Category Archives: VOGODA VIGODA VIGODA

What is the difference between jelly and jam

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Dorty goes outside; attempts to come back in; discovers: CATBLOCK!

For a while I thought this was general cat obtuseness, but it happens far, far too often for it to be a coincidence. The view out the catflap isn’t even that good. It’s partly obscured from the leavings of slobbery faces and the view is pretty much Porch and Bush. We have many many other windows that show other views like Road or Birdbath. Hell, Nightmere can GO OUTSIDE and view everything up close and personal-like. This is deliberate griefing.

Thing two is this problem:

I have discovered I have opened the LAST jar of strawberry jam, and it is from 2012. That’s fine, it’s still good and all, but there are no REAL flavors left after this. P. kept not making jam because we “had so much left from previous years.” LOOK AT WHAT IS LEFT. And there are MULTIPLE JARS of this nonsense–this is just a sampling. This is like saying, we don’t need guest pillows, there’s loads of cow plops around. WHAT.

Review of remaining jams.

Currant: Delicious but weirdly gelatinous, due to high quantity of naturally occurring pectin in currants. Best melted with wine as a glaze for meat, or diluted with vinegar and used as a mint sauce for lamb. I will commit to this, but it does not solve my peanut butter problems.

Rhubarb: Rhubarb is a devil invention and only fit for doomed livestock that has broken out of its paddock. The only allowable thing that starts inedible and gets WOW with a fuckity load of sugar is cranberries. Related point: where are thou cranjam?

Blk sauce: No, this is not dark matter squeezins, it is blackberry sauce. Delicious, but not blackberry jam or jelly, which we were out of before frost kissed the lawn. As a show of goodwill I vow to use this once we run out of our open container of maple syrup for anything I would put maple syrup on (pancakes, porridge, second-degree burns).

Kiwii: An attempt at fooling me into thinking this is some kind of Hawaiian or Japanese concoction. We all know this is KIWI. A thing that should not be jammed, but only occurring as wheels in fruit salad or eaten out of hand. It should be noted that the creator of this abomination also eats kiwis whole without peeling them. Nice try at fitting in on Earth, Ford Prefect.

Plum: Plum jam tastes okay, and you cannot swing an ikat infinity scarf around here without hitting an Italian plum tree that is usually overladen with fruits and an owner saying, “Dear god, please take some.” One year we got something like fifteen pounds of plums from Plum Tree Park alone. So kudos for thrift and creating what I think of as a Seattle classic, but there is something about these plums…they form a grey scum at the top which makes it difficult to get through the first half of the jar. It’s really daunting for the children, especially. No one wants to open this five years old jam.

Quince: I LOVE quinces in desserts, but this is a similar problem to currants. It is not so great with peanut butter, imo. I used to eat it with cheese, but now cheese is out and so is quince! I will make a note to glaze a turkey breast with it or something.

In conclusion, we are out of jam. Yours in ingratitude, SJ

Can I say that sometimes I am jealous of people who are my age and are just now having babies

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Psych though, because I am really into sleeping eight hours. I am all OCK OCK teenage problems and then I am all…sleeping eight hours. I dunno. The answer is probably: cigars on ice. Okay, I know I am supposed to be quoting D’Angelo now, but I am still not over Bey.

Chalkboard Christmas Steve welcomes you the fuck into Xmas.

Okay what happened this year? Nothing, which I think is very exciting. We did Capitalism on Christmas Steve, since Franny was set to leave on xmas eve.

I wanted to give her a little time to enjoy her big present. Naturally, she took the guitar away with her to her dad’s house. I threatened her gently and said YOU MUST BRING IT BACK. I can just see her father’s children sitting on it or something. So can she, actually. She triple assured me she would bring it back. As a side bar, it’s interesting to me that she’s trying to talk her dad into getting off the wheat. He’s having all kinds of problems that are just like hers were (and mine). He’s not biting. He was always a super big fan of not believing anything because BLEAH. Why believe anything anyone tells you? Fuck that noise.

So. Strudel was ready for her first earrings and Franny really wanted her nose pierced, so as part of their xmas presents I took them back to the place where I took Franny when she was eight and wanted her ears pierced. I don’t think I got a good picture of her–just a crap one on my phone. She said she wanted it on her right nostril, like her Auntie Morgan.

They did really well. Strudel wanted to hold my hand but of course Franny did not.

“A present!” Franny said. That is not a present, that is a Dr. Hoho.

I asked Strudel something later that day and she said “WHAT MOM I’M LISTENING TO DRAKE.” Please don’t make me regret my earphones decision. It did get her to clean with us very pleasantly today. “WOW I LISTENED TO MUSIC THE WHOLE TIME.” Okay, please turn it down before you start talking…

Stocking happiness. I had to go the the Special Store (read: expensive) and get corn, dairy, and gluten-free candy for stockings. If you are very bored I defy you to read labels in a store and try to find something processed that does not contain any of those things. I sent Franny away with mad vitamins and a command to actually take them. Our lives are vitamins right now. It’s working.

Look who has a mild case of the ocds.

She’s always like this. I make her insane because I am chaotic neutral and leave stuff lying around differently depending on how profitable it is.

Edith spent the whole time doing this every time I took the camera out.

“FOOD IS THERE FOOD???” No.

Okay, so there’s no graceful way to slip this in here. Strudel spends A LOT of time holding Dorty upside down. I always like it, because Edith likes the attention and it doesn’t seem to be interfering with anything. But at the same time, I feel like she’s an old thymey model being mesmerized by Strudel.

FURTHERMORE MY LOANS ARE PAID OFF. Ten years later. I reckon that’s about right. And now, I am ready for new debt.

So tonight I decided to make Thai food: phad see ew, tom yum, spring rolls, and a red curry with duck. I got it all from my guru at High Heel Gourmet. As a bonus I made a hot sauce with bird’s eye peppers and peanut sauce. WOO GLUTEN FREE.

Also I had a captive audience to test salad dressings on. I pulled five samples out and a bunch of veggies as appetizers. Lucky for me, my guests were hungry and like to give opinions. I’m plinking away at developing a first salad dressing that tastes awesome and is relatively hypoallergenic. Lucky me I am a closely related to two supertasters.

I also made real appetizers: spring rolls.

It’s like an ad for Natural Calm, really.

The recipe called for cooking the mung bean sprouts a little, which was cool, because it made them kind of like noodles.

This is the bouquet garni for the tom yum. Galangal, kafir leaves, and lemongrass.

When I was desperately making Thai food at my house in college almost twenty years ago, I thought that I could sub limes for kafir limes, because HEY they are both limes right? The smell that filled my house today….holy shit. Intoxicating. So that was Christmas.

A forgotten cheepie thrift store coat has been found in a closet:

Lots of phad see ew lately. “ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED??”

I finished working Monday thank FUCK. I would like to have another job lined up, of course, but I am loose and flapping for now. I will be tinkering with recipes and probably writing, because that’s how I roll.

Happy Xmas!!

The other side of the hinge now; or, origin story

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I keep thinking to myself that I feel like a baby, new. Not only is that one of the most hackneyed cliches in existence, but I also think that by all accounts I had a pretty horrible time as one, so I think I probably don’t feel like a baby. At least not a me-baby.

I’ve been told that when I wasn’t screaming, I was vomiting, or running a high fever, or all three, and I was covered in a rash. I was always sick and had terrible fevers, and I truly don’t know how many times I “had to be put in an oxygen tent” but I understood it was a big deal when I would overhear my grandmother telling people about it. I see pictures of myself from around the time my mother got her act together and showed up again and it was probably the worst. I looked like a six-year-old tiny Lydia Deetz, pallid with dark circles under my eyes.

I told myself I was going to take a break from whinging about my health for a while, and I’ve made somewhat good on that, but things are getting…a little weird. I’ve had tinnitus and vertigo since high school (twenty years) and it’s suddenly evaporated. I was holding my breath waiting for it to come back, but it’s been a couple of weeks now. Normally cessation for me is a couple of hours. Sometimes people would be talking and my hearing would just cut out and be replaced by the sounds you hear in a hearing test. I’d just watch their lips move and nod. Or guess.

“Yes, I would like it in the butt,” I would reply, my whole head going BEEEEEEEEEEEP HUUUUUM RIIIING.

“WHAT?”

“Wait. You feel like you’re in a rut? Sorry, keep going.”

Now I am an explorer on an exploration mission that is always christened, “What is making that noise, I don’t think it’s coming from inside my head.” [Spoiler: it is the refrigerator.]

Sometimes I like to play “DID YOU KNOW?”

Me: DID YOU KNOW the porch light makes a really loud buzzing noise?

P: Yes.

Me: DID YOU KNOW the dining room chandelier makes a humming noise?

P: Yes.

Me: DID YOU KNOW the toilet in the guest–

P: YES.

No one else likes this game. Sometimes it makes me cry a little, like in the case of the porch light, but not really in a bad way and I get over it quickly.

And now there’s the wiggling and stretching. I will be stuck in a waiting room and if I’m left for too long I start moving. I tell myself I want to stretch, and I do, but then it becomes a test. What if I do this? Does that still not hurt? What about my neck? Okay, neck’s okay. Shoulder joints are always bad, soo…nope, they’re like butter. By the time I am called I am practically rolling around on the floor, looking like a cat stoned out of its mind on the nip. “Ha ha, I was just testing the back of my knee (IS THE NURSE BUYING THIS??).”

I test myself in bed, too. I had that nasty nine month patch where my shoulder was just a little out of joint, causing constant pain. I didn’t realize until it was over that I was kind of rocking Bob Dole arm since it hurt so bad to move it. I had to get used to moving my arm again. So, just having this fixed, I felt much freer, but sleep was a strategic exercise in trying to minimize pain and praying that I would stay asleep for more then four hours at a time. I used to have very specific positions I could sleep in (sometimes) and if I was lucky I would not wake up with both of my hands dead. Now I sleep ON my hands sometimes, for kicks.

“I am sleeping on you, hand,” I say. “Just try something.”

“While this is probably not the best for our circulation, I am aware that you are sleeping on me because I am not wracked with nerve pain/burning from being dead asleep.”

“Okay see you tomorrow, when I will use you to hold up a book or do a project for more than three minutes without a break.”

I looked out the window on Sunday and realized I could read the street sign across the street. I can write words sequentially and without a million typos. I can write like it’s NBD, it’s just flowing out of me like diarrhea. Which is ironic, because what is NOT flowing out of me is diarrhea. HA. Sorry…I am not sorry.

I’m not wracked with anxiety or unexplained black moods. On nights that I slept deeply enough to dream, I would dream about break-ins, being held hostage, being tortured. I would snap awake at the slightest sound coming from outside. Slowly I am retraining myself that I don’t need to take more than normal precautions, that this house and neighborhood are normal and safe. I knew the fears I’ve had since moving into this house were irrational, but now I really believe it.

There’s actually more little things that have improved, like my nails don’t peel down to the beds anymore. No more pica. A year ago I was with a friend, putting my hair into a ponytail, when a clump of it just came out in my hand. A significant one, like a piece of fettuccine, like my weave was coming out. I was kind of embarrassed, but he was extremely unsettled. “I haven’t seen that since my wife had cancer,” he said.

“I’m fine. That was weird,” I said. I knew I couldn’t stop it so I just accepted it.

I had decent patches as a kid when I wasn’t anxious for no reason, and even as an adult where I would muscle myself into getting things done. But I always felt like something was missing, like normal was just out of sight somehow. This was just a crazy notion from hunchport but I didn’t think there was actually anything off with my brain. I tried anti-anxiety and depression meds when I was younger and nothing seemed to really help. I thought about my family history of thyroid issues, and strokes, and how they took one of my grandmother’s inner ears to “fix” her vertigo, and I thought I was just walking that path.

I think the weird exclamation point on all this that made me want to write about it again happened last night. I was in the kitchen and, naturally, the subject of head injuries and how much they bleed came up. I mentioned what was probably by biggest head injury, which was when one of those 300 pound dart machines you find in bars fell on my head and made a split in the skin. It didn’t bleed as expected, I think maybe because the machine was so heavy it sort of split the skin and then compressed the open vessels against my skull somehow? I was only about 25% Carrie on prom night until they started sewing me up in the ER and then it went full Carrie, blood running down my face.

“I was your age,” I told Strudel.

“WHOA!” she said.

“Your mom has a huge scar on her head, you should feel it,” P. said.

This scar has been with me since childhood, huge and raised. My stylist comments on it every couple of years or so, since it’s so obvious once my hair’s parted. She always asks if it’s recent. Occasionally it starts hurting again, especially in the presence of orcs. He prodded my head to show the kid, since I was up to my wrists in lemon juice.

“I can’t find it,” P. said.

“Hang on,” I said, rinsing. Then I couldn’t find it. It was flat. I immediately checked one of my other ancient scars, the infamous hole in the roof of my mouth. Still holey but no longer painful! I keep prodding it with my tongue, like my rolling around in waiting rooms. Does it still not hurt? HOW ABOUT NOW? Sometimes I like to sneak up on it when it’s not paying attention.

JAB JAB JAB

“Do you, like, need something, man,” my hole says. It’s the Dude now.

Now I have a new hole: a lack of all this shit I’ve been wrestling with for my whole life. What do I do with myself now? I feel like I’ve been playing on the hard setting for 36 years and someone just unlocked God mode. I don’t feel manic, though, just calm. Steady. Productive. Trying to figure out who the fuck I am and what I want. Everyday life is now super easy and not torture or battling back one symptom or another, but I am confused about the big picture. My goals actually seem attainable now, like doing a lot of writing and having my own business someday.

P. and I talked about it the other night and he was very, very honest with me and it made me happy but it almost made my heart break a little.

“Now that you’re feeling so much better, there’s a part of me that’s afraid you’ll decide you don’t need any of us and blow out of here,” he said.

I don’t think so. It’s no fun to cook for myself.

TL;DR: I have had celiac-induced malnutrition my whole life, it’s had an impact on things. Currently I cannot eat wheat, dairy, or corn, and my intestines are mostly a waterslide so this shit 100% does not apply to me. I am going to keep an eye on myself, keep taking vitamins and keep getting my thyroid tested.

Like a bad debt that you can’t pay; or, my fucking eyebrows grew back.

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I woke up.

This shit still hasn’t gotten me laid; I still have to do it on my own merits.

I’m sure this will end. Now I will have to find full time employment. Fuck me gently with a chainsaw etc.

It has been suggested to me I should get back to writing porn. Yes, race against life, I am going. ZOOM. Any other advices? I am hearing it.

Did you ever hear the one about…?

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Back in the day I used to spend a fair amount of time on internet forums and in irc and whatnot, and whenever people used to mention meeting me in real life I’d say, “Just look for the pink hair…and the goiter.”

HA HA hilarious. Do I even need to finish this Morrissettian-ironical weblog? I guess I should. Bam: I have a goiter. It’s just a baby one, though. Maybe more than one. In addition to a bunch of bloodwork I probably should have had months ago (but I was out of my mind on steroids [see also: Coats–leather–fringe–douchey] and having trouble walking, so I might have missed a few things) I am also having a neck xray. Hooray!

Also I impressed the endo with what percentage of my body is covered in horrific scars. I never get tired of “Stump/Horrify that MD.” Hy fyves all around.

Labs on Friday. Xray when they can get me in. This feels like progress.

So. Let’s talk about something else for a minute. Close the door.

A thing I have done every fall for the past three years or so is go to the film noir festival at the art museum. Two of my formerly favorite things: film noir and having an excuse to go out. I am pretty flat at the moment since I am so part time, so tickets are out. Also it is touch and go whether or not I can even sit in the theatre on any given night for two hours at a stretch right now.

Also I am again with the hating almost everyone. Last time I was in a theatre (Xmastime) I shamed myself by telling this obnoxious lady who asked my whole party to MOVE SEATS when we had gotten there early and there were plenty of other seats in the theatre (true) to GO FUCK HERSELF. I think I may have even asked her if she was born this annoying or entitled or if she had to work at it. I can’t quite remember. A sign I should probably not be out in company, polite or not. I seem to have lost my filter worse than usual.

Postscript, she came down the aisle and sat by me anyway because someone else moved. When the imbalanced collide….

MY POINT. I am having my own film festival at home following their calendar. Well, I cannot find Shakedown ANYWHERE, but I asked a subject matter expert for a substitute. Sorry, art museum, I want to put money in your coffers, but this is for the best. It’s not you, it’s me.

To make my pathetic self feel better, I decided to cook along as well. The first fillum is Maltese Falcon. I decided to look up the release date (January 1941) and I decided to google around for popular food in 1941, what the hell, and what did I see? BOOM: Gourmet‘s first issue. I got on the horn with the librarian I like to harass downtown and she told me they have Gourmet back to ’44.

The plan is to pull a menu from Gourmet each month and year that corresponds to the release month year and the film of the week. Since the library doesn’t have the first issue, I have kind of reconstructed it online. Apparently the “dinner of the month” was an eleven-course French holiday meal. CHRIST, NO. I am going to cherry pick three dishes from it.

It’s fascinating how Victorian the recipes still seem from ’41. I’ll get into that more on Fridays, which will be the day after the dinner and screening. Other than the early Maltese Falcon, the films range from the peak of noir, the late 40s through the 50s and the last one is from 1987 (sun-dried tomatoes that night, for sure).

Okay, team, I am halfway through a 22 of perry and listening to Ice Cube, so this seems like a good point to break. Let me pour one out for my new little friend, Gary.

Sad Clown Good Summer

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I have been waiting to tell you for almost two months–I have quit my job. Well, I tried to quit. I handed in my resignation letter and everything. My last day in the office was yesterday.


I cleaned out my cubicle, which sent the message “how about send me an email instead.”

I was feeling a lot better around the time I resigned. I felt like I had a lot of clarity. That generic life kind of clarity and a lack of brain fog. I probably felt about 85% healthy at that point.


This is the closest I come to an Instagram filter.

And then they offered me a short-term contract that I could do in 15 hours a week until the end of the year. I’m only like medium stupid so even I knew that was a good deal. I’m keeping my hand in and avoiding a gap on my resume.

In the meantime, I will be writing. I have a terrible pornographic vampire novella to finish. I would also like to edit an unpornagraphic short story I wrote in a laundromat around xmastime when I had time off that I will kick out under my real name. So I need to see if I can do this–write and edit and self-publish when I have concentrated blocks of time. If I can consistently make enough royalties, then I can leave Techworld…FOREVER.

Now as an extra-curricular activity I will be working on my health too, which was another hard thing for me to do in an office.

So things could be a lot worse. I could live with someone who writes messages in eyeliner when my toothbrush head gets ancient.

Wait, that is me. I do that to people.

Anyway. I think I will be off the wifis this weekend in Twin Peaks, and I’m not really going to seek it out, so I’ll be out of touch. I’m bringing my laptop and I’ll probably be writing offline. And I will take pictures, lots of pictures. HAVE A GOOD WEEKEND.

“I have to get up at five o’clock in the morning and SPARKLE, Neely, SPARKLE!”

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I wanted to show you my bathroom today, since it was supposed to be finished, but the plumbing inspection failed on Thursday. My least favorite plumber, aka Jackass Plumber, forgot to install a mixing valve on top of the hot water heater. Or perhaps he was not aware he needed to. It’s unclear.

The same inspector who approved the rough plumbing returned.

“Oh I see you went for the FANCY toilet,” he editorialized. There are way too many men in my house lately.

“Mmm hmm,” I said.

“Looks like this shower isn’t done.”

“It’s an open shower.”

“No door?” he asked.

“No door.”

He ran it.

“I guess the water’s staying in…”

And then a tick next to the word “failed.”

We get to try again next week. Also my vanity legs should be here by then. I bought vanity legs via my cabinet company. The legs–really more an idea of legs–were a very small black-and-white picture in the catalog that promised to be good metal companions to go with my retconned faux-nostalgic midcentury vanity that looks like something James Bond could have thrown up into, had vanities like this existed in the 1950’s. They did not. I’m enjoying this trend of thinking about what a credenza looks like and putting plumbing in.

But this isn’t Sears and Roebuck times. It is really bullshit to show me small black and white pictures at all. Sure enough, they arrived, and they are hideous. I didn’t really know what I was getting, which is not a defense. I asked for a picture or an internet link or a sample, but it didn’t really come to pass. First they sent two separate sets of black plastic legs, which was not what I ordered at all–so there was that delay.

Then what I did order showed up.


For size comparison, it cavorts among sauv blanc, water, and someone’s jank ass phone what needs a new case like whoa.

They were also kind of scratched or at least unevenly painted, and didn’t work at all with the actual vanity.

“Sooo the legs finally came,” I said, proffering them to my contractor. “Yay.” I was making bargains with myself at this point, just wanting to finish. I can do something else with the legs at some point, I told myself. He pulled one out.

“Do you like these legs?” he asked me, giving me a hard look.

“Well. Um. Maybe I can paint them, though?” He waited. “No. I don’t like them. And they’re kind of scratched up. I’ll go find some legs I actually like and have them sent immediately.” He nodded.

So I ordered legs from a site that does…midcentury legs. I figure they have ONE JOB, and they can do it well. RIGHT? Knock on knock-off legs.

It turns out the legs that we waited so long for and that I hated don’t even fit properly. So it was all moot.

We were hoping to start demoing the other half of the basement today, but it really needs to wait until the inspectors are done. One project at a time, please. So I have been futzing around the house today doing little odds and ends like painting a pillar on my porch that was getting very weather-ravaged, and test driving the DJ Roomba I bought with my tax refund. (R.I.P. Neato.)

Also I have been thinking about my kitchen today. There’s a couple of issues with it. It’s on the north side of the house, and gets a wee bit of sunlight in morning. It’s a candidate around here for a couple of those tubular skylights.

So this is what it looks like around 2 p.m. on an average April day. Dimmer than this picture makes it seem.

I decided to play up the primary colors feel between the yellow tile with the burgundy sizzle stripe and the teal-ish cabinets by adding a lot of primary red. The peace lily and the chevron bag is my sister’s for the little housewarming visit I made to her today. I had a squee. Among other things, I made her bacon peanut brittle and pickled eggs. I moved into that exact neighborhood when I was exactly her age, except her life is way less fucked up than mine was at 26. Yeh.

Also it’s L-shaped. Not much to be done about that. I like that it’s a one- or two-person kitchen and it’s pretty easy to convince people to beat it during parties so I can do my thing and get out.

Here it is with the lights on:

DEATH TO BOOB LIGHTS.

So here’s the tentative plan, but not for a while. Get ready for 50’s house heresy: I am taking out the countertops. I just cannot with the tiles any longer. Crud gets stuck in them constantly, liquid pools, and they always look dirty. I am thinking about doing wood but am not sure. I am keeping all the yellow backsplash, though. The cabinets are getting a new color scheme, and we have to redo the floors. The dishwasher leaked in January and it fucked up some of the underlayment. I feel lumps when I walk now. And the vinyl is going, of course. I am leaving the OG lights alone and the configuration, basically. It’s a nice cubey kitchen that is very 50’s sensible–no need to rip out the cabinets or anything. And it’s almost impossible to reconfigure an l-shaped kitchen so I am calling it good.

So now the question is how to work with yellow with a burgundy sizzle. I am thinking about doing something Frenchy Provencally after stumbling on a bathroom that is just like my kitchen, really (thank you, comments section).

Grey? Blue? Both? Cannot decide.

I am in the germinating phase now, since it’s far off.

This week was my last week of working part time. I’ve tapered down on Prednisone again today and it was a zap on my brain again. I dropped a bottle of rice vinegar on the back porch today–it was like it just left my hand somehow and shattered. I think I may actually sleep well tonight instead of my heart hammering at 2 a.m though. I’ve been sleeping 2-4 hours a night for several nights in a row and then I have a massive crash and sleep 12-14 hours and have a “good” day.

“How are you doing?” my contractor asked. It was before the plumbing inspector came, and we both thought we would pass with flying colors, and I would not see him again until maybe I asked him back to put in a gas insert in the basement fireplace.

“I’m okay,” I said. “The steroids are worse than the disease at this point.”

“Ah, I hear that,” he said. “I’ve been dealing with steroids for the last 25 years or so. I’m on my third heart.”

“Wow,” I said.

“And I’m a cancer survivor.”

“Holy cats, I’m glad you’re here.” We always say dumb things in the face of surprising information like this, right? Maybe just me, though.

“Me, too.” He said he owed it all to qigong and energy practice. I was not going to argue with that. I pretty much owe everything to obsessive attention to masturbation and the idea that tea tree oil can cure anything, including late-stage capitalism and jungle rot.

However. Cooking doesn’t require much thought at this point, which is pretty comforting. I can kind of just feel my way around. How many thousands of times have I sweated an onion? It sounds stupid but it really is so grounding to me. I had a little moment when I wasn’t able to walk or stand much where I was asking myself why I ever cooked, as we were hauling giant piles of frozen Trader Joe’s loot into the house that cost less than food that required marketing, planning, and chopping.

But now I’ve been doing a lot of cooking after work. On Thursday I made an asparagus and gruyere tart and then made Moroccan lamb shanks because why not? I’ve been cooking for so many years now that I think it’s keeping me from coming unhinged a little. Here is a normal thing. I was so anxious on Thursday afternoon I felt like I was going to have a panic attack, could not answer the phone, so I just focused on cooking. I had an alarm guy coming over and I felt like I was going to throw up, and made myself take an Atavan. It kind of freaks me out how I went from fish oil and an occasional Tylenol eight weeks ago to Valley of the Dolls so quickly. I hate this. I know it’s temporary, but I feel so trapped inside pointless, needless side-effectsy anxiety. I just kept rolling puff pastry dough and chopping garlic while he chit chatted at me about losing a cat from a hotel room during a cross country move.

I decided to see if I could bang together a Moroccan dish that tasted like Moroccan food with what I had in the cupboard and from memory. It was okay, really. I’d write it down, but I didn’t take a picture, so that would be kind of boring. It turned out. But here’s the tart:


Alien wiener tart.

I have been junking/thrift scoring plant stands for the house and bathroom. I liked my new snake plants but I thought they needed some levels to be finished. Behold my whirlwind life.

Now I’m happy with it.

Any thoughts about my kitchen are A. optional and B. would be welcomed.

Butterscotch Stallion Rides Again

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Well HEY HO there was a package on my porch last night!

This is called shopping clearance at 3 a.m. on Vicodin and Atavan. And some other stuff, because YOLO. Unlike 98% of the unflattering, bizarre shit I own, this is a New Thing and it’s stiff and looks weird (in a new thing way, ok, I recognize the irony of this statement). I don’t think I’m going to be allowed to sleep in it until it stains with my body oils and softens, so I had better find a rock pile to roll on. This coat actually looks GREAT on Strudel’s dad but he refuses to wear it. I DON’T GET HIM, I REALLY DON’T. He is in the new shower right now, being commanded to test it out (not pictured).

I would have taken a better picture, but a. this is what my face looks like (HA HA, hashtage “awkward”) also b. the carbon monoxide detector started going off because I didn’t charge the batteries enough. Also I woke up at 4 a.m. I am pretty okay mostly but still feeling a little weird. This is a record of that weirdness for later, since I can’t remember anything.

This is currently what it’s doing outside (raining):

Inside the forecast is, “Every picture is going to be blocked by a Cavalier because then you are looking at and thinking about a Cavalier and perhaps some cheese would really work a treat right now.”

Great weather for suede coats. Looking for backalley B-12 shot today, but will settle for Dick’s cheeseburger.