Anger Burger

The dog is recovering in normal dog fashion, in that she seems as though nothing traumatic happened to her until she suddenly crashes out into deep coma-like naps.  I, on the other hand, am entering into that second-guessing everything stage.

While the vet was right about what needed to be done – the lump had to be sent for biopsy, the tooth was abcessed, the nails too long for non-sedated clipping – I don’t think we’d stay with him in the future, were we staying in Los Angeles.  I don’t like that he told me that dogs didn’t have any recovery to worry about when having molars removed — when pressed he admitted that they could possibly get dry socket like humans, and should probably not eat hard food for “a day or two”.

He was also very offhand about the very reason I took her to him in the first place, that she has an infection around her fingernails.  The home-care for this is a tiny $20 container of  damp antibacterial wipes that are almost impossible to get in and around her nail bed because of the stiff hairs there.  I called and asked how well I should be cleaning them – should I be scrubbing them clean or just wiping them down? – and was given another vague answer of “Just wipe them clean as best you can.”  To which I answer: well, which is it?  Just wipe them clean?  Or as best as I can? Because as best as I can involves stuffing the stupid pad up under her fingernails and up under the hairs, which causes her visible discomfort.

It was my mom who pointed out that I like to know precisely how to do things, and my vet is of the old school philosophy that animal recovery just sort of works out if you surgically remove anything weird and then give them some antibiotics.

I sadly set about making the last pie of the Guacamole House, using the phyllo crust alternative, and was not at all surprised that it turned out way too sweet.  I mean, I was surprised, but not surprised that the last pie of the house would be a fucked up one.

I had some nectarines going south, and a few Honeycrisp apples, as well as some frozen blueberries and about half a cup of dried sour cherries that needed using.  Normally I hate getting rid of food just to get rid of it, but pies are natural recipients of the kitchen-sink method.  Anyway, it was a lot of fruit and I added a loose cup of brown sugar, which would normally be just right for the same amount of apples.  If they are tart apples, which these were not.  Also: overripe nectarines.  And ripe blueberries.  And a sugary phyllo crust. I mean, it was delicious, I just had to snack on some potato chips between servings of the pie, I’m no fool.

That was many, many, many dollars ago.  It’s less funny now.

Each of her little fingernails had a bacterial infection of unknown origin and needed to be scraped back to get the antibiotic way up under her nail beds, which gives me the willies, and we all agreed was way too painful unless she was put under anesthesia, which is no small risk for dogs with faces shaped like hers.   Her nails had also been unusually long as long as we’ve had her, for which there is literally no treatment but to cut them way, way back and cauterize the blood vessel inside the nails, and clearly this is also something you do only when a dog is under general anesthesia.  So we agreed to that.  Then I mentioned the little lump on her side she’s always had but that hasn’t changed size.  Then the vet asked when her teeth were last cleaned.  And then they found the abcessed tooth.

Basically, everyone had a rough fucking day¹.  Well, mostly Tank, she’s the one that got her fingernails chopped off, a thing taken out of her side and a tooth yanked.  But she got cheese and fresh lamb and sweet potato at the other end of it.  We decided that in order to earn her keep she must now learn to play the squeeze box.

¹ I totally cried at the vet like a crazy dog lady.

The down side to this expensive and often frustrating cooking hobby that I have is that it’s not a great hobby for someone that moves regularly, which is me.  It’s not by choice, though I’ll admit to no small amount of blind stupidity on my part.  Maybe “blind optimism” is a better choice of words, though anyone who knows me will snort at the use of the word “optimism” in conjunction with myself.

We’re sad to be leaving Guacamole House, but it’s time to be closer to our families again.  My mom is also a medical celebrity because she’s officially had more of the particular chemotherapy she’s on than any other human being in the history of human beings and I expect we’ll be doing the talkshow circuit soon and will need me to be her business manager, so you know.  Time to head back north.

Moving!  Moving is the most tremendous bullshit, but you already know this.  What you may not know are some things that I’ve learned through trial and trial.  And some error.  But mostly trial.

• This is worth the cost:

  

  It is U Haul brand packing paper, and I’m sure you can find cheaper paper somewhere in town, but the U Haul stores are always nearby, and at this point in the moving process I say fuck it. I wouldn’t move without buying at least one box and maybe two. $10 or $20 is a small price to pay to responsibly pack your breakables with padded abandon. When I was younger I used newsprint and discovered at our destination that everything I packed in newsprint – MY ENTIRE KITCHEN – now needed to be washed in hot soapy water to get the ink back off it, and She-Hulk was angry.

• Speaking of spending money on name-brand stuff, this is the tape ninjas use:

  

  It is Duck brand HP260 tape, and I have no idea what that designation is supposed to mean, but I assume the HP stands for “Harry Potter”. All I know is that for several moves we have used either Scotch brand packing tape or generic, and both came unstuck on our boxes to varying degrees. I even used Scotch tape that is supposedly designed for use on cardboard boxes, and that crap peeled off the easiest of all. Our last move I bought the Duck brand, and it’s the stickiest, meanest tape in all the land and I’ll never use anything else.  Be advised that I can only find it at Staples.

• Reward systems are where it’s at.  I get very overwhelmed and frustrated during the packing process where it seems like we’ve made little progress and still have so, so much more to do.  Today is that day for me.  Tomorrow might be as well.  But I generally know that things work out, and to just put my head down and pack another box.  Don’t think about the big picture, just pack another box.  In between boxes, I get rewards.  Usually it’s that I get to check my email and blog feeds.  Sometimes it’s a chocolate bon-bon.  Later in the day I’m allowed to have a beer for each box packed – if I start this too early, I’ll fall asleep at like 4pm.  Same with the emergency Vicodin stash.

• Get rid of stuff.  This is one of the hardest lessons, since moving is a balance of saving money versus saving effort.  Mike and I have continuously over the last few years moved with furniture that we hate.  But we keep it because it’s convenient and we need it on the other end.  We convince ourselves that after we move we’ll replace that stupid side-table with a radical Hobbit side-table that we actually like.  After 10 years, this has never happened.  This move we are trying harder.  I’ve listed multiple items on Craigslist, and if they don’t sell they are going to Goodwill.  Period.  There have also been more personal purges, because I have the time and I’m in the mood.  My mental position is: if it had burned in a house fire, would I mourn its loss?  No?  Then it can die in the garbage bin.

• Pharmeceuticals are your friends, particularly if you have Crohn’s disease.  Moving drama is the worst of the worst for my Crohn’s though so far (KNOCK ON EVERYTHING) my health is under control.  If you have access to drugs during this time, for god’s sake, take them.  Do not be above altering your own chemistry!  That’s why we evolved brains, for fucks’ sake, to make things better.  A little Xanax while moving is no different then getting your teeth cleaned at the dentist or wearing warmer socks in winter.  I, of course, do not have health insurance, so I have to treat my pain with macaroni & cheese and the occasional donut or seven.  And cuddles:

  

I think it’s safe to say that I’m going into the crazy-laugh stage.  I drank four or maybe five beers in about three hours last night, I can’t really remember, and then I made a grilled cheese sandwich and watched House Hunters International while vowing to cut the ears off of people who remark snottily that the master bedroom is a little smaller than they “thought it was going to be.”

You see, we’re leaving the Guacamole House.  Our beloved Guacamole House.  But it’s okay because we’re moving to be near family, and that’s good, but then there’s this part in between where we have to play possessions-Tetris.  And I fucking hate possessions-Tetris.

I hate it so much that my breakfast today is Excedrin, super-mega-C and some 7-Up because that’s what my stomach can handle.

That’s not entirely true, I also tried these cheese-flavored oatcakes from Wales because the interior package was busted open from the hilarious packing job.  I pushed the paper box back into shape to take the photo, but it was gruesome.

I like oatcakes already, and these with cheese were totally tasty, as you might imagine.  I had to look up Caerphilly cheese to see what it was supposed to taste like, and there are few descriptions outside “salty” and “mild” which is good, because that’s what the oatcakes tasted like.  So, success, I suppose.

Apparently the slang for Caerphilly cheese is “the crumblies” which is entirely too accurate for what happened to the oatcakes.  ALSO.  The town of Caerphilly has a festival called The Big Cheese, which as near as I can tell is a Renaissance Fair with cheese, and I honestly can’t think of a better time unless there’s also a Firefly/Serenity convention there at the same time.

It’s cooling off a little.

Every time.

Every.  Time.

I watch a lot of daytime Food Network, so let’s get that little admission out of the way before I progress.  There are shows that I simply, absolutely cannot watch at all, the primary example of these being Down Home with the Neelys. Watching Gina Neely try to pick food up without letting it touch her manicure makes my scalp bleed, and this is before Pat and Gina start their profoundly awkward and honestly kind of inappropriate-for-food PDA routine.

Most other shows I watch with a combination of terror and delight.

You might think I hate Rachel Ray the same way some people hate root canals, but I just don’t.  I don’t feel much of anything about her, to be honest – I find her mannerisms and speech to be occasionally abrasive, but her food seems pretty normal to me.  Er, I guess with the caveat of: of the two recipes of hers that I’ve tried, neither were anything I’d care to repeat.  One was an apple cider beef stew that was almost inedibly sweet, and the other was some kind of potato dish that I only recall as being unnecessarily greasy.

Recently, I became madly infuriated with Giada De Laurentiis.

I started out sort of liking her – all I knew was that she was a professionally trained chef, her crazy bobble-head made me laugh, and she seemed to really eat on TV (unlike Ina Garten – more on that later).  And then all those things turned bad.  Her bobble-head still makes me laugh, but is it just me or does her giant head amplify sound?  Because each time she takes a bite of something and frantically chews it, all I can notice is the damp, loud SMACKSMACKSMACK of her eating.  Then everything went downhill.

The first problem was an episode called “California Sushi” wherein she declares that she’s inviting her girlfriends over for a sushi-making party.  Step 1?  Stopping off at Hamasaku (where sushi rolls cost about $20 each) to buy the pre-made sushi rice.  PRE MADE.  There are so many things about this that are weird, not the least of which is that sushi rice is easy to make.

I can’t find anything to back this up, but there was an episode where she made buttercream frosting and thinned it with water.  WATER.  Oh my god water.

And then, the Le Cordon Bleu episode.  In an episode titled “Cooking School Made Easy”, Giada sets out to make her three favorite things learned from her time at school.  The first, pavlovas, are constructed without drama.  The second I sort of cringed at: a chocolate and cheese danish, made from frozen puff pastry and mini chocolate chips.  I mean, there’s nothing inherently wrong with this, and while I agree that making puff pastry from scratch is a foolish endeavor for a home cook when frozen is so high quality and readily available, something about the mini chip filling rubbed me the wrong way.  Perhaps because if reminiscing about Paris, shouldn’t we be using  Pierre Hermé or Valrhona?

And then she made madelines from cake mix.  Oh haayl no.  Here’s hoping that Le Cordon Bleu Paris just deleted her graduation record from the computers, because bitch, you did not just make a classic French cookie from motherfucking Betty Crocker.

I’m going to calm down a little bit and talk about Ina Garten.  Garten was under fire recently for refusing – twice! – a Make-a-Wish child’s request to cook lunch with her.  As hilariously Cruella de Vil¹ as it is, it’s not what bothers me about her.

The first is a purely cook thing – she cuts her food into pieces far, far too large.  For example, she makes a watermelon and feta salad, and advises cutting both the melon and the cheese into 1-inch cubes; the recipe online instructs to cut the feta to 1/2-inch, but I assure you that on the program she says to cut them both to 1-inch and reinforces it by saying that she loves how the big pieces look.  I can assure you that this is an essentially inedible salad.  Even if you could get a bite each of feta and watermelon into your mouth, the ratio is still insane.  Feta is a strong cheese!  This sort of madness is repeated recipe after recipe – broccoli florets left whole for an Asian salad, the pieces so large they wouldn’t even fit in your mouth – her famous chicken curry salad she cuts into massive cubes, easily larger than 1-inch square, and brags at the luxuriousness of it.

This brings me to the part where she appears to loathe tasting food on television.  It’s such a snarling, swearing pet peeve of mine that I admit to enjoying it.  She barely takes a bite of food, literally as little as she can get away with, and she absolutely will not chew it.  She does this strange sort of lipping to get it into her mouth – she will not open her mouth very wide (oh, hello Giada) and appears to be keeping her lips pulled taught in an effort to keep her teeth from showing.  Through this prissy slit-mouth she’ll take a microbite and then tell you it is delicious.  I’m pretty sure I ate just like this when I had my wisdom teeth removed and my jaw muscles were swollen nearly shut.

Phew. And I didn’t even get to Paula Deen or Sandra Lee.

¹ I think she’s a real iron cunt at her core (I can just tell by the way she pops her shirt collars) but if it makes you feel better she’s famously pro-gay marriage, and has steadfastly always refused to do fundraising in conjunction with the Food Network. I think that if someone doesn’t want to do a Make-a-Wish, they shouldn’t have to and shouldn’t be hunted by the media as a result – there is quite possibly an understandable reason for her not wanting to participate. She claims she didn’t even know about the request. Or she may just hate children. Either way.

OKAY.  So.  That was a little hairy.

Certain programs are still missing from my computer, but I think I’ve gotten my Photoshop back under control.  Except!  I lost all my actions and forgot how to optimize color for the web, and if you don’t know what that means then you’ve probably got a life outside blogging.  Anyway, test image:

So!  I’m sitting on a heap of photos and at least one recipe to share with you guys, so thanks for your patience and stand by.

Well!  That could have gone better.  I realize that radio silence on blogs is a death-knell, but I assure my readers that the exorcism is working, there’s just a lot more head-spinning and pea-soup vomit than expected.

Speaking of vomit, I got one of those hilarious little kid flus¹ where I basically woke up, jettisoned everything inside my body and then hallucinated for a two days while I nursed a jar of applesauce and seventeen bottles of Smartwater.

ALL WILL BE WELL SOON.

¹ Flus? Is that plural for flu?

The Viking and I rarely see eye to eye on anything, but we decided that if Saturday was going to be our last day on the earth as angry, unhappy atheists, then we were going to do it honestly.

And by honestly, I mean of course donuts¹, salt water taffy and yogurt-covered raisins for dinner.

And pizza for dessert.

Enjoy your delicious moments!

The rest of the day was spent playing Portal 2 and L.A. Noire.  Oh, and the dog got a bath, because if it turned there was a god who believes in genocide, I at least want the dog to be clean.

¹ More on those donuts tomorrow.