This is a tiny taco salad in a dog bowl.

For a very lucky dog, for no real reason at all other than it’s nice to see someone be totally happy and unworried.

I’d be that crazy dog lady that carried her dog everywhere if Thinktank wasn’t 30 pounds.  Instead I wrap her in crochet blankets my mom made me and feed her taco salad.

I’d say it was cheap entertainment, but to date Tank is the single largest financial investment of my life.  And of course I’d do it a million times over, if I had to.  Who knew I’d love a barfing machine this much?

Around that time I was coincidentally quitting the job and moving out of the state, so the ride was over, but for other reasons as well: I’d been found out.  Not that it was a well-kept secret or anything, but I heard through friends who still worked for the company that higher-ups had been told of my blog, and in particular, one training manager whom I had been particularly mean to.  It was complicated and double-edged; nothing I had said was untrue, and our employers really were (and are still) ill-focused, corporate-minded and petty and at the time I considered him to be one of them.  But that doesn’t excuse that I created a forum in which I could mock someone without recourse, someone who was also just trying to work at a career that they loved, in an environment that was difficult at best.

So of course, now he is the boss of the current coffee company of my choice, and the employer of one of my best friends, and now I see him several times a week as I stumble, blind with rage and sleepiness, to get my morning coffee on my way to work.  But I asked him for a meeting and apologized to him and now we say hello to each other but if I offered him half of a BFF pendant I’m certain he’d refuse it.

Why this long-ass story?  Because I have been debating deeply further discussing the issue that my new landlord has illegally kept us without a stove for now over five weeks.  He has, rather than hire a repair person, sent a part of the oven off to Canada for repair, only to be told several weeks later that they couldn’t, and then, this week, to acquire an even older stove off Craigslist, install it, and then discover that it too doesn’t work.  Not that I wanted it to, because it honestly would be the shittiest stove of any rental I’ve rented in my entire adult life of renting.

Broken stove #2 now sits on our porch, because we are now hillbillies.

There is so much I want to say about this here, but I keep reining myself in, thinking about the legalities.  What if we go to court with this guy?  Will my bitter name-calling be thrown back in my face?  Are we going to have to move again?  The sneaking thought keeps coming back.  Are we going to have to move again?  Can this guy really be so irrational and terrible that he won’t just replace the fucking oven with a reasonable one?  I’m tired of thinking about this.  I’m tired of not having my coping mechanisms available to me: I want to bake bread.  I want to roast vegetables.  I want to try the “hamburger” flavor you-bake pizza from Papa Murphy’s.  I want to make a pie with the rhubarb I had been so eagerly awaiting this spring, rhubarb which will now soon be gone from the markets.  I want to not be tricked by people.

Take for example this packet of Hot Pockets Snackers in Fiesta Nacho Bites flavor, which I purchased from the local Grocery Outlet¹. I was shopping with my pal Fraoigh, and we laughed at how utterly, totally teenage these things are, and since I still don’t have a working oven, they went into my basket.  I paid less than a dollar for them as well, which helps with that decision-making tree.

Perhaps the best part is that they don’t give instructions for heating them unless you have a microwave.  It appears that we have evolved beyond the toaster oven, sort of how a teenage friend of mine said she didn’t understand what the hell the icon for the “save” was supposed to be at the top of a document program, and I had to explain floppy disks to her.  I toasted them at 400° until they spooged their innards ala Totino’s Pizza Rolls.

Anyway, Fiesta Nacho Bites Snackers.  NOT A LOW FAT FOOD.  I stared at this warning on the label for some minutes, exhausted and hungry, before realizing that because the product boasts they are BAKED Not FRIED, the company had to clarify that they didn’t actually mean anything by this at all.  Everything is always so complicated with processed foods.  I’d forgotten that my avoidance of them wasn’t entirely dietary as much as scholarly.

They actually smelled good.  I was starving and alone in the house, so that may have been a factor, but they smelled pleasantly nacho-y, like cheesy and corn tortillas, despite having no corn in them.  Right then the dog told me she had to go outside, where of course it was pouring rain so I had to stand outside with a flashlight getting soaked while she read the Wall Street Journal and took the world’s most leisurely dump.  Upside: the Bites were not nuclear hot by the time I got back to them.

And, no.  They taste like breakfast sausage and fake cheese,  anything “nacho” or “fiesta” totally evaporated.  Literally just breakfast sausage inside.  Not wretched, but off enough to make me wonder if there had been some kind of test-kitchen mix-up back at the food lab.

I guess I’m not a teenager after all.  And then!  Proof arrived:

¹I should note that in the Anger Burger household, we call the Grocery Outlet the “Used Food Store.”  I don’t remember how this started, but I now have to concentrate on using the correct name when speaking about it to other people.

Fig Manor is coming along, with some setbacks.  But first, let’s talk about the basement.  Which isn’t really a basement so much as a hole under the house.

That’s pretty much it.  Nothing peculiar has happened down there or anything, if you don’t count the part where the light switch is that blue box there on the right side of the photo, at the bottom of the stairs.  Let’s let that sink in for a moment while you imagine going down in the househole to do your laundry at night.  Getting down to the bottom.  So you can switch the lights on.

The topic of discussion today is that I have not had an oven since we moved in two weeks ago.  Because I am a total fucking moron and didn’t wonder why the range was unplugged, or who had unplugged it, and why they hadn’t plugged it back in again.

Turns out there is an electrical component in the control panel that flashes an error message and SHRIEKS LIKE A BANSHEE EVERY THIRTY SECONDS.  Just to let you know that there is an error.  In a part of the range not in use.  So while the burners still work when lit with a match, the oven portion is controlled entirely by an electric interface, an interface that the landlord has sent off to be repaired with no real way of knowing when it might be fixed.  Two weeks?  Four?  And if you’re helpfully wondering why I didn’t check to ensure it worked before we moved in, I did: I plugged it into the wall socket, checked the burners, and then unplugged it in under 30 seconds, so the error code didn’t have a chance to cycle.  Lesson about being a tenant #1,007,935: check an appliance for longer than 30 seconds.

Still, we have burners and a rice cooker, even though I realized that 90% of my cooking takes place in the oven.  We do not have a microwave, something I’d forgotten since for the last two years we’ve lived places that came with them.  I bought several hippie frozen meals before realizing they take 45 minutes to cook in the toaster oven, by which time I’ve had a few beers and then walked to the burger joint two blocks away.

Say what you want, but Spam pan-fried with a little not-too-sweet homemade teriyaki sauce served with rice and fried runny eggs is sublime.

Mike the Viking has been waging a bloody and disheartening war against the Internet Providers.  We tried DSL and immediately discovered that when the saleswoman assured us that it was perfectly adequate for normal usage, she was being incredibly literal.  It’s adequate.  As in, it works.  Ish.  We went crawling to the evil troll Comcast and begged his mercy, and we have suffered for it.  There have been new wireless routers purchased.  There have been phone calls, for assistance both foreign and domestic.  Mike the Viking used a raised voice to tell someone that Odin would destroy them, and then had to explain who Odin was.  Last night a total system failure resulted in several hours of product assistance calls this morning, which for now has granted us access to the great Net that is Inter, but how long we are blessed here I do not know.

Life!  It just keeps being here.

Friends have asked “Aren’t you excited to be all moved?”  And I have a totally automatic and unintentional facial spasm that I imagine is not unlike what my dog looks like before she throws up a bunch of mucousy grass.

Because right now, this is my new dining room:

It looks like we live in a box fort.  A box fort that we a pay a lot of fucking rent for.  But at least the kitchen is… well, it’s a total disaster.  I can’t even take a photo of the rest of it, it is just too dismal.  Why do I have so much stuff?  I feel like I got rid of so much when we moved out of the Guacamole House, but The fact that I’ve uncovered the 7th large box of just pantry goods pretty much proves me wrong.

We are pros at moving now, but this move we really fucked up on a couple of things.  Because we had friends help instead of hired dudes, we felt pressured to just get the stuff into the house in any way it would fit at all, and didn’t boss them around on breaking things down into room-by-room piles.  We always fix up the bedroom first so there is at least one retreat in the house, but we keep finding more bedroom shit and the whole thing never feels complete.

But you know.  Fuck it.  House.

The goal is to get the kitchen done today (ha! ugh) and then… The rest of everything.  Oooooh, man.

But soon I will be able to tell you about Fig Manor, which has a motherfucking gas cooktop. And the creepiest basement I’ve ever seen, even counting “Spider Dungeon,” the basement of the 100 year old apartment building from when I was briefly a resident of Cincinnati.

In the meantime I need to try and remember what else teenagers eat so I can continue on this theme.  Bagel dogs? Stouffer’s french bread pizza? Mountain Dew? I’m getting acne just thinking about it.

¹ Even worse: the bloodborne pathogens certification class actually costs about $100, which my boss paid for me because he’s a prince amongst scoundrels.
² I passed! I actually had anxiety dreams last night that I failed, which were deserved because I was on so much cold medicine that I could only perceive myself in the third person.

I briefly believed that Food Junk had pranked me by Photoshopping Anger Burger in with The Food in my Beard and My Drunk Kitchen, because, you know, I’m not competition for those guys.  I’ve had this conversation more than once:

someone: “Oh, Sunday has some kind of food blog.”

me: “Oh pish.”

someone else: “OH MY GOD! Have you seen My Drunk Kitchen?!”

So there it is.  After a few months of some of the worst blogging I’ve ever scraped off my shoe, Saveur decides to send a bazillion people my way.  Or ten, really.  No need for hyperbole.

*Edited to add: it appears that if you aren’t “signed in” as a free member of The Saveur, then your vote appears to count, but doesn’t actually. So, that’s neat.

Meanwhile at the bar the other night a guy sat for hours drinking beer and watching ST:TNG on his laptop.  He’d pause when he got up to get fresh beers.

My friends and I sat and talked about nerd stuff for hours, and every once and a while we’d look over and find this sort of universal comfort glowing back at us, this perfect, gentle encouragement that even though were are all broke and overworked and bewildered at how we got here, there’s still Q.

Back at my dad’s house, ThinkTank’s favorite TV show is Animal Planet’s Too Cute: Kittens.  I swear I am not shitting you.  Look:

We eventually have to turn the channel because she watches it so intently and with so many muscles flexed that we’re afraid she’ll hurt herself.

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.