starter, because I have absolutely HAD IT with throwing kitchen waste into the trash!

TWO FUCKING DECADES AGO

Admissions

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.

TIME to DO some BLOG

Life

In which I’ve put “blog” on my to-do list so I can check it off.

Yes, hello. Happy Pi Day! Spring is coming, there are tiny crocuses and the little tree in the side yard is in bloom.

Work is picking up enough that instead of not having enough to do, there’s too much to do — which means now I’m noticing detail stuff I should have gotten done last month but now it’ll be months again before we can!

Here’s a wheel of havarti I cleaned last week:

Look at how fuzzy that cheese was! I kinda love cheese molds.

Today I made FALAFEL POUTINE and it was fucking delish:

Fries, curds from work, falafel balls, gravy, tahini, onion, tomato, and parsley. FANTASTIC! I put a bunch of tahini in the gravy, and seasoned it with the same spices I used in the falafel, and it was brilliant. I’m half-tempted to buy a food truck.

Anxiety disorder symptoms showed back up recently and I’ve had a few attacks. It still sucks and I prefer it when it’s not around, but at least it’s gone more than it’s active.

Sundays are for accomplishing nothing, so I laid around a lot and did some papercraft (primarily because they were suggested by the printer app on my phone).

Tomorrow I am intending to get over to the bank to open a local account, since Simple.com is being killed by its parent company for no fucking good reason whatsoever (i.e. corporations are fundamentally broken) and the bank absorbing its accounts charges, according the to documentation I’ve seen, fees so obscene they border on usury. Tuesday I might bike over to a nearby vineyard for a tasting, if it’s nice out. I’ve met the owners (they’ve been to the cheese shop several times) and per their Instagram they’ve just bottled a red I’ve decided I’m interested in.

This evening I’m drinking white wine and watching tropical murder mysteries on BritBox, and it’s not impossible that I might run a load of laundry through the wash.

Someday, when we’re all vaccinated, I’m going to have The Witches (I have an absolute gaggle of female relatives I’ve taken to referring to as The Witches in my head) over for the housewarming tea party I would have had a year ago if not for Covid-19. I’m considering serving actual tea sandwiches and cheeses from work or chai and pakoras. Hmm. Who even knows what witches will eat.

It’s gonna snow: ugh

Admissions

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.

Happy October!

Life, Recipes

In which I’ve put the fall leaves window clings up, and am looking forward to cardigan weather!

Not much to report, really. I’m just blogging because it was on my to do list and I’d rather do this than run the vacuum.

I work, I hang out at home. That’s about it. I stepped into the Mexican restaurant last week to pick up some carry out, and stopped at the corner store a couple times, but other than that I’m only ever in the two buildings. We’ve been ordering carry-out groceries from Walmart for months.

Garden’s nearly over. Didn’t get much produce, which is okay. Three or four cucumbers, which were utterly delicious. Two I made into refrigerator pickles. A few handfuls of cherry tomatoes I’ve just used here and there, and only a couple beefsteak tomatoes so far (but there are three nearly ripe I’m looking forward to). Am planning to add a bunch of mulch to the beds and hopefully turn and mix them thoroughly after I pull out the plants after the first freeze. The soil’s packed and water doesn’t really soak in, and though the plants are reasonably healthy they don’t seem robust.

Work’s still great. The owners are amazing people, the work is fun to me (I genuinely enjoy cutting and packaging cheese, and average about thirty-five pounds a day). The staff these days is a couple of dudes and a couple of high school kids, so I get to tell people to clean up after themselves and do their own dishes before they leave, but it could be worse. People who don’t close rarely think to put their shit away without being told, it’s just how the world works.

Still utterly in love with Inland Empire weather. Proper spring! PROPER FALLL! The days are warm, the nights are cool, leaves are turning slowly, perfect sleeping weather! Minneapolis is a cool city, but my God the weather fucking sucks in comparison. I asked my better half if he’s starting to find the mild weather out here boring, and he replied that he still loves not having to drive in blizzards five months a year. So that’s good! I suppose if he gets missing real winter, we could chain up the Jeep and go drive in the Blues until he gets over it.

I turned 52 last week. Had been mentally planning a big blog post but when the day came realized I didn’t really give a shit. There’s a lot about aging-while-female nobody ever told me, sure, but when it comes down to it even I don’t want to listen to myself bitch about how weird it is to be old. Dry feet, sagging skin, aches, fat that won’t budge. All the weird menopausal atrophy is weird as hell, but other than being briefly distressing it’s just what it is: if you somehow manage not to die young, you get to witness your reproductive system shutting down. Getting uglier every day sucks, and how much stuff just hurts for no good reason other than being old is pretty shocking, but hey, it’s all downhill from here!

Watching tons of TV. Tons. Like, hours and hours every single day. Some nighttime soap garbage called ‘Chicago Fire,’ basically anything on BritBox, crap on Amazon, Netflix, YouTube. The volume of TV I’ve been watching is astonishing, and I keep buying books so I will read instead, but then I don’t read! I have at least ten books piled up, too.

I have a pair of socks and a pair of felted slippers to finish knitting, but they’re just sitting there in the basket. Haven’t touched ’em since, what, June? July?

My phone started failing to connect to wifi and cell at random but frequent intervals, so after a reasonable amount of resetting and basic troubleshooting, I bought a new one. I hate the massive waste that is the entire cell phone industry, but man, I use the shit out of my cell phone. And getting a shiny new one really is a lovely feeling.

I do my best. I recycle, I compost, I mend my clothes. I eat my leftovers. I try to buy stuff in minimal packaging where possible. I make sincere efforts to keep plastic waste to a minimum at work. But I still keep buying new phones every two years… mostly because they stop fucking working after two years, they’re built to fail.

Still in love with this house. It’s perfect, even the weird bits (like the garage built directly over the kitchen window). It’s comfortable, cute, a perfect size, clean, and everything works. The oven hood burns through appliance bulbs, but that’s really the only issue — everything else works perfectly. The kitchen would benefit from another grounded outlet or two, but it’s workable. Love the location, and the neighborhood’s quiet enough; incredibly quiet compared to the Uptown apartment!

I’d intended to have my mother, aunt, and grandmother over for tea this spring, and also to have thrown a housewarming party after we’d finished furnishing the place, but pandemics happen. We’ve been here a year now and have had a grand total of five guests, one of which was my brother’s dog. People keep making noises about gathering together, but I just think it’d be stupid. We’re all bored of not having social lives, and I’d love to hang out with people, but without rapid testing I feel it’s too dangerous. Imagine having tea with your relatives and accidentally killing one of them because you caught fucking Coronavirus from some redneck at work and didn’t know it? No thanks.

Apropos of nothing, here’s an easy and spectacularly delicious egg dish:

Baked Chile Rellenos

adapted from Lazy Chiles Rellenos

Mix together:
5 eggs
2 c. milk
1/2 tsp paprika
1/4 tsp cayenne
salt & pepper, to taste

Pour into an 11×9″ casserole.

Stir in:
1/3 lb grated Monterey jack cheese
1 4oz can diced fire roasted green chiles
1 4oz can diced jalapeno peppers

Place casserole onto a cookie sheet and put in an oven preheated to 325F. Pour hot tap water into the cookie sheet until it’s full.

Bake for 40 minutes.

Serve with steamed corn tortillas, rice, and beans, or fold into a burrito.

Monday

Life

In which it’s my day off.

He burned another personal day to sleep in, which is his choice, of course, but I’m still aggro about the year he didn’t have any time off left when I wanted us to go on a trip together, so I rolled my eyes at him. Like, he never does anything with his PTO, he just uses it to do absolutely nothing. (Such a weird person, why not save it up for a week away somewhere? We could rent a lake cabin and get drunk somewhere other than our house!)

I made refrigerator pickles because we have several cucumbers from the vine Embo gave me this spring.

Also made a pot of beans, and dough so I could bake bread, and espresso for an iced latte.

Did my nails. Did the remaining dishes after he loaded and ran the dishwasher. Ate some weird leftovers out of the fridge for lunch, just to get rid of them.

Watched the latest episode of Wild Bill on Britbox. Good show.

Smoke has cleared but there’s still a faint wildfire scent, blue skies today, mild and tinged with autum. The apple orchard next door is ready for harvest any day now, likely its last as I’ve heard it’s been sold and will be dug up and put into grapes next year.

Assholes still come into the store every single day without masks on. I’m too burnt out after six months of worry to genuinely feel much anger about it, I just make a point of standing uncomfortably far away until they mask up. Luckily it’s a fairly large shop and there are rarely more than a few people in it, so the social awkwardness of me being twelve feet away (and I back up if they try to come closer) tends to work. Like, I’m friendly as hell, and I love talking about cheese and cheesemaking, but I’m not going to let your dumb ass in my airspace without a mask. Because if you’re not wearing a mask, you’re sure as fuck not distancing and you’ve probably seen hundreds of people in the past two weeks.

Here’s tonight’s dinner:

Basically a riff on this recipe. Made the beans from dried, baked the bread, grew the parsley and cherry tomatoes, and the cheese and rinds were from work (I didn’t make the cheese, but I did some of the affinage and the packaging!).

Pandemic Money

Finance, Health

In which saving teeth is far from cheap.

The pandemic started and I kept getting money. Not complaining, but it was a bit baffling: the stimulus check, then two aunts and an uncle sent cash, bless them, and then a Minnesota tax refund I’d forgotten about filing for appeared. All told, a few grand.

And then I went to the dentist and figured out what the windfall was for.

I spent about $400 on x-rays, an exam, and n really intense cleaning, then another $1,400 at the periodontist on saving an old root canal, and tomorrow another couple hundred getting the crown fixed.

Next month, another grand at the endodontist saving yet another tooth.

And after that, all my surprise pandemic money will be spent! I’m glad I could afford all this as otherwise I probably would have had two teeth pulled, and I guess having teeth is better than not having them.