serinde

1. Go to Gourmet Garage, intending to just grab eggs and yogurt and kitty litter (and to dine on mac and cheese with tuna). Enter a fugue state and wake up with a 1.3lb boneless "mini-roast of wild boar", with a USDA stamp declaring it to be from "Feral Swine".

2. Return home. Visit the vendor's web site for recipes, as the package suggests, only to find that they don't have anything for this particular incarnation of boar.

3. Pour a drink.

4. Remember the packet of dried wild mushrooms that has been staring accusingly at you for a couple months. Start reconstituting them to buy time.

5. Stuffing? It's boneless, so there should be convenient gap. Slowly work loose the net thingie holding it together, realize that not really is there a convenient gap, but perhaps we can make something of this.

6. Go to chop an onion. Realize that the last of the onion went into the beef stew Sunday. Well, shit.

7. Cook rice in the mushroom soaking liquid, add the mushrooms and sauteed garlic and herbs? That might work.

8. Realize we had better get the roast in if it ain't bein' stuffed. Ponder what a good forester would rub his pig with. Drink more. Default to sage, thyme, and long pepper.

9. Surprise yourself by actually getting the net thingie back around the roast. Realize the roasting pan is way too damn' big. However! Grandma's enameled handled pan that she made mac and cheese in! Yes.

10. Heat oven to 4something, for searing. Drain mushrooms, reserving broth (almost forgetting to). Smells kind of like gym socks.

11. Chop a few carrots and celery to throw in the roasting dish, because why the hell not? Put roast in oven.

12. O NOES COCKTAIL IS GONE make another.

13. Measure mushroom soaking liquid, eke out with water for 2c. Begin to put it on the stove, then realize you have a rice cooker, idiot. Transfer operations thither.

14. Chop garlic and some slightly wilty scallions found in the back of the fridge. Sauté for about that long, adding the chopped mushrooms (some of which look disturbingly like horrifying sea life).

15. Turn down the oven to 325. Uncork last bottle of red. Where does all the wine go?!

16. This drink has too much grenadine. However, the kitchen is starting to smell awfully nice. Realize that the mushies have not been herbed. Leap up to rectify.

17. After that's settled it for a bit, add the mushies to the rice, which is still madly cooking away. Lordy, we love the rice cooker.

18. An hour five after beginning productions, everything seems to be ready (modulo letting the roast rest for a few minutes). The meat thermometer seems to think it's about 155 deg F. There is almost no liquid produced by the roast to make gravy or other joy from, alas; a teaspoon, at a generous estimate. This be some lean meat in spite of the nice square slab of fat on the top of it.

19. OM NOM NOM

For the past week, I have been babysitting Dr. Livingston, Adventure Kitten!, who is possibly the most lovable kitten to have ever existed. (You pick him up, and he instantly starts purring, whether he knows you or not.) He'd had a very bad infection of some kind, and managed to pull through, but needs antibiotics 2x/day for about a month; so to give nedlnthred a break, I took him for a few days.

Ranger has coped with this surprisingly well. --Perhaps not surprisingly; he has dealt with (by which I mean "hid from") much more obstreperous and interfering felines; but I expected a great deal more fuss. I'm not saying he's delighted, but we sit together on the couch and sleep together on the same bed in reasonable harmony. No bloodshed, no peeing incidents. Now that Livingston is feeling a bit better and regaining some of his natural vif[1], I guess it's just as well he's going to go home tomorrow; but I'm sure going to miss him. He's so very people-oriented and friendly and cuddly and WOOGIE WOOGIE AWWWWWW *flail*

[1] I am particularly thinking of him tearing through the apartment last night and rear-ending Ranger, who was just standing near the fridge minding his own business. Ranger was Not Amused.

Grandma died early this morning.

As has been noted, intimated, and occasionally ranted about in this space, one could say that she has been gone for awhile. I have not felt like My Grandma Who I Know And Love has been there for well over a year, maybe two, and I have been intermittently tearful and howlish about that; and she has been in varying states of mental and physical discomfort for most of that time, which is now thankfully over; but it doesn't seem to have made much of a difference to how I feel right now.

...aaaaand I realize it's the same as when Grandpa died, so you might think I'd've known to expect this?

Funeral is Monday. Airlines are useless (dear JetBlue: plz start flying to Cleveland, kthxbye) so I guess I'm driving. I think Bud can make it. I was just musing last weekend "I should get him a tuneup in case I need to make the long trip", ho ho ho.

Gotta pull my shorts up and get to work. Later for thinking about her loving kindness, and never-failing patience, and true faith, and [aaaa stop now]

I was on the way home tonight, for the third evening running of being at home (which may be a new record since moving in), and I found I was castigating myself for wasting a beautiful evening & not going out to Do Something. "But I'm tiiiiiired..." "SHUT UP GO DO SOMETHING YOU ARE WASTING YOUR LIIIIIFE"

I am indeed at home, though will go out to drop the sheets etc. at the laundromat since the coin-op is closed for sorely-needed renovations. Possibly I will bake.

O ye Mac users: what do you use for managing your budgets? I see that Numbers has a template built-in, but I wonder whether something designed for the purpose might not be more useful.

On the Bergen County line this morning, returning from the house closing, I heard the guy behind me take a call; which I then heard the entire resultant conversation, will-I or nill-I. It seems my fellow-traveller desired his buddy to meet him at 86th and Lex, because he was looking at apartments up there, and wanted a second opinion. Why, quotha? Because he wants to live in the city, and it's a nice neighborhood, and is close to lots of things without being in smack dab in the middle of ruckus. (Money quote: "Dress nice, I'm trying to look rich.")

The Vehicles:
* 600GB internal hard drive
* 750GB hard drive (yclept U-Haul) rescued from Old Gfefx, currently in an external enclosure connected by USB
* [Stuff I Might Buy.]

The Passengers:
* Day to day computering wossnames: OS X, general files and what not
* Perfect archive copies of all my CDs [not extant yet], so I can put the physical media in storage
* MP3s, of which there are Many
* Theoretical: ripped versions of all my DVDs, so I can store them too
* Probable: WinXP partition, because every now and again I do want to re-play Baldur's Gate II or KOTOR
* Backups of all the above

The question is, fundamentally, how to divide up the extant disk acreage in the most sensible, sustainable fashion? E.g., it seems to me that putting the CD archive on the same physical disk as the backup drive means that one is fucked gloriously if the drive eats itself. OTOH, as sweh pointed out, since I will still own the hard copies, it is merely a case of labor, not complete loss.

I could try and stuff all the data onto gfefx' internal hard drive, and just use U-Haul for backups; this should fit everything above easily, I think, unless I do the DVDs, in which case it will be not enough. And then, is connecting via USB solid and quick and reliable for backups? Not to mention that the iMac only has two USB ports, and I do have other USB things I need to plug in from time to time, and there will be more if I succumb to temptation and get an iPhone in the next month. (Yes, I could get a USB hub, but they really do not seem reliable; I have witnessed repeated cases of devices just not being recognized when plugged into one or another.) Firewire seems to be what in The Apple Way is intended for this, but this enclosure supports it not.

Oh, and then there's the question of larger-capacity portability; what if I need to move more data than fits on a flash drive? Should I look into one of those wee portable 75GB things? Do I actually have a need for one, and should I factor it into the architecture?

I still have to decide for sure in what fashion & format I will archive the CDs, but that is outside the scope of the current study; I think the options don't materially affect the above.

Suggestions are solicited, unless it's LOL Y U PLAY GAMEZ, in which case I will slap you with a wet fish.

Ranger just yorked up the cooked chicken livers I gave him to eat an hour ago; this after I got home yesterday to find two (small) pukes on the rug. He seems otherwise okay, but he's a cat who has never been ill a day in his life, so it's way off the normality scale for him.

I guess I better try and find a vet in the area who doesn't have a price list calculated for Ladies who Lunch and their toy dogs.

I've felt rather low this week, particularly this morning. Some can certainly be chalked up to exhaustion and weather, and weather-caused exhaustion--the stickiness is overcoming my apartment coolth--, but I feel that's not all of it. I want everyone and everything to go away and leave me to my own devices. Well, not really, but sort of; and in spite of a reasonable amount of being home and puttering, I haven't actually been cleaning as much (other than the kitchen, which I have to, since much of the puttering has been cooking) or furthering my goals of making the place look like I want it to. I had been holding off on budgetary concerns, as the house sale doesn't go through for another ~3 weeks (presuming all goes well), but maybe I should advance myself a bit more funding for the sake of my well-being.

And then I look at myself and say, Self, are you really such a shallow being that you need a decorative shelving unit and some placemats and a fan to soothe your discontent?