![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7via https://ift.tt/2MzBeGw
It’s always sort of notable for me to have a weekend that isn’t spent driving, so I was a bit glad of that. But I had a lot to get done this weekend.
The thing is, sometimes I can still kind of skate along on my sister’s household’s executive function when I’m not there. I hit a bump when I first got home and discovered the myriad… science experiments, where I had left a functional kitchen, but I was buoyed up later by discovering he’d cleaned out the fridge, and had done all kinds of other important things, like make his first dental appointment in this millennium (I might be exaggerating but not by much) (I am not in any better shape) and flush the new water heater, and get himself a physical, and all that. I wish he could help me do some of those things, but that’s kind of. It was hard enough for him to do it, so whatever. Also make the cat a vet appointment… for this morning at 8 am… boy oh boy. Oh well, it’s fine.
what i did this weekend, mostly so I recall:
Saturday I did All Of The Laundry except one load. We’re to the time of year where it’s cool enough that some things don’t get dry in a day on the line– a heavy sweatshirt and some other long-sleeved garments were still quite damp when I took them in after nine hours outdoors, but they finished drying on hangers just fine.
I also had said, look, you’re working at the table on the back porch which is not heated, that seems silly, let’s focus on cleaning off the kitchen table. So I started, half-heartedly, and then Dude sat down and actually sorted through all the rest of it. And then when he was done I used a scrub brush on the vinyl tablecloth, and then used a sponge, and then used a towel, and then rotated the tablecloth to use a different part of it, because. Well. The table gets silted in and somebody among us doesn’t believe in wiping stuff down ever, and that somebody lives in this house every day while the one of us who knows how a sponge works doesn’t, so.
So now he can work at the kitchen table, and we can eat there.
I also made him go through the box of shoes I’d pulled out to ask if he wore anymore. He’d said no, but then I was like, okay, so which of them did you never wear, so they can be donated, and which of them are garbage?
His response to that was to put the still-okay shoes in the donation box, and then give me the box that was garbage. Which is not throwing it away, but ok. I walked it out to the garbage, and then I guess to make it worth my while I stole the shoelaces out that were still in good shape. The rest of them, though– you can’t recycle mixed rubber and fabric, there’s nothing to do but throw them out. It’s fine, that’s what a landfill or incinerator is actually intended to handle.
I have been making my way through my own shoes– I have a lot of sneakers from over the years, and many of them I wore as a waitress, so the vast majority of use was indoors, which means it’s subtle– they’re not torn, or visibly dirty, and some of them look quite new, and if you put them on they seem fine, until you walk a little and realize the tread is quite worn and all the internal padding is crushed. So I’ve had to wear those around a little bit to determine it, but little by little I’m realizing, yes, all my sneakers are worn out and I’d be justified to buy some new ones, since I’m having orthopedic problems stemming from my feet.
Anyway– that evening we went out to a restaurant and had a lovely dinner, somewhat notable for being in a neighborhood slightly beyond an invisible line of where we normally go and so at one point we were the only white people in the restaurant, which is really notable because like many Northern cities, Buffalo is really really racially segregated and it took me working in a photography store (photography is one of those hobbies that on the level of like, the proletariat, is universal and not confined to any racial or ethnic groups– everybody takes photos) to finally realize how many Black people live here and I just never saw any. I think it’s improving– you see more different kinds of people all around, I think?– but then, I don’t know that, it just seems like it. (We did used to have Black neighbors and don’t anymore, but that’s such anecdata it’s hard to nail down. We’re the kind of white where we don’t talk to our neighbors, so we wouldn’t know. Listen my neighbors used to verbally abuse me over the fence when we first moved in [not the Black ones!] and so that taught me not to be friendly.]) Anyway, it was startling to me, to look around and realize that. (Ironically enough, we had nearly not gone to the restaurant, because the name contained the word G*psy and I know that’s a racial slur. I guess these things are complicated. I’ll rec it to people but not by name!)
Sunday morning we got up early and went grocery shopping. Groceries have become Dude’s job, largely because he spent a while waiting until I arrived home exhausted from the farm and then springing on me that there was literally nothing in the house, and to his credit it only took me bursting into tears like twice for him to notice that this bothered me. Anyway– the problem/benefit of this is that while I grew up making very infrequent Supply Runs Into The City and thus have this mentality of Buy Everything You Might Need In The Next Month when you go out to the Stores, Dude shops with a list and buys only what’s on that list with no thought processes of things like, hmm, that recipe called for two sticks of butter and I know we only buy it in sets of four and I bet there’s not that much really left, butter’s not on this list but it also doesn’t go bad fast, maybe I’ll just grab a package of it on speculation, and it took some training for him to be like, sometimes we like to have a little something in the house to eat before dinner’s ready, maybe i should buy some potato chips or something and even that, the result is always i will buy one bag of Tostitos and never couldn’t hurt to get some pretzels too so we often run out on like, Wednesday.
Anyway, I’d had the thought that maybe I should get some frozen burritos or Hot Pockets or something (ok i’ve never eaten a pocket in my life, hot or otherwise, and don’t think i’m ready to start now) so I could have something on hand for days when there’s nothing else to bring for lunch, and so he said well I’m not going to just find you something, you gotta come poke through the offerings at least this first time.
So we went together to the grocery store, and I made the condition that I’d go but I absolutely would not do what he does, which is always laze around until exactly two hours before the Bills game starts, and then go in a manner that seems calculated to align with the grocery store’s maximum occupancy for the week. No– I will only go before 9 am, or after 2 pm. (the game started at 1.)
So we got out of the house at 8:45 and sure enough, there was parking, the crowds were manageable, and we left as the parking lot was filling up.
And I thought to buy butter, which was good because the one recipe I was making called for two and a half sticks, and the other called for a stick, and we only had two sticks in the whole house.
In the early afternoon I went into work, as I think I detailed on here already, or maybe over on DW. Lots of things, I just wanted to get some stuff done. Weirdly, the store manager, who does not have any kind of supervisory capacity over me, was like, psyched I was there and complimented my work ethic. I was like… I’m hourly, and I’m punched in, and I’m actually a little worried my own supervisor will frown on this, but I wanted to get it done so I wouldn’t worry Monday morning. Shrug. As it happened, the vet appointment for the cat was literally ten minutes and I arrived to work my customary 20 minutes early this morning, so I needn’t have worried, but I know if I hadn’t I’d’ve gotten here late and been frazzled to all hell.
The pleasant reward for going in on Sunday is that I was able to walk to work on what was a beautiful day, and halfway there realize that no, these sneakers aren’t any good either. Then I walked up to the nicest ice cream parlor in town, and Dude walked from home to meet me there– we arrived, despite my inability to time things, at precisely the same moment. We had wonderful sundaes, and then walked home together. (Dude had brought me my other sneakers, and I realized those were no good either, but that was two pairs of shoes in a single outing that I managed to pare down, so like. I guess that was good.)
I’m not even screwing around at work as I write this, Windows Update is being a turd and I’m sitting here watching it. Yikes.
anyway more rambling:
So in the evening, I did a bunch of cooking. I was going to make a tourtiere, which is a French Canadian kind of meat pie I’d read about on maybe Twitter? recently? and it sounded so good I had to try it out. I found this recipe and was like ok, probably that’s fine: [https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/261983/tourtiere-french-canadian-meat-pie/]
and I realized it was going to take hours, so I decided to make it for Monday’s dinner, and do the Instant Pot Butter Chicken for Sunday’s. Cooking two things at once is fine, especially when you manage to involve your partner.
It would have been flawless but for two things. 1) the recipe, linked above, has an absolute jackshit crust. Like… seven tablespoons of water? No. No. 7 Tbsp in 3 cups of flour gives you fucking flour. You can’t roll out fucking flour. I had to double the water, and even then it still was a crumbly mess of bullshit. So that was annoying. It’s not like I’ve never made a pie crust; I should have just made a pie crust from my mom’s or Dude’s grandma’s recipe, and I’d’ve been fine. But I thought maybe their method is important to the pie, y’know? No, it was horse shit. Fuck that recipe. It was a huge pain in my ass and had no reason to be; the rest of the recipe is wonderful. I even realized, I own a beautiful, Longaburger pottery deep-dish pie plate, which is now vintage I guess, I’ve just discovered the company’s gone. Alas! It’s lovely, and has been tucked away in a cupboard, and I’m positive my mother bought it for me new sometime around when I first moved into this house, and I’ve quite possibly never used it. I’m so glad I remembered to look and see if I had anything like it.
Anyway.
The other big flaw?
My fucking Instant Pot died. It worked fine on sauté, I got the aromatics in there, and meanwhile seared the chicken in a frying pan (I adapted the Famous IP Keto Butter Chicken recipe to have some vegetables in it, which is probably heresy, but I like vegetables and it seems dumb to make the recipe as written when you have the chance to not do that), and got it all dumped in there together– everything but the spices was from the farm, that was kind of exciting actually– and it came up to pressure and went, and then I wasn’t really paying attention, it beeped that it was done, and then when I went to release the pressure it had already cooled off enough to release itself, which I thought was weird.
And I pulled the chicken out– I’d just used an entire half-chicken, instead of thighs like it calls for, because I have that, and went to carve it, and– it was raw in the middle.
Part of me thought, well, this has happened before– a half chicken takes a lot longer to cook than I expect it should, and I should’ve given it more time probably, this is my fault. But part of me was like, how is half a chicken still partly raw after fifteen minutes on high pressure, I can do a whole one in twenty every time.
So I cut it up and threw it back in and programmed it to do five more minutes on high, and it accepted the program, and then instead of displaying a time countdown, it just said “ON”. I let it go, because I was finishing the pie, but when I was done it had been twenty minutes and it still just said “ON”. Given that the thing was pretty much at a boil when it started, it should have come up to pressure in no time?
I tried several different settings, and each of them just said “ON”, and even the saute function would not heat up at all.
So I dumped the entire mess into the frying pan I’d just finished making the pie filling in, and just simmered it there for a further 35 minutes while I finished up with the top pie crust and dealing with the jackshit pie recipe and so on.
So we ate pretty late, and I’m upset about the Instant Pot– I got it last Christmas, but is it under warranty? It’s clear I didn’t do anything to it, it quit mid-meal. I don’t know what to do about it. It was a gift, so.
Anyhow, I persevered, and now there’s a cold tourtiere in the fridge for tonight, and enough Pseudo Butter Chicken (Stovetop Version) in the fridge/freezer for leftovers for a million years.
It was a lot. It was a stressful afternoon. But I overcame it. I guess Windows Update is done so I ought to go do my actual office job now. Christ, Win 10, you are a pile.
It’s always sort of notable for me to have a weekend that isn’t spent driving, so I was a bit glad of that. But I had a lot to get done this weekend.
The thing is, sometimes I can still kind of skate along on my sister’s household’s executive function when I’m not there. I hit a bump when I first got home and discovered the myriad… science experiments, where I had left a functional kitchen, but I was buoyed up later by discovering he’d cleaned out the fridge, and had done all kinds of other important things, like make his first dental appointment in this millennium (I might be exaggerating but not by much) (I am not in any better shape) and flush the new water heater, and get himself a physical, and all that. I wish he could help me do some of those things, but that’s kind of. It was hard enough for him to do it, so whatever. Also make the cat a vet appointment… for this morning at 8 am… boy oh boy. Oh well, it’s fine.
what i did this weekend, mostly so I recall:
Saturday I did All Of The Laundry except one load. We’re to the time of year where it’s cool enough that some things don’t get dry in a day on the line– a heavy sweatshirt and some other long-sleeved garments were still quite damp when I took them in after nine hours outdoors, but they finished drying on hangers just fine.
I also had said, look, you’re working at the table on the back porch which is not heated, that seems silly, let’s focus on cleaning off the kitchen table. So I started, half-heartedly, and then Dude sat down and actually sorted through all the rest of it. And then when he was done I used a scrub brush on the vinyl tablecloth, and then used a sponge, and then used a towel, and then rotated the tablecloth to use a different part of it, because. Well. The table gets silted in and somebody among us doesn’t believe in wiping stuff down ever, and that somebody lives in this house every day while the one of us who knows how a sponge works doesn’t, so.
So now he can work at the kitchen table, and we can eat there.
I also made him go through the box of shoes I’d pulled out to ask if he wore anymore. He’d said no, but then I was like, okay, so which of them did you never wear, so they can be donated, and which of them are garbage?
His response to that was to put the still-okay shoes in the donation box, and then give me the box that was garbage. Which is not throwing it away, but ok. I walked it out to the garbage, and then I guess to make it worth my while I stole the shoelaces out that were still in good shape. The rest of them, though– you can’t recycle mixed rubber and fabric, there’s nothing to do but throw them out. It’s fine, that’s what a landfill or incinerator is actually intended to handle.
I have been making my way through my own shoes– I have a lot of sneakers from over the years, and many of them I wore as a waitress, so the vast majority of use was indoors, which means it’s subtle– they’re not torn, or visibly dirty, and some of them look quite new, and if you put them on they seem fine, until you walk a little and realize the tread is quite worn and all the internal padding is crushed. So I’ve had to wear those around a little bit to determine it, but little by little I’m realizing, yes, all my sneakers are worn out and I’d be justified to buy some new ones, since I’m having orthopedic problems stemming from my feet.
Anyway– that evening we went out to a restaurant and had a lovely dinner, somewhat notable for being in a neighborhood slightly beyond an invisible line of where we normally go and so at one point we were the only white people in the restaurant, which is really notable because like many Northern cities, Buffalo is really really racially segregated and it took me working in a photography store (photography is one of those hobbies that on the level of like, the proletariat, is universal and not confined to any racial or ethnic groups– everybody takes photos) to finally realize how many Black people live here and I just never saw any. I think it’s improving– you see more different kinds of people all around, I think?– but then, I don’t know that, it just seems like it. (We did used to have Black neighbors and don’t anymore, but that’s such anecdata it’s hard to nail down. We’re the kind of white where we don’t talk to our neighbors, so we wouldn’t know. Listen my neighbors used to verbally abuse me over the fence when we first moved in [not the Black ones!] and so that taught me not to be friendly.]) Anyway, it was startling to me, to look around and realize that. (Ironically enough, we had nearly not gone to the restaurant, because the name contained the word G*psy and I know that’s a racial slur. I guess these things are complicated. I’ll rec it to people but not by name!)
Sunday morning we got up early and went grocery shopping. Groceries have become Dude’s job, largely because he spent a while waiting until I arrived home exhausted from the farm and then springing on me that there was literally nothing in the house, and to his credit it only took me bursting into tears like twice for him to notice that this bothered me. Anyway– the problem/benefit of this is that while I grew up making very infrequent Supply Runs Into The City and thus have this mentality of Buy Everything You Might Need In The Next Month when you go out to the Stores, Dude shops with a list and buys only what’s on that list with no thought processes of things like, hmm, that recipe called for two sticks of butter and I know we only buy it in sets of four and I bet there’s not that much really left, butter’s not on this list but it also doesn’t go bad fast, maybe I’ll just grab a package of it on speculation, and it took some training for him to be like, sometimes we like to have a little something in the house to eat before dinner’s ready, maybe i should buy some potato chips or something and even that, the result is always i will buy one bag of Tostitos and never couldn’t hurt to get some pretzels too so we often run out on like, Wednesday.
Anyway, I’d had the thought that maybe I should get some frozen burritos or Hot Pockets or something (ok i’ve never eaten a pocket in my life, hot or otherwise, and don’t think i’m ready to start now) so I could have something on hand for days when there’s nothing else to bring for lunch, and so he said well I’m not going to just find you something, you gotta come poke through the offerings at least this first time.
So we went together to the grocery store, and I made the condition that I’d go but I absolutely would not do what he does, which is always laze around until exactly two hours before the Bills game starts, and then go in a manner that seems calculated to align with the grocery store’s maximum occupancy for the week. No– I will only go before 9 am, or after 2 pm. (the game started at 1.)
So we got out of the house at 8:45 and sure enough, there was parking, the crowds were manageable, and we left as the parking lot was filling up.
And I thought to buy butter, which was good because the one recipe I was making called for two and a half sticks, and the other called for a stick, and we only had two sticks in the whole house.
In the early afternoon I went into work, as I think I detailed on here already, or maybe over on DW. Lots of things, I just wanted to get some stuff done. Weirdly, the store manager, who does not have any kind of supervisory capacity over me, was like, psyched I was there and complimented my work ethic. I was like… I’m hourly, and I’m punched in, and I’m actually a little worried my own supervisor will frown on this, but I wanted to get it done so I wouldn’t worry Monday morning. Shrug. As it happened, the vet appointment for the cat was literally ten minutes and I arrived to work my customary 20 minutes early this morning, so I needn’t have worried, but I know if I hadn’t I’d’ve gotten here late and been frazzled to all hell.
The pleasant reward for going in on Sunday is that I was able to walk to work on what was a beautiful day, and halfway there realize that no, these sneakers aren’t any good either. Then I walked up to the nicest ice cream parlor in town, and Dude walked from home to meet me there– we arrived, despite my inability to time things, at precisely the same moment. We had wonderful sundaes, and then walked home together. (Dude had brought me my other sneakers, and I realized those were no good either, but that was two pairs of shoes in a single outing that I managed to pare down, so like. I guess that was good.)
I’m not even screwing around at work as I write this, Windows Update is being a turd and I’m sitting here watching it. Yikes.
anyway more rambling:
So in the evening, I did a bunch of cooking. I was going to make a tourtiere, which is a French Canadian kind of meat pie I’d read about on maybe Twitter? recently? and it sounded so good I had to try it out. I found this recipe and was like ok, probably that’s fine: [https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/261983/tourtiere-french-canadian-meat-pie/]
and I realized it was going to take hours, so I decided to make it for Monday’s dinner, and do the Instant Pot Butter Chicken for Sunday’s. Cooking two things at once is fine, especially when you manage to involve your partner.
It would have been flawless but for two things. 1) the recipe, linked above, has an absolute jackshit crust. Like… seven tablespoons of water? No. No. 7 Tbsp in 3 cups of flour gives you fucking flour. You can’t roll out fucking flour. I had to double the water, and even then it still was a crumbly mess of bullshit. So that was annoying. It’s not like I’ve never made a pie crust; I should have just made a pie crust from my mom’s or Dude’s grandma’s recipe, and I’d’ve been fine. But I thought maybe their method is important to the pie, y’know? No, it was horse shit. Fuck that recipe. It was a huge pain in my ass and had no reason to be; the rest of the recipe is wonderful. I even realized, I own a beautiful, Longaburger pottery deep-dish pie plate, which is now vintage I guess, I’ve just discovered the company’s gone. Alas! It’s lovely, and has been tucked away in a cupboard, and I’m positive my mother bought it for me new sometime around when I first moved into this house, and I’ve quite possibly never used it. I’m so glad I remembered to look and see if I had anything like it.
Anyway.
The other big flaw?
My fucking Instant Pot died. It worked fine on sauté, I got the aromatics in there, and meanwhile seared the chicken in a frying pan (I adapted the Famous IP Keto Butter Chicken recipe to have some vegetables in it, which is probably heresy, but I like vegetables and it seems dumb to make the recipe as written when you have the chance to not do that), and got it all dumped in there together– everything but the spices was from the farm, that was kind of exciting actually– and it came up to pressure and went, and then I wasn’t really paying attention, it beeped that it was done, and then when I went to release the pressure it had already cooled off enough to release itself, which I thought was weird.
And I pulled the chicken out– I’d just used an entire half-chicken, instead of thighs like it calls for, because I have that, and went to carve it, and– it was raw in the middle.
Part of me thought, well, this has happened before– a half chicken takes a lot longer to cook than I expect it should, and I should’ve given it more time probably, this is my fault. But part of me was like, how is half a chicken still partly raw after fifteen minutes on high pressure, I can do a whole one in twenty every time.
So I cut it up and threw it back in and programmed it to do five more minutes on high, and it accepted the program, and then instead of displaying a time countdown, it just said “ON”. I let it go, because I was finishing the pie, but when I was done it had been twenty minutes and it still just said “ON”. Given that the thing was pretty much at a boil when it started, it should have come up to pressure in no time?
I tried several different settings, and each of them just said “ON”, and even the saute function would not heat up at all.
So I dumped the entire mess into the frying pan I’d just finished making the pie filling in, and just simmered it there for a further 35 minutes while I finished up with the top pie crust and dealing with the jackshit pie recipe and so on.
So we ate pretty late, and I’m upset about the Instant Pot– I got it last Christmas, but is it under warranty? It’s clear I didn’t do anything to it, it quit mid-meal. I don’t know what to do about it. It was a gift, so.
Anyhow, I persevered, and now there’s a cold tourtiere in the fridge for tonight, and enough Pseudo Butter Chicken (Stovetop Version) in the fridge/freezer for leftovers for a million years.
It was a lot. It was a stressful afternoon. But I overcame it. I guess Windows Update is done so I ought to go do my actual office job now. Christ, Win 10, you are a pile.
