Anger Burger

For some reason I didn’t understand that Oly Burgers is inside a gas station.  As in, inside-inside.

I suppose this is a normal thing to many now, but I’m not sure my brain is capable of processing this many primary colors in conjunction with food.  Even when I’m at the gas station to buy gas I often become distracted and leave with a single tube of Necco Wafers instead.  Also: I genuinely believed that Washingtonians used the word soda instead of pop to describe a soft drink, but apparently we most assuredly do not.  I say soda, I’m pretty sure everyone in my family does.  I feel like I’ve had a false memory inserted, like there’s a glitch in the matrix.

So, Oly Burgers. My dad financed a reconnaissance mission after reading that Oly Burgers had fish and chips on their menu, and I was blissfully unaware of any details aside from the word ‘burgers’. Great!  I love burgers.  Let’s go.

But I’m still having a difficult time with the whole gas station thing.  It’s really a gas station, it’s busy and people are buying cigarettes and diesel about 10 feet away from where my tummy rumbles thinking about tater tots.  I don’t know what to make of it, to be honest.

There is only one woman working the shop, and she makes my dad anxious by being slightly harried in a good-natured, pleasant but frantic way as she makes burgers, hotdogs and milkshakes for the few people waiting in front of us.  I should also add that this isn’t a normal gas station – this is a gas station inside a massive automall.  So the other customers, so far, have been car salesmen.  I think we can vote out any ambiance appeal, but you know, fuck it.  How are the burgers?

Mike the Viking ordered off the South of the Border off the “Specialty Burgers” menu, and –

Wait.  The South of the Border includes onion straws, pepperjack cheese and BBQ sauce among the usual other burger flotsam.  I call shenanigans.  Since when is BBQ sauce a Mexican flavor?  Or onion straws?  Or pepperjack cheese?  Shouldn’t this burger be like jalapenos and nacho cheese? Closer inspection reveals further tomfoolery: the Hawaiian burger has pineapple, yes, but again onion straws, pepperjack cheese and BBQ sauce.  The TexMex burger?  Onion straws.  Pepperjack cheese.  Oh, and chili.

I’m just going to let all this slide for the time being.

The Viking’s burger is massive!  I’m actually impressed that the ratios of toppings to meat to bun are all pretty solid, if a little regionally challenged.  There isn’t too much of any one component.  He takes a few big bites and grunts enthusiastically.  It is, as he says, a pretty solid “messy burger,” which is the category of burgers that have a lot of shit going on with them.

(Stranger’s zombie hands reaching for the Viking’s brains on the right hand side of the photo.)

My regular ol’ Oly Burger starts off looking promising, but is soon revealed to have a few flaws.  The bun is lovely and soft and eggy, and well buttered and crisped on the inside.  The pickles are nice.  The “Oly Sauce” is a direct rip-off of the local favorite Goop, a sauce trademarked by Eastside Big Tom, the inarguable and still-reigning local burger champs.  Oly Sauce is similar but not quite right – it’s lacking something.  But sadder, so is the patty itself.  It’s a faux-hand-formed patty, I suspect — the rustic shape of it seems eerily similar to the rustic shape of the patty in Mike’s burger — and has the peculiar sponginess of some burgers that I just can’t entirely abide by.  But it’s cooked well, and if I weren’t in Olympia I would be pleased that I had something almost-but-not-quite-like a Big Tom’s ‘regular burger’.

My dad’s fish fared the least well.  They came out hot and initially tasty, but quickly cooled to a dense, unpleasant texture.  They weren’t cooked wrong, exactly, but I’m left to assume they were fried from frozen, which you know, is not a crime.  It’s a burger joint inside a gas station, after all.  If everything tastes a little Sysco, it’s probably because it is all a little Sysco.

But the food was prepared quickly, my dad’s strawberry milkshake was made from real ice cream, and the total (which included tater tots not pictured) was just over $20.  Not bad.  As my dad said, “I’m not disappointed.”  It was a fun food adventure, and if we’d also needed 2 for the price of 1 tins of snuff, a tank of gas and some Funyuns, this would have been a highly successful mission.

So, this week The Kitchn has been running a series called “My Weeknight Treat” as a part of their week-long focus on desserts, and I’m afraid I can’t let it slide.  These are the weeknight ‘treats’ showcased so far:

• A HANDFUL OF M&MS
• AN ORANGE AND SOME DATES

Not even on the same night, mind you.  I mean, come fucking on you guys.  Are you kidding me?  I get the aesthete life thing that everyone is kookookachoo over lately, the single plain flower in a thrifted vase, the appreciation of foods simple and nurturing, blah blah blah.  But do I need a blog post describing the eating of M&Ms as a reward for washing the dishes?  And then!  Following it up with this:

Plus eating a handful as a weeknight treat carries that particular joy of “I’m an adult and I eat candy if I want to.”

You don’t actually understand what being an adult and doing whatever you want means, do you?  Because the ability to eat a tiny portion of M&Ms after dinner and chores is what you are allowed to do as a child.

The oranges and dates makes a little more sense, until you encounter this:

One of my own favorite weeknight treats is a simple one that still feels luxurious and grown-up: A plate of oranges and soft dates.

Again, I’m not sure we’re reading something written by someone with a dictionary; luxurious is not what many Americans would call an orange.  Even if eaten with a date.  And I maybe even, maybe could have let it all slide if not for:

Just one or two dates satisfy my sweet tooth, and followed by a wedge of juicy orange, I’m completely sated after a good meal.

It’s too much.  Gwyneth Paltrow hacked The Kitchn, folks.  For breakfast you’re going to feel totally full after eating half an apple and a cup of straw tea. For lunch you’re going to eat a little bit of mat lint while you’re doing your Pilates floor routine.  For dinner you’re going to wear a half a million dollars worth of diamonds to the Oscars.

You want to see how grown-ups have a luxurious treat?

Mmm, rewarding.  So rewarding, I’m not even going to wash the goddamn dishes.

In fact, let’s just stick with this all week.  I’d throw in some M&Ms too, but I’m not sure it’s safe to drive to the store now.

***UPDATE: Wednesday night’s ‘treat’ is elderflower cordial, which I can’t disagree with.  Though of course I recommend elderflower liquor.

The best thing that happened on St. Patrick’s Day (other than my friend drunkenly watching Leprechaun 3 and pausing to tell me earnestly “This movie is much more informative than I thought it was going to be!”)  was someone hauling out a one pound sack of caffeine and offering me some.

One pound sack of caffeine.

Now, clearly it’s not hard to get caffeine — it’s hard to keep from consuming it, really.  But I drink several caffeinated beverages a day, and in anticipation of being even more poor than I am now, I’ve already resigned myself to not buying any more Red Bull.  It’s just too expensive, but it’s the only energy drink I like other than coffee.

And coffee, let’s talk about coffee.  I am good for one, maybe two cappuccinos in the morning before strange things happen to my Crohn’s butt.  Not good things.  I love coffee and refuse to give it up, but it’s taken years of self-brainwashing to be happy with merely a single cup in the mornings.  Happy in the same way that Oprah claims she’s happy with her body but still brings up dieting in every conversation ever.

But you guys, I’m tired.  I’m tired almost always.  Solution:

I ordered 250g of pure caffeine off eBay BECAUSE THAT SOUNDS TOTALLY SAFE and it arrived as two 100g packets and one 50g packet, which was not how the package was described or photographed, but it is actually better than a single 250g packet.  The 50g packet is going into my emergency/apocalypse bugout bag, the other two packets are going into the kitchen cupboard.

I did some research, and it turns out that bodybuilders¹ use caffeine in big doses and with some good science behind it, one point of which is that it increases blood flow, which is good for muscles.  Clearly I do not give a shit about muscles.  But the point is this: bulk caffeine is actually easy and safe to acquire, and I probably didn’t need to get it from the internet, I could have gone to a Super Supplements or a Vitamin Shoppe or something.  Still, these guys were selling it for a good deal, and were one of the few bulk ones that bragged about being USP, FCC Grade.

Anyway, caffeine!  It feels finer than wheat flour, more like talc to the touch.  And you mix it into whatever you want, which means of course that I’m putting it in my whiskey.

The order came with this hilarious micro-scoop, but it requires like 10 of these little scoops to equal a Red Bull.  I could have earned the $2 needed to buy that Red Bull in the time it took me to carefully measure out a dozen of these scoops.

The thing to do is to order a 1/16 teaspoon, which is the equivalent of about 125mg of caffeine, which is still maybe less than a cup of drip coffee.  Mixed with your beverage of choice, you’ve got yourself some frugal wakey-wakey time.  I’m trying to find the conversion I read earlier, but it appears that they consider a “dose” to be 250mg, which would mean there were 1,000 doses in this order.  And if we’re actually taking half that, then there are 2,000 doses.  Two thousand!  Wait, is that math right?  Who cares, it’s still like a penny a dose.  Heart attack party!

¹ I originally mistyped this as ‘babybuilders’ which made me laugh and laugh.

What I hadn’t anticipated was how few adults at The Hunger Games premiere had actually read the books. So that when you show up looking like this:

Instead of being all “Way to kill those asshole kids, Katniss!” they were all “Are you girls alright? What happened?”  The fourth and final adult that asked my cousin and I what happened to us, I had this actual conversation:

me: “You didn’t read the books, did you?”

adult: “No, I haven’t.”

me: “So you’re not aware you’re about to watch a movie about 24 teenagers trying and mostly succeeding in killing each other for forced sport?”

adult: “No, but — wait, what?!“

My boss is a tattoo artist, but when he was a kid he wanted to do monster makeup for a living.  He saved his allowance and mail-ordered one item of professional movie makeup at a time.

Now we are grownups and can do whatever the fuck we want, but he sadly doesn’t get much casual opportunity to do theatrical makeup.  When I asked him to make us look like we’d barely missed throwing knives, tracker jackers and fireballs, he grabbed his kits and got to work.

We spent maybe too much time Googling bruises.

(this is not my head)

It’s strangely satisfying to make bruises.  They are pretty.  And there’s my detriment to feminism for the day.

(neither is this)

Neither my cousin or I wanted to remove our makeup at the end of the night.  We felt tough, as if we’d actually earned them rather than sat primly still for fifteen minutes while an internationally award-winning tattoo artist gently poofed our faces with baby powder to set the makeup.

How was the movie? It was great!  The experience of waiting in line at a premiere is always it’s own experience, and while I was supremely bummed to miss out standing in line with my friends Krista and Jess (there was an IMAX misunderstanding, and we ended up with tickets to different theaters inside the same cinema), the energy of the theater and the excitement of the movie itself actually kept me awake past midnight, which I don’t think I’ve done since New Years Eve a few years ago when my friend lied to me about the time in order to trick me into staying out.

I’ve spent the last few days explaining to various people what The Hunger Games trilogy is about, and as much as I want to say they are full of great subversive politics and are the actual antidote to Twilight-brain-madness, once you’re in a theater of a zillion teenage girls screaming and clapping when the girl finally kisses the guy (who may be lying about liking her in order to kill her later! and she knows it!), you kind of have to sit back and will yourself 15 years old again: Katniss is a badass.  There are two cute¹ boys. And oh-em-gee the chariot ride costume!

So what if you only got five hours sleep between two 10-hour work days.  That’s why the internet sells bulk crystalline caffeine.

¹ Sort of, I guess. They didn’t do anything for me. I mean, we’ve got Discount Thor on one hand (also: Miley Cyrus’ boyfriend fiance, so, no), and Forgettable McWhatever on the other hand.  Even my cousin is holding out for Tom Hiddleston, bless her little heart.

I don’t know what I was thinking. In my defense I haven’t been invited to a themed party in years, and I like science, so non-branded-Jello-brand gelled shots seem logical. I mean, maybe not in retrospect.  Also: Irish Car Bomb gel-shots. Let’s skip to the part where we agree that not all Irish people put bombs under cars in the same way we can agree that not all nipples are buttery.

I’ve harbored a pretty solid fascination with making decent-quality Jello shots for years now.  It happens occasionally that I eat them, and each time they are made from cheap booze and terrible Big Lots generic gelatin mix (raisin paste and salted chili flavor, of course), and I think about the potential of these things to be great.

First, though, there’s the culture of Jello shots.  There’s this implication that Jello shots will get you fucked up, and to that I’ve always been a little skeptical.  There’s really only one response: isn’t it just faster to drink the alcohol straight?  But I’m not thinking like a teenager, I’m thinking like a 30-something that has a lot of workday memories she needs to kill in a short amount of time.

Then there’s the actual eating of the shot itself; is it chewed or swallowed whole?  I always assumed chewed, because again, if you’re just swallowing it then why aren’t you just drinking the goddamn vodka straight like a normal person?  Then someone pointed out: because the Jello makes it so you can’t taste it.  So terrible cheap booze is solidified into what amounts to alcohol in pill form.  There’s a kind of sense to it.  When you chew these cheap shots, you’re stuck with Monarch vodka in your mouth for longer than you’d ever need to have it there barring post-apocalyptic dental surgery antiseptic.

So what if you used good ingredients?

I encountered the suggestion for the layered Car Bomb shots at Endless Summer, but I was immediately turned off by the quantity of gelatine used in the recipe – five envelopes of Knox gelatine to not-even three cups of liquid, when Knox’s own “Knox Blox” recipe (think Jello Jigglers, aka, Jello set up hard enough to cut into shapes and eat with your hands) calls for four envelopes to every four cups of liquid.  Or an even simpler ratio: one envelope of gelatine hardens one cup of liquid to a pleasantly firmer than normal texture.  So while I liked Endless Summer’s layering, it was clear that the math needed to change.

I did some creative fudging, and in retrospect maybe the middle layer should have been thicker and had less Jamesons in it and more Irish Cream, but people seemed to like them.  I used 2oz plastic cups because the 1oz looked too small, but the 2oz size ended up being hair unwieldy – lots of overfull mouths and people trying to dig smaller bits out with their fingers.  Not ideal.  But shit, dawg, it’s a Jello shot.  If the Queen shows up give her a spoon, everyone else can wing it.

The biggest weirdness is that when you put one in your mouth, the first reaction is slight revulsion, because it’s not sweet.  Rather, it’s a tiny bit sweet from the Irish Cream layer, but for the most part you see this deep cherry-brown color and think you’re eating dessert.  But it’s Guinness and whiskey, and that moment of mental adjustment takes a few seconds.  Once the layers begin to mix in the mouth, it starts to coalesce: boozy, and the strange alchemy between the Irish Cream and the Guinness where the flavors take on a chocolatey, root-beery note.

The party was a blast, a big thanks to the ladies that arranged it.  My friend Cara made what was easily the best corned beef I’ve ever had, along with colcannon with kale and bacon and a side of fried cabbage.  And homemade bread.  We ate well that night, my friends.  Truly well.

And then Predator barfed in the trash can.

Irish Car Bomb Gel Shots
the greatest piece of advice I can offer regarding the making of gel shots is to lightly oil your shooter cups before use.  pour a teaspoon of flavorless cooking oil into a small dish, gently wad up a small piece of paper towel and then soak it in the little bit of oil.  using your now-oily little paper wad, quickly but thoroughly wipe down the insides of the cups, taking care to get down into the corners and all the way up the sides.  no one will know that you’ve gone to this effort, but the joy of seeing people successfully disengage their shots from the cups should be reward enough for you.  also, if you don’t feel like making three layers, you can combine the two Guinness layers into a single layer and put the Irish Cream layer on either the top or bottom.

Layer 1:
2 cups Guinness, divided
2 packets gelatin (packets are .25oz each)

Layer 2:
1/2 cup Jamesons whiskey
1/2 cup Irish Cream, Baileys or otherwise
1 packet gelatin

Layer 3:
(see layer 1)

• First, prepare your cups by oiling them as instructed above.  You will need about 30 2oz cups or 60 1oz cups.  For ease of getting them into the fridge as you work, have the cups lined up and ready to pour into on a cookie sheet or two, and have room in your fridge for those cookie sheets ready to go.

• In a small saucepan, put one cup of beer and sprinkle over 2 packets of gelatine.  Allow to sit, cold, for one minute before moving to the stove top and stirring while warming over medium-low heat until the gelatine has dissolved, about 5 – 7 minutes.  Do not let it come to a boil.  You can tell if the gelatine has dissolved by dipping a metal spoon down to the bottom and bringing a spoonful of liquid up to look at in the light – if there are nothing that looks like clear sand in the spoon, then the gelatine has dissolved.

• Off heat, pour the second cup of beer into the hot beer.  For ease of pouring, transfer the mixture into a Pyrex-type measuring cup with handle and pour spout off the side.  Fill each of the plastic cups the same amount – this will take some trial and error to get the liquid evenly distributed among the cups, but don’t stress about it.  Place the tray of cups into the fridge to set Layer 1 while you start Layer 2.

• In the same saucepan, pour in the whiskey and sprinkle 1 packet of gelatin over it to sit, cold, for one minute before moving to the stove top and stirring while warming over medium-low heat until the gelatin has dissolved.  Remove from heat and pour in the Irish Cream.  Transfer the mixture to the pouring cup and let the whole thing sit and cool for 5 minutes before pouring into the cups just like you did with Layer 1.  Move back to fridge.

• Repeat Layer 1 for the final layer.

• Allow the shots to sit for at least four or five hours or overnight to set them fully.

Yesterday the mailmail¹ threw a package at my dad’s door, and when I picked it up I laughed so hard that I choked on my own spit.

The inside, with no return address, no note, nothing, at this point had Mike the Viking and I both in a hand-clapping, gut-giggling state.  I’d start talking and then start laughing again.  My dad looked on in total confusion, and it hadn’t helped that he’d repeatedly told us to either not open the box in the first place (anthrax bomb) and then to not eat whatever was inside (biogenic and/or cyanide weaponry from North Korea).

To Mike and I, there was no doubt who it was from, and while a series of inside jokes is one tip off, the other is that no one else knows that Mike and I love Sixlets enough to be the only customer base keeping their company afloat.  Hydrogenated palm oil bonded with carob?  In a “unique shape” just the right size to choke on?  It’s a candy masterpiece, I don’t care what anyone else thinks.  We can and will eat these two pounds in the next few days.

And to the sender:  thank you. Let us know where and when we can send a return package.

¹This is a typo after having intended to type “mailman” but I like mailmail so much I’m keeping it.

A few months ago after much begging, needling and cajoling, my co-worker gave me a rabbit.  A dead rabbit.  See, I’d offered to pay him, after I learned that he raised rabbits for meat, and he insisted: I could just have one.  Sometimes they had extras, and if they did, I was welcome to it.  When he finally handed me a sack of rabbit parts I was ecstatic.

And then I lost interest in cooking.

For months it sat in my freezer, a growing testament to my apathy.  My dad doesn’t eat meat and hasn’t eaten it in 40 years, and the polite thing to do would be to cook it at my mom’s house.  But I don’t have a car and getting to my mom’s house requires a favor from the Viking, and then on top of that it became increasingly clear that I didn’t have time to stew something for hours at someone else’s house. It’s not a good excuse or anything, but for someone who has lost interest in cooking, any excuse is a good excuse.

So it sat.  And my co-worker said “Hey, you never said how that rabbit was!” and I had to sheepishly tell him: I haven’t eaten it.  I felt like a tremendous asshole.  He raised and cared for that rabbit, and then butchered and cleaned it.  It wasn’t a ‘free’ rabbit. It was a gift I’d squandered from someone who took urban farming seriously.

Yesterday, finally disgusted with myself, I thawed it and set about stewing it.

I used Hank Shaw’s Rabbit with Mushrooms recipe, with all the disregard for actual recipe that you’d expect from me.  I didn’t want to spend the money on dried porcini mushrooms, so I made do with some powdered porcini I already had, and fresh mushrooms.  I added carrots and extra parsnips.  I forgot to get thyme.  I added extra roasted garlic, because when has that ever gone awry.

I’d forgotten that my co-worker had warned me, casually, “There might be some fur.”

It was a genuinely beautiful piece of meat.  A huge animal, much bigger than the frozen commercially farmed rabbit I’ve previously purchased.  There also seemed to be more fat present, but whether that was do to cleaning or how they are raised I don’t know.  But the fat, the fat is good.  By all respects, it was immediately visually apparent that this was a healthier, happier, more robust animal than the weird little lean creatures I was used to, but I still wasn’t really ready for the hair wads.

A few hours later I had rabbit stew, and it was fucking awesome.  I picked the meat off the bones since the Viking gets all furious if something slows down his eating, and I think I must have eaten half the rabbit there over the sink, loudly sucking meat and juice off the rib cage and leg joints.  It is no damn joke you guys: this was a delectable forest creature.

I have to tell you though, as I was parting out the meat, a large hunk of it shot out of my greasy fingers and onto the kitchen floor where there was a loud popping sound that turned out to be the dog teleporting through time and space to snatch the rabbit out of the air before I could even turn my head to follow where it went.  This is a dog that I can normally say “WAIT” to very firmly and she won’t eat something delicious off the ground.  For the whole rest of the evening we stepped on her a total of like five times, because like all dogs she’s an optimist, and if one golf-ball sized hunk of rabbit meat hit the floor, surely more will follow.

I’ve mentioned before that I am a third¹ generation Pacific Northwesterner, and as a result of such I believe that fish should be fried in beer batter, and breading is an anathema, unless you’re frying oysters, in which case they should be fried in either seasoned flour or cracker meal.   I don’t mean to be an old lady about it or anything, but you don’t see me telling Southerners not to fry stuff in cornmeal.  Which I think is gross, but you know.  They can do whatever they want down in those sweaty states.

I’d heard on good authority that the food at Fish Tale Brew Pub was much better than since I last been, which was admittedly like 10 years ago or something.  I also made the mistake of checking in with them on Yelp and discovered that everyone TOTALLY DOESN’T GET WHAT THE HYPE IS and WHY WON’T THAT ASSHOLE SERVER BLEND MY HUSBAND’S SOUP IN A BLENDER FOR HIM, DOESN’T SHE CARE THAT HE HAD JAW SURGERY AND WE WANT TO EAT OUT SOMEWHERE THAT DOESN’T SERVE PUREED FOOD?

Anyway, the lure of potentially good fish and chips – of which there is a desperate dearth of in Olympia – was enough to lure my dad and the Viking out of our hut for the evening, which is a supremely rare event.  Truly rare.  In fact, I don’t think the three of us have left the house together in the last five months.  And the result?

Nope.  I mean, good for many.  Meh for me.  I’d never order their fish and chips, because the fish is breaded in panko, though the quality was good and the Viking and my dad were not-speaking-nomming happy.  The portion of fries with the fish was huge (in the photo it seems rather small, but they could barely finish) and the quality was high.

I ordered the oyster burger, which normally comes with fries but I substituted onion rings for.  And regretted.  PANKO, you bastard!  Shit.  So, in addition to demanding that my fish be beer battered, the same applies to my onion rings.  These were fresh and hot and tasty and totally shredded the holy living meatpaste out of the roof of my mouth.  I literally couldn’t eat them, because I’m a serious weakling, I guess.

The oyster burger though?  Divine.  Perfect.  Nicely fried, gently seasoned, and tasty enough on it’s own, but it was the Viking who handed me his dish of coleslaw and suggested “Put that on there,” and the angels sang and Yog Sothoth returned to the beyond and I greedily consumed the entire thing without offering anyone else a taste.  For god’s sake, ask for a side of slaw with your oyster burger.  They’ll try and push bacon on you, and that’s fine, but coleslaw on that fucker is what’ll make your day.

Anyway, I’m heartened by Fish Tale.  It wasn’t cheap, but their happy hour is solid.  I can see coming by here for a burger (which, served until 11pm means it’s one of the latest-serving joints in town; important information for post-work drunkards like myself) or some garlic & parm fries and a pint of brew as a reward for a particularly crusty day.  A lot of the negative reviews on Yelp center around the issue that the servers don’t afford any special treatment to regulars, delivering beer with equitable aloofness, and to that I say: bless them.  After a day of talking myself hoarse at work, sometimes I want to be served a beer by a lady who refuses to puree a customer’s chowder for them.

¹Or something, close enough.

I’ve anguished over explaining myself, I’ve mentally composed a long heart-to-heart with you about how Anger Burger was never supposed to be a chore, about how exhausting it is to work a full-time job while trying to find a new place to live.  But it’s all frosting on the toad.  The truth is that I just haven’t been into writing.  I haven’t been into taking photos.  I haven’t been into much at all, to be honest, and that’s okay.

• We’re waiting to hear back about a NW version of the Guacamole House. I’m trying not to think about it.
• I just worked 40 hours in 4 days.
• I’ve gained 3 pounds of beer weight.  This part is 100% true.  Well, some of it might be donut weight.
• Barbara’s Puffins cereal should be renamed Lady Kibble.
• My cousin and I have assembled costumes so we can dress as Katniss for the midnight premiere of The Hunger Games.
• I bought and ate a package of cake-flavored 100th anniversary Oreos.

And really, the thing that made me break my silence because I sort of can’t believe it myself and sometimes writing things down makes them real:

• I just ate a literal pound – a pound – of crab meat that has a good chance of giving me food poisoning.

It’s a long and sad story, but I ended up with some of the biggest crabs I’ve ever seen that had been left at my work, taken home with someone else, cooked, brought back to the work and then taken home by me, all over the course of several days.  Days.  And I’m frankly not even sure who left them at my work in the first place.  I basically just did the food version of shooting up heroin with a dirty needle, and all I can say for myself is: I am pleasantly full.

I’ll try to keep in better touch with you guys, even if it’s just a sentence or two.  Bear with me.  I miss you guys too.

***UPDATE:  No food poisoning!  Ha-ha!  Take that, health department!