it's all kind of a lot sometimes

I came here to bitch about something else which i've of course forgotten. something about opening up a posting window erases my short-term memory.

So I've been bitching a lot in Instagram Stories lately about my commute. There's one particular garage (collision shop) that is on the corner of the last turn I have to make, and they are absolute shit at clearing their sidewalks. I can just cut through their parking lot on the corner and avoid the completely unplowed walks there, but then there's a bit, the last bit before I get to my own workplace's mini-mall, where the sidewalk goes alongside a very busy road with no shoulder at all, and their halfassed efforts at snow-clearing have been just this fucking saga.
I know it's like, ha ha, what a nosy old lady thing to do, complaining about how people keep their yards-- but listen. LISTEN.
( i go on about walking in snow for a really long time )

I wish I could stay in bed today, but I cannot.

In other news I reread not only the Barbarians Novel but also a novel I attempted to write circa 2005? 2006? about vikings, so that was fun. Again, it had some good moments, but overall I am not uhhhhh... entirely delighted with it. I think I remembered it as better than it was. It wasn't that good. Also I literally can only find half of it, and I think that's because I was doing a big rewrite and that's as far as I got. Which is good, because what I remember of the rest of it was also Definitely Not Good.

On the upside, gosh, I have written a lot of stuff. And it's a bonus, I think, for me, that the stuff that's old enough that I don't like it was, well-- I didn't get on AO3 until a solid ten years into my writing career on the Internet, and so most of that shit isn't immortalized. And it's not that it was awful and irredeemable, it probably would have had readers who were fond of it, so I'd have to leave it up and then I'd sort of cringe.
On the downside, I was really lonely and took longer to improve probably than I would have with an audience, and--
oh anyway, I have a bunch of invite codes to AO3, I finally looked and discovered that I do, so honestly please ask if you need one.

I've gone this long and still don't remember what I was going to write about here, so anyway. Gotta go get dressed and ready to deal with this unwelcome thaw. You think I'm ungrateful, but honestly it being very cold is best when it's this snowy because then you're not dealing with water. Water is the worst, and when all the drainage systems are entirely covered in thick layers of snow, water is absolutely a nightmare. I'm going to maybe die, that's all.

See y'all later if I survive.

csevet: @pinkiepiebones, @bomberqueen17 this is an

via http://bit.ly/2RayuOO

csevet:

@pinkiepiebones, @bomberqueen17

this is an adaptation of my family’s “it’s winter and fuck-you cold and we are SO TIRED and need SO MUCH CARBS” chicken and dumplings recipe. it is not healthy, it is not fancy, it does not demand advanced technical skills besides boiling things and safely handling scissors. but it gives you plenty of precious calories to keep from freezing the hell to death.

ingredients:

two 32oz cartons of no salt added chicken stock, or equivalent bouillon/etc

two chicken breasts

one bag of frozen mixed veggies

one small onion, diced

one can refrigerated biscuit dough

seasonings to taste, i used lawry’s seasoned salt and black pepper

special equipment:

big (wide) soup pot

kitchen shears

baking sheet

knife/forks/meat-shredding claws

put stock and chicken in pot. season as desired. bring to boil for ~20 minutes until chicken is mostly cooked. remove breasts one at a time and cut/shred into mouth-sized pieces. return to pot with veggies onion. bring back to boil. after this point you may taste and adjust seasoning further, if needed.

preheat oven according to biscuit directions. brace for loud noise. open can. with shears, cut each biscuit into 4-8 small pieces and float on surface of soup. remember that dumplings will expand as they cook, so you may not be able to fit all the biscuits, depending on the surface area of your pot.

place any remaining biscuits on baking sheet, and bake for directed time. meanwhile, boil dumplings uncovered for equal time. starch will thicken stock into gravy. a properly cooked dumpling is somewhat soft outside, chewy inside, and does not taste at all of raw dough.

feeds SO MANY, and each bowl is filling and restorative between bouts of shoveling and cursing the salt-defying cold.

bomberqueen17: ____________________
Oh this is fantastic.

I do kind of a variant of this sometimes! I call it chicken pot pie but now that I see this, it’s definitely chicken and dumplings! 

I use the leftover meat from a roasted chicken, and some of the broth from said roasted chicken’s carcass, and I just make my mom’s biscuit dough or dumpling recipe (kind of like this one from allrecipes I guess?) and instead of rolling it out or doing literally anything she says to do, I literally pull it into pieces and mush it between my fingers to make it be biscuits that I drop on top of the chicken. 

Buuuuut I have a can of tube biscuits left over from the holidays and I am all out of chickens to roast so this might happen one of these days, it sounds fantastic.

Also: SHEARS TO OPEN TUBE BISCUITS? You might be a genius, I must try that immediately. I always get a spoon and it won’t go and won’t go and I get all cringey, I never think I’m a loud-sounds-problem person until it comes time to open the biscuit tube. But Dude’s mom is worse, she calls him to come over and do it because she hates it so much. She never calls him! We live a quarter mile away! But she calls him for biscuit tubes.)