300 miles to go

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Yeah I’m procrastinating on my drive, again, I gotta leave soon and I just
don’t want to. C’est la vie, perpetually. Fuck.

What’s good is that when I’m supposed to be doing something else, that’s
when I get good at writing. So, while I’m kind of stuck on Ancient Sea
because it’s a complicated sex scene and kind of intense and ALSO
high-stakes because I’ve realized that this probably should be the
concluding chapter of that story, I’m actually making really good progress
on Fugitive, which i’ve been stuck on for a month. (Who even remembers that
story? I do. There’s absolutely another chapter here, I just have to find
the end of it.)

so there’s that.

under the cut: lard-rendering and other unsavory processes

also I rendered a bunch of lard using the slow-cooker function on my
Instant Pot and for a day and a half I was like “this isn’t going to work”
but then it did work, so for the record, you can do that and like half of
the process of rendering lard consists of staring moodily at really gross
slimy hunks of fat and saying to yourself “I don’t think this is gonna
work” so jot that down. Also I scraped the cracklins into muffin tins to
freeze them, so I should repackage those before I go, now that I think of
it. (It makes little pucks of fat and connective tissue and if you throw
those in a frying pan and fry them really well you get this great
seasoning/lubrication in whatever dish you’re making, it’s really good and
a cheap way to make your caramelized onions at the start of every dish be
higher in protein and such. Also lard/cracklins from pigs raised on pasture
is high in vitamin D!) Lard is *so gross* and yet so good, and once you’re
done it’s this creamy white pure-looking thing and you’re like, how. (If
you render it gently enough and strain it well you can bake cookies with
it, yes really. Also it’s a fantastic moisturizer but I won’t lie, the
smell is pretty unmistakable. Use it for overnight creams.)

I’ve cut out and assembled a bunch of new facemasks but I need to finish
assembling them and also put on elastic or ties and I have zero clue what
my plan is for all that, so like. Yeah. Anyway I want to embroider things
on some of them. We’ll see how that project goes, this week– I figured
bringing a bunch of ready-to-go handsewing would actually be something I
could concretely do, so as experiments go, I mean, there’s one.

I made Jamie Oliver’s Chicken In Milk for dinner last night and it was
super good, and instead of potatoes I served it over shredded cabbage and
beets that I dumped the oil from browning the chicken over the top of and
added some salt and herbs to, and then i shredded the chicken over that and
poured the sauce over it all and it was super good. I recommend that to
anyone, man. It was a tiny fucking chicken, a reject from the line– like,
two pounds at most, and it had a broken leg-end, so it was unsellable.
Undersized birds like that tend to be tough, so I figured doing this recipe
with the lid on would soften it up a bit and it worked. Probably that would
be a good recipe for an old laying hen too, a more flavorful bird would
hold its own.

Like a dumbass I didn’t wash the last load of my laundry, and it’s my
delicates, so it’s all my bras and undies that I absolutely do need and
don’t have spares of, so I have to wait for that to dry. That’s my excuse,
today.

And my dilemma, as I sit and think and procrastinate– I got my canvas tent
that I impulse-bought eighty years ago, finally, and I should set it up,
but I dont’ know what furniture will go in it, if any, and when will I have
time to get it set up, I surely can’t do it alone, and I don’t know what
else I need until I have it set up, so– what I should do is set it up and
leave it empty to get rained on one time, and in the meantime figure out
what my furniture should be, and maybe take it back down afterward. Maybe
that’s my goal this week. Find out if it’s even suitable, and if it’s not–

well, bring it to Rochester and have MM set it up in her yard for a play
fort for her kids, is the eventual solution probably. But, maybe it’ll be
okay after all and I should use it.

I did discover that it’s easy to claim partial unemployment benefits in
NYS, today, so I did that, and. Gosh. My claim is really still in progress,
they don’t give me any option for contacting them with questions about it.
Weirdly they put the start date as 3/09, when I know I didn’t claim until
two weeks after that. I wonder what that means.

Anyway. It’s $0, for now, and forever, but if I do get it it’ll be
retroactive, and I have no idea how I’m supposed to make life plans around
that. That’s twenty weeks, now… I don’t know what I’m meant to have been
doing with myself, all this time.

Credit cards, I guess, which is actually sort of what’s happening, but
since we started off rich it’s all 0% for six months this and 0% for twelve
months that, and boy, I hope I get some kind of final determination before
the six months expires.