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catch-up post
Dec. 17th, 2017 04:04 pm1) This is my eighth Christmas working retail (*sigh*) and the first one in which I've hardly gotten any extra hours. The company is disappointed with sales levels, it seems.
2) Not unrelated to point 1, I've started selling blood plasma to help make ends meet. The process is less seedy and degrading than I had feared it would be. Still not the most fun I've ever had in my life, but money is useful.
3) I'm having one of those spells of feeling generally tired and unwell while not actually being sick. I don't think it's related to point 2, since it was already happening before I started selling plasma and hasn't gotten worse since I started. But it's a serious motivation killer and part of the reason I haven't been around much.
3b) I will have health insurance starting in the new year. Hooray for Obamacare while it lasts! (This is definitely a thing I should have done earlier, although it would have been more complicated at my old job, where employees were offered health insurance but it was expensive and terrible, than at my current job where part-timers aren't offered insurance at all.)
4) Definitely related to point 3, I haven't been doing much cooking and probably won't do much for Christmas. The limit of my ambition is to maybe buy a nice steak or pork chop and accompany it with some easy pre-made sides from Trader Joe's.
5) I did, however, cook a nice lentil and sausage stew yesterday. Browned some garlicky sausage plus three cloves of garlic, took it out of the pan and cooked an onion and an orange bell pepper in the remaining fat, added Puy lentils, chicken stock, bay leaf, and water to pan, simmered until lentils were about half done, added chopped mustard greens and radish tops, simmered until everything was almost done, put sausage and garlic back into the pan and simmered another 5 minutes or so. Oh, and at various cooking stages I reinforced the flavor with a few drops of Worcestershire sauce, a few drops of soy sauce, and a bit of ham dripping from my Thanksgiving ham, which has since resided in the freezer. (Seriously, if you cook a ham, pour out all the cooking juices into a shallow pan, refrigerate overnight so that you can skim off the fat, and then cut the lovely flavorful gelatinous dripping into bits and freeze it. It adds tons of flavor to soup stocks and even to vegetable dishes that would benefit from hamminess and saltiness.)
Variations of beans + sausage + greens are some of my favorite things in the world to eat.
6) The two shows I was currently watching, The Exorcist and Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, both had their season finales this weekend (and both were very good). There's no word yet on whether either will get another season, and The Exorcist's situation is now even more fraught because of Disney buying Fox. Though The Exorcist's executive producer has said he'll try to take the show to Hulu or Amazon if Disney doesn't renew it.
Anyway, I feel like I've got OMG nothing to watch until The Good Place comes back from hiatus. It isn't actually true, because there's tons of stuff on Netflix, but I'm attached to those two shows and want to see more of them. There doesn't seem to be any good fanfic for The Exorcist and I can only find one good Dirk Gently writer on AO3 (it's Lavellington and I've already read all their fics).
Am I just nostalgically imagining that there used to be tons of great fanfic and now there isn't anymore? Or am I unlucky in my recent--by which I mean the last ten years or so--fandoms? My first two fandoms were Buffy and then due South, both of which had a high proportion of excellent writers, so maybe my experience since then has been regression to the mean.
7) I should go to the laundromat but I really really don't want to. I may end up hand-washing something and trying again tomorrow.
2) Not unrelated to point 1, I've started selling blood plasma to help make ends meet. The process is less seedy and degrading than I had feared it would be. Still not the most fun I've ever had in my life, but money is useful.
3) I'm having one of those spells of feeling generally tired and unwell while not actually being sick. I don't think it's related to point 2, since it was already happening before I started selling plasma and hasn't gotten worse since I started. But it's a serious motivation killer and part of the reason I haven't been around much.
3b) I will have health insurance starting in the new year. Hooray for Obamacare while it lasts! (This is definitely a thing I should have done earlier, although it would have been more complicated at my old job, where employees were offered health insurance but it was expensive and terrible, than at my current job where part-timers aren't offered insurance at all.)
4) Definitely related to point 3, I haven't been doing much cooking and probably won't do much for Christmas. The limit of my ambition is to maybe buy a nice steak or pork chop and accompany it with some easy pre-made sides from Trader Joe's.
5) I did, however, cook a nice lentil and sausage stew yesterday. Browned some garlicky sausage plus three cloves of garlic, took it out of the pan and cooked an onion and an orange bell pepper in the remaining fat, added Puy lentils, chicken stock, bay leaf, and water to pan, simmered until lentils were about half done, added chopped mustard greens and radish tops, simmered until everything was almost done, put sausage and garlic back into the pan and simmered another 5 minutes or so. Oh, and at various cooking stages I reinforced the flavor with a few drops of Worcestershire sauce, a few drops of soy sauce, and a bit of ham dripping from my Thanksgiving ham, which has since resided in the freezer. (Seriously, if you cook a ham, pour out all the cooking juices into a shallow pan, refrigerate overnight so that you can skim off the fat, and then cut the lovely flavorful gelatinous dripping into bits and freeze it. It adds tons of flavor to soup stocks and even to vegetable dishes that would benefit from hamminess and saltiness.)
Variations of beans + sausage + greens are some of my favorite things in the world to eat.
6) The two shows I was currently watching, The Exorcist and Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, both had their season finales this weekend (and both were very good). There's no word yet on whether either will get another season, and The Exorcist's situation is now even more fraught because of Disney buying Fox. Though The Exorcist's executive producer has said he'll try to take the show to Hulu or Amazon if Disney doesn't renew it.
Anyway, I feel like I've got OMG nothing to watch until The Good Place comes back from hiatus. It isn't actually true, because there's tons of stuff on Netflix, but I'm attached to those two shows and want to see more of them. There doesn't seem to be any good fanfic for The Exorcist and I can only find one good Dirk Gently writer on AO3 (it's Lavellington and I've already read all their fics).
Am I just nostalgically imagining that there used to be tons of great fanfic and now there isn't anymore? Or am I unlucky in my recent--by which I mean the last ten years or so--fandoms? My first two fandoms were Buffy and then due South, both of which had a high proportion of excellent writers, so maybe my experience since then has been regression to the mean.
7) I should go to the laundromat but I really really don't want to. I may end up hand-washing something and trying again tomorrow.
