Stumbling Through Adulthood

1. Knitting status: let's see. Yesterday I spent some time speccing out my next project. I wanted to make some knitted then felted coasters, but I don't have a "stash" so would need to buy yarn and finding a yarn that didn't cost an arm and a leg and that would also felt (ie wool, but not superwash) proved too stressful so I am going to try to make a summer pattern beanie, I ordered the yarn and the double pointed needles, they should be here tomorrow. Today I wrote up the last project so there are records, and will practice the pattern I want to do with random yarn and random needles. Whee!

2. I should give this a whole post called "Ode to a Kitchen Scale" because my kitchen scale died. I stood there, trying to make biscuits and realizing first that I was OMG, going to have to use volume on flour and then that when I've weighed out my measured cups, I'm usually within 10 grams so nothing to panic about (the biscuits came out great.). But yeah, I'll miss that scale. I've had it A Long Time, and it's done a great job.

3. If you don't already listen to her, or get her emails, do check out Heather Cox Richardson. I've been reading her stuff for a while, but recently started listening to her youtube videos while knitting or in the car. She's just fabulous.

Do I ever keep these to 3?

4. Artemis. SO freaking exciting. I watched the launch and have the video pretty much running non stop. I love this. I hope the Mango Mussolini doesn't kill this entirely.

1. Today is Make Double Stuff Oreos Day. I need to make an Oreo crust (dh requested a chocolate cream pie for one of the TDay dessers), Nabisco no longer makes the plain chocolate cookies, and I am waaaay too busy to make plain chocolate cookies for a crust this week. So. I buy a big package of Oreos at Costco, and every two Oreos nets me -absent breakage- two cookies and one Double Stuff Oreo which Perry and dh are more than happy to eat. Perry did some for me this morning but I still have to spend some time this afternoon pulling Oreos apart. 🙄

2. As per my usual I am making waaaaay too many desserts. I love making desserts and people love to eat them, so eh. I'll send plenty home with everyone else and they'll just be a bit left in the house next week.

3. Hard eating week for me. I got my Shingles booster a few weeks ago, when I noticed it had been six months since my first shot, that I'd gotten at dh's work clinic. Why was I there? To get my Zeppy check for a new pre-auth. Did I think when I got the Shingles shot oh look, I was in six months ago, that means my Zeppy pre-auth needs to be renewed, I should schedule an appointment? No, I did not think that. It was only after I took the last shot I had that I noticed Costco hadn't contacted me to make sure I wanted them to reorder and started asking questions. Of course, by then I was in Bend and unable to get in for an appointment until yesterday. I hope everything will be fast and I can get my meds by tomorrow, but that's unlikely, so. Blah.

We're slooowly dialing in pizza. Thursday has been frozen Costco pizza night with better toppings for a long time for dh and me, started when there were no rowers to feed, LOL. Then we got ambitious. I found a recipe/method for some allegedly great pizza dough and... it was! What's more it made a lot so I just froze it. And damned if it wasn't fantastic even frozen. I'm out so I have to make more. We've tried a lot of doughs over the years but this is by far the best: what makes it so spectacular isn't just how it cooks but how it handles. It doesn't tear and stretches nicely even without a rest. The recipe is a youtube video so this weekend I'll probably sit down and transcribe what I can, but here's the link in case! How to Make Perfect Pizza Dough. The guy is a bit over the top, making the video painful to watch but the data are good so.

I ignored his sauce and am working on another method that I started tinkering with a few years back but lost interest.

Cheese is our final piece. Dh says it's toppings, but if we can dial in an excellent cheese pizza, who cares about toppings? But tbh (dark marital secret here) one of the reasons I decided to get back on the perfect pizza quest is that he'd overload the poor Costco cheese pizza with toppings, and it would never cook properly, the cheese never got completely melted. Ick. Anyhow, cheese. On the principle of changing one variable at once, we continued to use Trader Joe's shredded mozzarella as we worked out the kinks with dough and sauce. Yesterday we tried fresh mozzarella. I am not a fan. It doesn't melt properly but dh liked it. I think I'll try a whole milk low moisture self-grated mozza next. That's what we used to do when we made pizza but got lazy!

Then it'll be onto toppings.

Here was one of last night's pizzas. This one was pretty small it was the second to last dough ball of the frozen ones, and then other one was larger but I didn't get a photo.

I need to start writing again. Desperately.

But my thoughts are all over the place in a chaotic panicky mess.

If anyone is interested in a better social media platform, bluesky is totally a better place than twitter, LOL. I've had an account for a while, read but did not post there since then, but started transitioning there sometime last month, when twitter got too toxic.

Work is shitty. New postdoc and I'm the one who is supposedly training him. This sucks and again, not what I want to do in a job. Add in that my PI has all of a sudden decided that there must be something wrong with my cell culture technique and is observing and critiquing me as I work with cells. Comments like "you have some theoretical knowledge of cell culture, but not much practice". Dude, I may not have been doing it for twenty years, but a) you haven't done anything in over 5, by your own admission and b) I've been passaging, freezing, thawing, and otherwise dealing with cells for 6 months now, with no contamination and plenty of live healthy cells to show for it. The one experiment that is not working is something else. Not sure what, but I'm 99% sure, as was the previous postdoc -we worked out the protocol and the parameters together and did the experiments in tandem- that is has zip to do with the cells or my sterile technique. I was very close to walking out yesterday. Plus, my dude. You have bigger hands than me. There are manipulations I cannot do without putting down a cap. "Practice," he says, but practice not going to make my hands bigger. Other annoying thing. He gave me a bit of an independent piece of research to do, YAY. He keeps on asking me where I'm at with it. That's nice. The holdup? Purchasing. I'm waiting on the stuff I need to start the experiment, and it took purchasing three days to get a PO to the company. They're fast when it's a simple please order me this product, but when it's paying for a service, it always takes longer and there we are.

I've been avoiding the internet and doing more reading. I like that.

Weight loss is going fine. I'm up a bit these past few days, which is frustrating, but overall, I'm thrilled. While BMI isn't something I trust as, well, indicative of anything, I'm at this point within spitting distance of "normalweight", a status I never thought I'd even approach. We'll see if I get there. These meds are a fucking miracle. Dh's work plan is high deductible, so I'll be paying a lot for them next year until we meet that deductible, but I can afford it and it's totally fucking worth it. Life changing. Not perception changing, though. I still see myself as a fat person but I'm starting to think that other people no longer do. Body dysmorphia is real.

Planning the holidays. Tonight, I'll start the first Tday shopping, and this weekend I'll start to prep the base for the gallon for so of gravy that I make every year... ok, maybe not a gallon, but a lot. I usually end up with plenty for the turkey, and I freeze the rest to use in chicken stews etc over the rest of the year. I'll also get apples to pre-cook for a pie, I'm going to try to make an apple pie this year. I'm terrible with pies. It looks like Christmas is going to be here. My sister will come up and probably bring my mom. We'll celebrate on Christmas Eve and then on Christmas day, get up early, pack brunch, and go to Vancouver to spend the day with my aunt. It'll be her last Christmas. Not thinking about that right now but focusing on the logistics of "a lot to do, lots of food to prep for two holidays, while working, and a house to get in order for guests".

We went to Bend last weekend for four days; I took Friday off. My aunt flew down with a friend of hers, and we had a good time. She's slipping quickly, but still there. My mom is doing SO much better in memory care. I mean, the issues are the same but she's happier, and even not seeing her daily, the slippage in cognitive function in the time between visits isn't at all jarring, in contrast to my aunt, whose is. Sigh. Anyhow. Dementia fucking sucks beyond words.

Funny idea. Dh has done a "twice smoked ham" in the smoker a few times, and his briskets are now legendary in the family, LOL. I am planning fancy roast beef (Perry and I are mulling beef Wellington) for Christmas Eve. I'll need a separate port gravy, so I suggested dh smoke a brisket so I can use the non-smoked tbc trimmings for gravy/demi-glace. Then I came on the brilliant idea of packing and freezing ham and brisket for Anne-Chloe and Linnea as part of their holiday haul. LOL. I think they -especially Linnea- will be thrilled.

1. I made a Tang pie for dessert last night, along with a chocolate cream pie. There were supposed to be more people for dinner but everyone begged off (one of the everyones was my sister-in-law, no loss there). Anyhow, since I knew Linnea doesn't like citrus based desserts, I made both. Everyone hate the Tang pie, except me. Don't they know that Tang is astronaut orange juice? Bah! 😂 Anyhow, I'll probably freeze it in tiny portions. As far as I'm concerned, it tasted like a tart creamsicle.

2. Memory care sitch with my mom isn't great. I've called her, she just sounds terribly sad and lonely. There is just no other solution. If laws in this country were better, we might have other options, but with the cost of memory care, our only finally possible one is to let a facility that takes Medicaid get every single cent she has until she's eligible for Medicaid and they have to keep her. If we were to have her at my sister's with the support she'd need, she'd have to go to a different type of facility, and the ones we visited were absolutely dreadful. So. But yeah. I hate this.

3. Let me just say this. I am not body shaming, or really, I'm not trying to body shame. I mean, I've had "some people should never wear spandex" said while looking at me right after I finished a 204 mile bike ride (by a father to his tween son, btw, neither of whom were riders), so I'm pretty clear that people who want or need to wear spandex should go ahead and do it. But! Men should not EVER and I mean EVER wear spandex bottoms in any color other than black or navy. Because oooh boy, the Italian (light blue) and Wisconsin (red) bottoms left little to the imagination. And really, no, please. 😂

Flourless chocolate cake = chocolate omelet. No thanks!

Rather than 'how it started/how it's going' I'd like to paint a picture of 'aspiration/reality'.

Aspiration: a delicious Thanksgiving dinner is ready to be served and I am dressed in pretty clothes and even wearing the shoes we don't wear in the house.

Reality: a delicious Thanksgiving dinner is ready to be served and I am dressed in sweats, a tee shirt, and my apron, my hair is under a bandanna, and I'm wearing my slippers.

Maybe this is the year when I can get at least as far as getting the apron off!!!!

I'll shower tonight and tomorrow night because I always feel like food smells cling when I've been cooking all day, LOL.

Here's to aspirations!

1. I asked our music teacher if she would be willing to come over and hang out here. Hopefully my mom will sleep late and it won't be too much of an issue. Heidi might have to teach a class from here, but if so, we should be back, it would just be a quiet overlap. Part of the issue is that WSDOT is closing roads and exits to the freeway around UW and that makes getting home something that will take longer than expected. Ah well, we'll figure it out, I think.

2. youtube's ads are really pissing me off. I have an adblocker, but when they demanded it, I did ad them to my exceptions list. Of course, they're shitty google scum, and it's not just an ad at the start of the video, it's ads every 2-3 minutes on videos that last maybe 7-10 minutes? I'm probably going to be cutting down on my political viewing as a result. You can skip the ads in the middle of the videos, but most of the time, I'm listening not watching, and either teaching myself to knot, playing Candy Crush or doing a Microsoft Games jigsaw puzzle so pausing to dismiss the ad is a pita. Add to that that the ads are all crappy clickbait take advantage of the gullible type. When I see shit like this I am again reminded that after Trump's stupid comment, I could have sold homeopathic bleach pills and been a mega-zillionaire. Right now the workaround is to bring up the share button and watch the video in the embed. Again, if it was ONE or even TWO ads at the start, I'd grit my teeth and bear it. Interrupting twice in ten minutes is egregious.

3. Some bready thoughts. Perry bought me a bag of 6 cardamom rolls from the Norwegian bakery last weekend and I've been having one in the morning in addition to my usual skyr. I love love love cardamom. These are not sweet, even less sweet than Finnish pulla (I love that too), but just a wonderful plain not enriched roll with cardamom. I need to learn to make them. Which brings me to my other November project, this one for Perry and me. Dinner rolls. I've never found a recipe that balances 'fussy to pull off at the last minute' and 'good'. David's aunt Greta used to have one, I'll have to ask if she still does. Perry and I have tried recipes over the years, but nothing was ever a repeat. I think this year I'm going to start baking a few batches, or maybe half batches now, and pick the best recipe in that way. Perry coaches every day and food that goes to the boathouse does NOT come home, so we have an obvious outlet for extras, LOL. So. Anyone have a good roll recipe to share?

1. Perry and dh are going up to B'ham, Linnea is already there, to move her stuff from Apartment A to Apartment B, and to bring whatever Perry has left up there down. Dh was at trains Friday and Saturday. Perry was at rowing all day Friday and slept most of yesterday. My mother has been getting up between 8-9am and I've been 'on' both days already, and there is about to be a 3rd as soon as they leave. I'm exhausted. It's not like Perry and dh do that much, it's more that having them there means someone else can answer, for the zillionth time, the exact same fucking question. Caregiving sucks. I am not good at it.

2. Perry and Anne-Chloe are going to be rowing a double together at the PNW Pink Ribbon Row. Alas, I'll be at Crater Lake camping, so won't be there to cheer them on, but the coach took some video of them today. The last stroke was crappy -you can hear Perry's reaction to it- but aside from that, they look pretty good. Perry and Anne-Chloe the canal with the Aurora (tall) and Fremont (small drawbridge) Bridges.
And yeah, note the color of the sky. The horrid wildfires both in WA but especially the ones in BC (OMG, Kelowna!) are the cause of that.

3. I don't even know how to broach this as a minor issue. When we camp, we're pretty minimalist. Tent, sleeping bags, and food is pretty basic one pot meals, nothing elaborate. The past few years, we've been going camping with my sister and BIL and they have a GIGANTIC RV with kitchen, bathroom, TV, and even a freaking microwave. Which yay, if you enjoy that kind of camping. The issues that have come up: nobody wants to spend any time outside. As soon as it gets chilly, rather than extra layers, sis and BIL use the excuse of my mom (*) to move everything inside (note that my mom, who hates camping even in the luxury RV is usually inside already). So that. And then the meals. Since they have a stove top with multiple burners, a microwave, and an oven, they prefer to plan more elaborate meals than us. Which is fine, but... really? Yes, we can grill burgers, but, really, we don't need to make oven fries to go with, we can open a freaking bag of chips, and apples are a hell of a lot easier than chopping lettuce for a salad, LOL. This trip (in mid-September) they won't have a water hookup, so they're talking about using only paper plates... it's like... my dudes. There are faucets, we have a small basin, we can wash dishes... oh wait, you want to make an elaborate three course meal with loads of dishes. Nothing serious, just an annoyance.

1. My baby girl will be 20 tomorrow. It's my last full day of having a teenager. Sob.

2. She's headed out hiking with friends. Bless his little heart, Perry was going into Seattle later to coach but volunteered to go in a bit early so he could drive her to the rendez-vous point and I didn't have to get up and out.

3. Which is nice because last night's dinner was a grilled cheese and waffle fries (at home, fries were purchased and baked) and that's a lot more fat than I'm used to so I was awake wtih an iffy tummy for a good part of the night.

and bonus 4: She has friends coming over this evening. Menu is brisket, baguette (I may make soft rolls if I'm feeling ambitious), and either roasted asparagus or roasted green beans. Appys, a variety of little things to accommodate her friends' allergies and sensitivities. Dessert is a mocha cake, so I'm buying a small cheesecake for Perry and MIL (*), and something gluten and dairy free.

(*) Texted this to my sister a few days ago. OMG. Conferred with Linnea re her birthday cake. She is still insisting on a mocha/espresso cake. Which is fine with me... only I'm going to have to listen to my MIL complain for the next months that I ruined a good chocolate cake with coffee etc. She still periodically brings up the coffee icebox cake that I made when AC was in high school, still lamenting the 'waste' of the butterfinger topping. BTW, when I made that cake, I made a pineapple-maraschino cherry icebox cake for her and Perry. And again, that was Anne-Chloe's request. So yeah, I'm preparing for at least a decade of reminiscence about how delicious the cake look and how tragic it was that it was contaminated with coffee. 🙄🤣🙄