Putting the 'dugong' back in Christdugongmas!

 Good lord, the crowds out there!  The teeming hordes have all crawled out of their dens, pale as maggots, and descended on every retail outlet here in my part of the planet.  It's like a state fair, where all the weird people you've never, ever met, but who clearly live nearby, come shambling out of the forest like lost Innsmouthians, slavering after deep fried Twinkies and corndogs.

It takes centuries of inbreeding with fish-humanoids who worship Dagon to produce a grandmother like this, and dammit, she wants waffle fries with her fried twinkies.

I do not miss The Reddest Corner of the Bluest State at all when it comes to shopping.  Yes, the crowds were thinner, but they were made up of white folks busy policing everyone else's morals, 

 

Look at the joy on those faces.  LOOK AT IT.  

folks with too much religion wearing MAGA hats, and they had truck nuts on their vehicles. On a farm truck this form of ornamentation is barely excusable, but on the family sedan it's just heartrending.  

I really have felt like a kind of social weight has been lifted from my shoulders here in town.  I live in an area with two colleges nearby, so there's a lot of diversity, a lot of young energy, and a huge out and proud LGBTQ+ community too.  Many, many hippies. Big pagan presence. Many, many people from places other than Holland.  It's wonderful!  Example:  I can exclaim 'Shit!' absentmindedly and nobody looks at me as though I'd just shot a loop of gut out my ass!  I CAN WEAR MY FRANKIE SAYS RELAX t-shirt and people laugh! And talk to me! About the Eighties! Not about how God disapproves of butt sex!

We've been doing a pile of necessary shopping amid all the holiday preppers.  Most of it's just been replacing things we lost in the flood, which was kind of boring (Oo, a blender.  Oo, a toaster.  Oo bedding.)  But now the bulk of that is finished, and we've been able to turn our thoughts more toward Christdugongmas and gifts and thank-you cards, and it's starting to be fun again. 

                                     'Merry Christdugongmas!  Ho ho holy shit I'm drowning!'

Retail is nice.  I have nothing against retail.  But thrift stores are more fun, and the thrift shopping out in this area of Bellingham is fuckin' nuts, y'all.  There are warehouse sized places, small places, weird places, smelly places, clothes only places, machinery and tool - only places, shit; I could keep going but you either get the picture, or you don't care.  I've picked up so many high-end items for so cheap lately it's stupid.  And that stock revolves, let me tell you.  Not a week goes by that they haven't all completely turned their inventory!

And here's something that kind of blew me away, now that I'm back in the new and improved, bigger, better, faster Bellingham I've found that in my absence apparently all of Bellingham has become a Designated Wildlife Corridor.  There are warning signs everywhere.  I've seen more of Gods lil' critters here in a week than I did in a month out Sumas way. Deer! Birds galore! The fattest, sleekest squirrels you've ever seen, like real American squirrels that need to go on a damn diet and stop wearing tennis shoes everywhere! 

Back in 1985, when we first lived in Bellingham, there were the occasional deer, black bear and cougars (the Wilderness Death Kitty kind) roaming around at night right in downtown, and since it invariably follows that where there's deer - and there sure in the fuck are some damn deer  - 

                                                 Yes. Not even kidding.  Like this.  Don't they look tasty?  

- there will also be black bear and Wilderness Death Kitties, I can but surmise that there are now more black bears and Wilderness Death Kitties out there too to go along with all the freakin' damn deer. 

'And we're just the vanguard! Let's not forget about coyotes, mink, wolverines, bobcat, martens, velociraptors and bass!'  

It's just like living in downtown Portland Oregon again! (sniffle)

And let me make the same parallel when it comes to nutty people.  I haven't seen so many free-range nutty people since I left Portland multiple decades of years ago.  (Don't make me count on my fingers, just move on.)  Portland back in the 1970's was overflowing with floridly nutty motherfuckers.  So too is Bellingham lo these many years later.  And the odd thing about the nutty population is:   if they're wearing a lot of pink?  Man or woman, they're meth heads.  I've had lots of people tell me the same thing, and it matches up with my observations. Apparently you ingest a certain amount of meth over time and bammo, you're weird as shit and in the girls' apparel aisle shoplifting tutus.  Meth heads love them some pink clothes.  Dora the Explorer-themed togs are au courant among the meth set, followed by Barbie anything and Glitter Girls. I do not know what this is about, but it's killed my urge to try meth once just to see what it's like.

And remember the motto of Christdugongmas:  Don't chew on your mother, even if she's already dead.

I Am Still Here

 I would have gone for the 'I Am Alive!' gambit but I'm writing this on my phone, and I can barely manage as it is in this tiny format.

Well, we are still moving in to our new apartment, and I cannot express how incredibly convenient our location is!  While still being wooded!  And scenic!  Or as scenic as the Wood Hood gets.

Yup, we went with the Wood Hood apartment.  Turns out the old cess pit has gentrified some.  Our building is very secure, very modern, and the landlord is fantastic.

Tell ya what, I am liking all this 21st century doings.  The whole place stays warm, for starters.  I don't have to huddle in the front room by the gas heater and pray for summer.  And this whole notion of energy efficiency and the roof not leaking is the cat's tits!  All six of them!  CATS HAVE SIX TITS AND ALL OF THEM ARE AWESOME!!!!

The Biker found a $500 work beater, and it's great. The only problem is that it has km instead of miles on the speedometer, and a bitch does not know metric.  I am a Murrican.  I don't need to know metric.  That's what they told us on sixth grade. We didn't need to know metric OR geography, because Murricans.  We only needed to memorize all the counties in our state and then it was off to play sports!  Because sports are important!  Like cat tits!

Anyway, this makes the thing problematic for me to drive, because it's so much more easy to leadfoot the gas when the speedo is telling you that your happy ass is moving at a tremendous rate of speed.  Driving is a competition sport, as we all know, or at least as far as I'm concerned because I never learned geography.  And I'm determined to win, for the cats.

I BREAK THE SPEED LIMITS FOR THE CATS.   

Imagine that you are a cat-ess and all you have are four tits.  Now imagine all the baby cats out there fighting like Marines every meal time because their mothers have no thumbs and can't spoon feed them, or even hold a bottle of vodka to numb the pain?  Insufficient nipplage is no joke if you're a mommy cat, and baby cats don't know metric because they don't speak English as far as anyone knows.  And that's why I must break the speed limit. I have thumbs.  I use them.  To drive.  And I use all my other assorted fingerage too.  You can take that to the bank, Paco.  

Turn That Right Around!!!!!!

 

                               Back and badass!  Slammin' doors and slappin' whor...well, yeah.

 

And on the heels of that despairing little post comes the fantastic news: WE FOUND A FANTASTIC APARTMENT!

Right near the Biker's job, way within our price range, lots of room, brand spankin' new, and the landlord and onside handyman are great.  We'll also be four doors down from one of the Biker's friends!

Man, I cannot believe our fortune!

Dead Raccoons and Crackheads

                    "Hello I'd like to look at the apartment you had listOH HOLY FUCKBALLS NO." 
 

 Looking for apartments.  

Found one, it was the size of a closet.  Lovely neighborhood, brand spankin' new, lovely neighbors, and tighter than a nuns' ass.  I have never seen such a tiny  little place, and I've lived in studio apartments, kids.  What the actual fuck.

Looked at another apartment. -nay, a duplex!  Just about perfect!  Beautiful rural setting, a view of the mountains, on high ground, all the space we'd need plus a yard to turn into a magnificent garden...aaaaaand the manager is a huge douchebag.  Big man here. Got important shit to do.  Not time to chat! Yeah yeah yeah yeah my wife handles that shit I AM DOING IMPORTANT THINGS PEASANT!

Whew!  OK then!

On to Crack Country.  Average apartment, average building, rent controlled, but crackheads.

Then to the Wood Hood!  Yes, once a former coal mine, now a large flat place riddled with underground tunnels, where all the streets are named after trees and all the people are sketch as fuck.  But it is a nice building, and hell, it's in a neighborhood...near all the stores and services...

And in the middle of all this, I travelled nine miles and then waited two hours to speak to a Red Cross representative only to have our case get lost in the system.  Waited some more, sitting in the shelter, smelling the distinct aroma of human feces, amid the Covid cases and a lot of really pissed off people, only to get a phone interview - that could have been conducted anywhere - and  end up re-start a new case with a new case number...only to have the system lock up and be told that 'You'll be hearing from us.'  At least I got a can of tomato juice out of the venture.

I also met a couple of grizzled old rips like me there who lost everything in the Sumas flood.  It was kind of nice to meet old neighbors and be able to commiserate with people who 'get it'. 

 Both women had to be rescued by fishing boat AND by tractor bucket.  One almost drowned when the shelter she was staying in flooded and a floor caved in, and the other has been moved three times already to different shelters.  So there's the 'it could have been worse' factor too. 

As I was out and about I nearly drove in to Sumas to take a look at the old place, but I just couldn't. It's odd.  I just never want to see it again.  

I'll have to of course.  There's things to clean and pack, and roses to dig up and distribute.

The thing that gets to me is all the people out there living in their little houses, just like mine, happy about Christmas on the way, warm and dry, probably worried about their mortgages and car payments.  I desperately want one of those little houses.  It doesn't matter where.  I'll make it a home.  I'll stand on the roof and fend off the crackheads.  It doesn't matter.  I just want a little house again. My own, all paid for, simple and cozy.

Yeah, the loss is starting to hit home.

Happy Post Thanksgiving!!

 Here's hoping you had a boneriffic Turkey Day, and that your turkey had a boner, and everyone had boners, and there were boners laying out in the yard, and like driving cars around, and one in your mailbox too which is absolutely a double entendre. 

For the first time in absolute centuries we spent Thanksgiving as the guests of another couple, instead of being the T-Day destination for stray people.  IT WAS AWESOME.  

Our host and hostess are fantastic cooks, and no holiday horrors were perpetrated on our palates - you know, like that gross sweet potato casserole with maple syrup, Karo syrup, brown sugar, onions, raisins, miniature marshmallows and canned sweet potatoes that's always kind of burned on top?  Or the nasty green bean dish made with Campbells mushroom soup and overboiled beans and mystery chunks?  No!  Begone! Not present!  WE had fresh asparagus spears and a green salad with pomegranate and feta cheese, and turkey and ham and potatoes and gravy and PIES PIES PIES!

There is a Carmel Apple Pecan Streusel pie making the rounds of supermarket bakeries here that is the most delicious thing ever.  We shared one for dessert last night. OMG I would totally smuggle this pie in my underpants across state lines. It was incredible. We were truly thankful. Traditional food-coma Thanksgiving meal - CHECK!

I hope all of you had a wonderful Thanksgiving.  Even people who live in no-Thanksgiving countries and stuff.  Yesterday should have been wonderful for you and I sincerely hope it was, because all you guys are one of the things that I'm thankful for.  You make my day and lift my spirits.  

                                                          Rock on with your bad selves!

Family Matters

What's cool is when your kids grow up and finally realize you were right all along.  AND TELL YOU THAT.  

What's weird is when they say you were a good example.

                                        I really wasn't a good example.  I swear I wasn't. Really. 

______________________

Life in the new motel is going well.  Once again the Sikhs came through for us via a co-worker of the Bikers, and got us a week free at this place owned by one of the Temple members. We'll probably  be able to stay here as long as we need to, and it's clean, bright and economical, too. Most importantly of  all, it's on the second floor.

What's strange is being back in a city-suburban surroundings again.  

The last time I lived in Bellingham, it was a nice little town.  Now it is a high-density urban sprawl, and there's homeless encampments in every empty lot and down every creek.  Meth is everywhere.  Our room is in a nice area, too!  Clearly I was entirely too isolated in Sumas, because this is fuckin' extreme shit as far as I'm concerned.  

About five years ago I worked at a place about half a mile away from our room, and it was a nice 3-star Marriot, brand new, in a newly developed area with it's own brand-new business district.  All that's still there, and still fairly upscale, but it's got homeless people, garbage dumps and abandoned cars everywhere they can fit.  The corners of every parking lot, between buildings, in landscape plantings and what few empty lots are left.  It's really messing with me.  Meth heads roam in packs and do home invasions en masse!

Now that being said, we're looking for an apartment in one of the 55 and over developments nearby, since the Biker works three minutes away from where we're staying - he's been walking to work in the mornings, it's so close.  It's simply a matter of finding a vacancy in this particular time and at this time of year.  This genuinely is a nice area, meth heads aside, and the amount of money we're saving on gasoline alone is fucking astounding. EVERYTHING is nearby!  Our friends, public transportation, our doctors offices; you know - civilization!  No livestock! No silage trucks! Supermarkets galore!  Even a sex shop!  All the necessities!

So here's the score.  We've been getting the mess cleaned up and the house dried out up in Sumas; we still own that, and we're planning on selling it.  We'll be moving back to Bellingham and into senior rental digs for the rest of our wrinkly lives because frankly, it makes sense.  It's time to let someone else worry about upkeep; and they all have allotments where you can garden.  Hell, I'll sneak in a rose and some ferns and they'll take it and like it.

  The flood was a wake-up call.  We need to be way closer to services, and we need to downscale.  These past days have been...enjoyable!  Convenient! Positive, even!  And there's no chance in hell that we'd ever, ever get cut off so fast and so completely as happened in Sumas when the flood hit.  We're well above sea level here on a rise, and the drainage is fantastic.

Remember, at 9:30 am the water had reached our backyard.  At 9:52  it began to come into the house. At 10:08 we stepped off our back deck into water that was three feet deep. At 10:10 we were on a raised railbed watching water draining down into our town from a nearby river, and at 10:18 we were speeding down the single open lane of the very last back road out of town, with nothing but rising water in our rear view mirror, covering the road behind us as I watched and the Biker drove like a motherfucker.  That's 48 minutes from a dry house to a house that had two and a half feet of water in it and a town that was COMPLETELY INUNDATED. That's FAST.  Add to that another day and a half trapped on Mt. Baker  because the few roads and bridges were washed out, in a shelter because all the resorts and motels on the mountain were full of skiers and dipshits?  FUCK THAT.

Everything Is Fine

 It's over. No more emergency. We're doing the recovery and assessment thing now and we have plans in place and arrangements made. Shit happened. We prevailed. Next!

_______________________________

We got to relive some good memories unexpectedly while we were up  in Kendall when we ran into a woman from back when we were riding. She had been a bartender at the local Bandido bar, pretty much what you'd expect; a packer like I was, a cheerful hillbilly type lady who took no shit and started a lot, and laughed all the time and partied hard.

In the intervening years, she had gone on to get a Masters' degree in Special Education, and works with mentally challenged kids now! She also held the line and stayed in Kendall, which is a little slice of squalid meth hell in the pinewoods, and is a dedicated community volunteer - and there she was volunteering at the shelter!  

The thing about her that made this reunion so incredible is that she's the woman who stood by our dear friend, business partner and running buddy Albert Souk while he was dying.  

We did a lot of business together over the fifteen years we knew him, oddly all legal (I used to run his stall at the  swap meets and made him a big ol' pile of cash, while he went out doing his social butterfly thing, buying low and selling high.)  He had so much respect that he rode under the name his mother gave him, which believe me, is not something that happens a lot an almost never to people who aren't clubbed up.  We've got a million stories about this guy and all of them are as appalling as they are hysterically funny, but to get down to it, the man loved criminally insane women, and the last one tried to bludgeon him to death. While he had brain cancer.  It put him in hospice.

During all the insanity this woman literally stood guard over him and mustered the clans on his behalf.  She made sure that no part of the sideshow nonsense that was his wifes' family and their intrusions and outrages touched him by filling up the place with large men and women with intense attitudes. This was a high-end facility, and for a solid month the sidewalk out front was constantly lined with Harleys.  Everyone came out and represented and kept the peace in his honor. It looked scary walking up on, all those different clubs flying colors, and not all of them friends. But that happened, and this lady coordinated the whole thing.  And, without going into vivid details, because those details are just way over the top biker as fuck, she saw to it that he went out the way he wanted to go out.  Think of a Viking pre-battle feast, except one that went on for a whole month. That's kind of what it was like.

It took a little while for us to recognize each other because it's been a lot of years, but once we did she just brightened up our day.  She's still all country, all Bandito, and totally awesome.  We knew we were going to be OK while she was around. That vibe just spreads out from her.  It took our minds and got them right, and we got to hang out with someone from back in the day and reminisce about one of the most awesome people we've ever known and laugh.

I'm not going to put her name out there, but she deserves all the good vibes.  She's astounding.

Our Old Carpet Looked Vastly Improved With A Nice Brown Coating Of Farm Silt

 The house is, as we expected, a complete loss.  No surprises there.

My front steps are missing.  Absolutely gone.  We actually drove around the block looking for them, for a laugh, and there is a very real possibility that they washed into the nearby creek and are now in Canada.  Not even kidding.  If someone finds three grey wood steps with two silver pigs jammed in between the steps, those are my steps. You can keep them.  Hands across the border.

There are pictures, and someday the Biker will email them to me and I'll get them up.  For now I'll give a brief description of what we found, starting outside.

-Two steel dumpsters! Big welded steel dumpsters! in our front yard.  One had smashed into our garage door, and the other was stopped by my valiant 'Improved Josephs Coat' rose out front from colliding into our front room.

-We have other peoples belongings all over our yard - fence posts, a razor scooter, a girls bicycle helmet, a big Halloween pumpkin in the buddleia, a Betty Boop 'Welcome!' mat in the front  yard, and oh so very much more.

-Our entire barbecue deck floated away and is now in the back northeast corner of my back garden piled high against the fence, with all our lawn chairs, random garbage cans and so very, very much more.

-Our back deck broke away from the house and is covered in a giant tangle of flotsam and jetsam, railroad ties and mystery belongings, including a Buzz Lightyear coloring book.

-The bottom of the garage door blew out. The high water mark was three feet.  Nothing important inside was damaged, thankfully.

-Both sheds also flooded at the three foot mark, and my lawnmowers are deceased.

-My car was lifted and set at a 45 degree angle to the driveway against the retaining wall, and was filled with water up to the drivers wheel. Borked.

-Our truck is salvageable, although waterlogged and in need of a complete oil purge and some jiggering around to break the waterlock. This suits me just fine. I like my truck. I did not like my sedan.  And our SUV is running strong.

-The inside of the house got two feet of water.  All the bottom drawers of everything, including the refrigerator are full of water and every drawer made of wood is swollen shut. The furniture is borked - we may be able to salvage the solid wood pieces, though.

-We lost nothing whatsoever of any real or sentimental value!!!!!  It's all safely in storage now!!!

-Some stuff had floated around in the house.  Not a lot of things, just enough to it kind of amusing.

-All the food will have to be thrown away, of course.

-And finally, weirdly...MY GARDEN IS ALL THERE AND HAPPY AS A CLAM.  Even though there are places where the wicked current had laid things out, everything is alive, still rooted, kinda dirty.  Even have a couple of roses in bloom, and all the calendula is going nuts too.  I  couldn't believe it!  All that fresh, nasty, reeking silt is probably acting like plant crack, is what I think.

The people where the Biker works put together a work party and tomorrow we set out to get the place scraped out and the junk hauled away. Lots of trucks, lots of volunteers. One has a container we can store our salvagables in until we find a place to rent!  With any luck, the next week will see the place squared away enough to be boarded up.

Amazing things that happened:

Sikhs from the nearby Guru Nanak Gursikh temple, the one that I've been supporting for years with food donations, randomly laid two hot meals of curried rice and lentils on us just for...being in Sumas!  They were helping our pharmacist get his store cleaned out and just had a pile of meals they were distributing to people!  I will always support their temple.  They walk their talk.

Our pharmacist gave us our prescriptions for free!

I was offered a job working where the Biker works!  (after I described my scant qualifications, I doubt I'll get anything, but the offer was sincere.)  Truthfully, his job is doing so much right now to assist us that I almost burst into tears.  They might even find us a place to rent.

It looks  like we'll get FEMA money!

The hero in all this is THE BIKER.  Without his fast thinking and his knowledge of  logistical and financial things, along with his amazing memory, his sense to drive back home when he saw shit floating around on the roads and waves in the fields, added to his mad driving skillz?  Without all that my happy ass woulda woke up floating around on my memory foam mattress.  He has brought us through with style and class.

Off Mt. Baker! In A Fine Two-Star Motel!

 

                 "If you need anything, I'll, I'll, um, just ask my mother. Me! I mean me. Just ask me."

 The moment that Mt. Baker highway opened up we raced down off the mountain and into Bellingham and straight to...well, ahem.  Affordable accomodations - where we will be staying for at least a week.  It's near the Bikers workplace, and hell, there's no cockroaches or blood on the sheets so I'm happy.  

 It's been a long, stressful day.  They're saying that tomorrow we might be able to get back into our house and check things out.  I really want to see exactly where we stand - then we can make solid plans.

We also have standing offers on the property, and while we'll probably take a kick in the ass on the price, it's still four city lots near a grade school in a good school district. It'll sell next spring, floodplain or not.  The same man who plopped 62 people in a high-density unit two feet off the side wall of my garage will buy our place and plop another 62 person unit on it. Fuck it. Fuck Sumas. Fuck all my furniture and appliances. Fuck the 20, 000 we just spent on updates and repairs. Fuck it all.

I'm going to bed now.

Rancho FirstNations, Flooded As A Motherfucker

 

                          Circle marks the Rancho.  Lookit our house!  French Provincial! 

Well, here it is.   If you want to see the whole video and you are not from America, try Google United States and searching it on there.  Here's the link to that video:

https://www.facebook.com/wcfd14/videos/1078428006261595/

It's on the Whatcom County Fire District home site here:  https://www.facebook.com/wcfd14/

Scroll down and you'll see the link, with a picture, for the flooding today.  Tap on that and watch the kayakers cruising through town.  It's whimsical.

We're Homeless!

 We will be staying at least one more night here in the shelter before we can get down the mountain and find a motel to hole up in, and get ahold of FIMA, our insurance company, and a realtor.

Yeah, a realtor.  We're selling our house and property.  We'll never feel safe there again.

Here's what happened.  

Sumas is four feet below sea level, and back in the 1800s it was a shallow lake, not fields. The area was drained via a system of canals to open up the land for agriculture.

Usually when it's flooded in Sumas, it's just been rain accumulation and the runoff from the couple of creeks that go through town, combined with a really high water table. The whole town turned into a big, shallow mud puddle, and only a couple of times. No big deal.

This time was different.  

We had been having torrential rain storms for the past month almost every night, all falling on land that had been baked solid by last summers dry conditions.  But then, two days ago, we got a hard southerly rainstorm that came through, with high winds and sideways, firehose-type precip, nonstop.

The town just south of us is called Nooksack, because the Nooksack river runs through it, and it's a deep, swift river with tall embankments built all along it's bed through the flatlands.  All the rain that fell emptied into the whole of the Nooksack, from where it starts on Mt. Baker and downward until it abruptly hits the flatlands, where it just overtopped all the levees and spread out over the fields.  The floodwaters crept out over the nine miles between us and Nooksack, and came spilling DOWN into Sumas over the railroad embankments, and I know because at one point we were stranded on one such embankment wondering why the water was higher on the south side than on our side, and trippin' balls watching it come cascading down into town.   That's why the water level rose so rapidly beginning at around 8:35 am.  All that river water had just crested the railroad embankments.

A helpful diagram.  Not to scale and kind of sideways, but you get the picture.

 

Our house is an unrepairable biohazard now.  The floors and the foundations were pretty iffy, and we were going to wait and re-do them this summer.  Now we don't have to.

We are for the present time homeless, and will be until we can get down off this mountain.

Here's the thing I can't get over - how nice this facility is!  It's like the grade school I attended.  Everyone has been so kind and the food is pretty good, too.  We're the only flood refugees here, but the place is also a food bank and a Head Start - community center with multiple resources.  

In fact, we left this very place, Kendall, where we lived less than a mile down the road from where I sit typing this, because it had become a slum in the deep woods, where meth and crime were rampant.  We moved to Sumas to get our daughter into a better school district, so that worked out.  But here we are right back where we started from, getting our butts saved by a facility that didn't exist here ( and really needed to be here) when we moved away.

Our plans for the present are - assess the house, contact our insurance and all the other resources at hand, get an apartment or something in Bellingham to be closer to where the Biker works, get our household situation together and then wait for further developments.  I foresee a huge garage sale in our future.

We Evacuated!!

 At 9:58 this morning the floodwaters started running into out house.  We had everything important packed and ready, and stepped out into 4ft. of warm, icky crick water and slogged to our SUV.

We are in a shelter now.  We are safe, and the facility is set up and ready to accommodate A LOT of people comfortably.  But the flooding is so widespread that we literally cannot leave Mt. Baker - Kendall because all the roads out of the area have been flooded and many of the bridges washed out.  Thank God the Biker thought to come home this morning instead of pushing though to work - the speed with which this came on was unprecedented and it would have been a hell of a lot more difficult to get things situated and he had not been there, my guardian angel, to keep a cool head.

I do not know if our house is a loss or not.  I do know that the entire town of Sumas is inundated.

Take a look at this shit:

https://www.king5.com/article/weather/weather-blog/sumas-flooding-atmospheric-river/281-e5823c49-4269-4145-ad4f-d219b40ba945

A day late and a dollar short is how the flooding caught all of us in Sumas.  I honestly think that we were some of the last people who got out of town today, as the back road we took through the cornfields was just beginning to flood out just as we hit the base of the mountains and started up.

I've got all my crying done, and now I'm sitting here in a really pleasant facility on a cot.  And that's how things are going for me.  We are safe, we are sheltered, and we have insurance AND money in the bank.  All is not lost.

We're Flooding!

 Yup, for the first time, we have completely flooded right up to the foundations. NO I DO NOT HAVE PICTURES. Imagine a whole shitload of water.

Last night at 11pm. an alert came over my phone about flood warnings for Sumas between midnight and 3am., and to go to such and such a church for shelter.

Well, it was raining, and my phone is always blowing up with bleeps and bloops and alerts and shit, and I just thought nothing of it.  I wake up this morning at 8:30 and find  my husband roaming around. WTF? I think.  Come to find out,  Sumas is cut off.  Everywhere. And that's the first time that's ever happened since we've lived here.  (Of course snow is a different issue.  Everybody freaks out and commences to flail and drive their Yugos around and all kinds of nonsense.)

I checked the back yard - always the first thing to flood - when I woke up, and as of twenty minutes ago the water level has risen four inches.

We've got another foot and a half before it's actually to the doorsills.  Meanwhile, the garage and both sheds are flooded about an inch or so deep.  And the rain is torrential, heading sideways at us at high speed directly from the West.  Hoo boy.  All that work we just had done on our house...

We're in the process of moving all our shit up onto higher stuff inside the house.  There is a very real possibility we may have to evacuate.

So, there's that.

If I Buy The Yarn, Will Your Mother Knit Me A New Proctologist?

 Sorry I haven't been around.  I picked up a quilting project that I put down about seven years ago and I've been all OCD on it since the last time I done bloggered.  It's a hand-sewn quilt, so it's been just thousands and thousands of stitches, and me mesmerized, and the floor next to me all littered with pins and bits of thread and shit.  Do I have pictures?  No I do not have pictures. QUIT BUGGING ME FOR PICTURES! I DON'T HAVE THEM! PLEASE GOD STOP!  THE PRESSURE! THE PRESSURE!!!!

Looked up 'downtrodden medieval peasant'; found 'lute playing cat with a snatch' and here we go.
 

______________

My primary physician has been bugging me to get my annual butt probe, which, at my age, is considered mandatory, and I've been telling her for two years now that I will once they get Covid figured out.  In return I get that placating attitude from her that folks give old people who are being unreasonable. I was not being unreasonable.  I was being someone who's learned that thoughtlessly granting your trust to people simply because they have a medical degree is naive and dangerous. Those are MY mucous tissues, and I'm guarding them with my life. 

Looked up 'militant medieval peasant' and found 'badass dragon attacking ancient Ninevah' and here we go.

Then I got a letter in the mail last week from my ass specialist, the very man I was supposed to visit, that I have been going to for seven years now, saying that since his rights as an American were being infringed upon by being required, as a medical professional, to receive the Covid vaccine, he was forced on principle to to resign his practice, and hoped his patients understood.  

             Looked up 'medieval asshole', found far too many images of assholes, liked this better, so here we go.
 

You know what I understood? That he should never have received a medical degree in the first place; and that his hurt feelings are clearly more important to him than his patients welfare.  This man actually decided to be a potential disease vector, and thought he was quite the valiant martyr for standing up for his 'rights'. What an asshole!

Haven't felt this bummed about being vindicated in quite awhile. I've been passing around his address to all the raccoons I meet, so let's hope for the best.

 

 

It's Halloween! Time To Scare You!

 OK fine it's the day after Halloween.

You wanna know what's scary?  When you live in a border town and the international line is breached.

A couple of days ago someone tried to blast through customs without stopping, and suddenly there arose, at 11A.M., the background track from every documentary concerning the London Blitz you've ever seen at full, screaming volume. Those loud wailing sirens, whistles, all kinds of holy horseshit. I was expecting to see those ICBM contrails come arcing over. I had no idea what was going on at that moment.

Here's the deal.

I live in the Constitution-free Border Zone. 

 A quote from the ALCU website: "The expansion of government power both at and near the border is part of a trend toward expanding police and national security powers without regard to the effect of such expansion on our most fundamental and treasured Constitutional rights. The federal government's dragnet approach to law enforcement and national security is one that is increasingly turning us all into suspects. If Americans do not continue to challenge the expansion of federal power over the individual, we risk forfeiting the fundamental rights and freedoms that we inherited—including the right to simply go about our business free from government interference, harassment and abuse."

Yes, this is a very real thing. Look up just what that means here. NO, SERIOUSLY. DO IT RIGHT NOW:  

                             https://www.aclu.org/other/constitution-100-mile-border-zone

 

                                         Old broad goes alt-freak with political post! News at 11!

 

When you contact me, our online interactions are being monitored by Homeland Security and who knows what all Agencies and shit with guns and badges.  

Now, me being me, yap first and think later, I have been contacted by some pretty shady entities from all over the world during the course of my online presence, including extremist groups from overseas and Anonymous.  It's all on record somewhere. NO I did not respond, fuck that action! It's one of the many reasons that I'm no longer on Facebook, though.  All of this contact came directly through Facebook. Yup. I did nothing to encourage it. But the wackos out there also have keyword bots, and they use them. In a worst case scenario, just having those cookies on your machine could be construed as highly suspicious by people in positions of authority. Paranoid? With good reason. Homeland Security agents aren't hired to use their abilities of independent thought and judgement, kids. One power-tripping bully can ruin your whole life.

                                                      

When the child internment camp scandal down at the Southern Border exploded, I went to the Homeland Security installation a mile from where I live, in person, to ask about it. Yes, they have a whole back room full of holding cells - I saw them before they closed the door on me - and more shit underground because I remember them building the place during G.W's 'reign', the same time they put up the spy towers (without a public vote or notification of purpose/ expenditure) all along the northern border of the U.S. Of course I was handled by a flak catcher and gentled along and given no real answers, but the place is serious as a heart attack, and those black and gold helicopters and SUV's are omnipresent, just another part of everyday life here.

When I heard those sirens and alarms go off I went right past panic into zombie mode.  I did not know what was going to happen. There's no 'Public Alert' system in place - I had no idea what to expect, and just stood there waiting for something to explode, gunfire, bombs, crashing planes, immanent death, whatever.  Why not?  Clearly there's something going on.  Why would they not want to inform the public?  Gracious, what purpose might that possibly serve; koffkoffintimidationofthecitizenrykoffkoff.

I do know that the border is being breached nearly every day, though, that important arrests are being made and serious shit is being apprehended, and that none of that information ever hits the news. I know it for a fact. I've seen it happen.  If you live around here you've seen it happening too...out in farmers fields, in the woods, on the roads, in stores, you name it.  People talk about it. It's known. But less than one fraction of one percent of that activity ever makes the local news outlets, much less the national news.  Think about that.

No, we don't have a wall (yet) but there is a long-distance detection protocol in place; it's referred to as 'motion sensors' when it's mentioned at all.  I know for a damn fact that it's more than motion sensors, and I get that the Border Patrol doesn't want to reveal their hand and give the bad guys a tutorial in how to breach the system, so we'll go with 'motion sensors' for the remainder of this paragraph.  Now usually it's tagged animals that trip the alarm (like bears and such that carry tracking devices for the forest service on either side of the line.)  It also catches a lot of on-foot drug traffic and groups of people trying to come over and get work during harvest season; and also ordinary hikers, small aircraft, trained dogs with knapsacks full of oxycodone, 4 wheelers, snowmobilers, cross country skiers, logging trucks, road equipment, farm equipment, and even by flying payloads delivered via trebuchet. 

 Seriously.  They load timber-built trebuchets with drugs and a tracking chip all wrapped in duct tape, find a nice empty stretch of forest and fire the bundle over the border. Someone is waiting on our other side with a marker detector and goes tootling back through the woods whistling a merry tune, carrying ten pounds of XTC. 

I can see the clearcut line of the border going right up over the mountains through the timber, laser straight, from my front room window - and the spy towers too.  And those spy towers can see me.

Close enough to what ours look like.  They aren't just in a neat line down the border, though - they're dotted here and there all over within the zone.  What you might think is just a cell tower has about a 50/50 chance of being a spy tower with a different configuration. Hit up Google images for more.
 

Right after they first went up, I used to go walk my dogs near the ones here in town and moon them, I was so angry about not having been informed or given a choice (all while GW was crying poverty and recession and shutting down public services right and left.) It was a HUGE construction operation, very intensive, very sudden, very organized and well funded, whammo, out of nowhere, blocking traffic, ripping up streets and digging up private land.  And those towers are built to look scary, too.  You can clearly see the binocs on top when they level around and tilt until they're aimed right at you. So to answer your question, yes. Homeland Security has pictures of my bare ass on record. Your tax dollars at work.

 A couple of times my dog Opie would catch a scent and run right across the freaking line into Canada and I'd have to go chasing after him because there's a road right on the other side, and the little dipshit didn't have any sense whatsoever once he latched onto a fascinating aroma. He'd run into walls, fences, cars, people on the sidewalk, out into traffic, just mesmerized.

                                          Sub in a short, fat stinky dog and you have the idea.

So there I am again, on record as having crossed the border illegally at least two or three times, trying to keep my Opie dog from rolling in a dead Canadian possum or being creamed by a Buick with B.C plates. I could see those sensors  tracking me as I ran, too, every time. Hi there! I just thought I'd invade Canada with a farting dog!  Lock up your daughters, Huntingdon!

In this day and age I don't know if these measures are necessary, are enough, or too much, or already obsolete.  I do know that this 'Constitution Free Zone' was imposed, not decided upon by the public.  I know that the public has never been given enough information about the border situation to be able to make a decision about it, too.  I live that truth every day since I've moved here.

So there you go. If you have a scarier story than this? Post it. Tell me.

Perfection and Sentiment, With a Side of Altered Brain Chemistry

 

                                                      MILK does a body goooooood, y'all.

The paneer turned out PERFECTLY!

No I do not have glamor shots.  They are on my phone, and my phone is refusing to release them without a titty fucking and a blank check, so here is a picture plucked from the innerwub that looks pretty much exactly like how it turned out:

                                                                    Cue angel chorus!

It was as simple as simple could be, I must say.  Bring whole milk up to a boil, then add one teaspoon of citric acid in one cup of hot water, and foof...it gently separates into snowflakes and clouds like magic.  It was one of those cooking moments when you try a new method and it blows your mind, like mounting a sauce with butter and watching it thicken, when logic would seem to suggest otherwise, and you stand there like a muppet going 'Whoaaaaaa' at your stove like it just grew a pair of tits.

Paneer is the dairy version of tofu. It's only flavor is protein and creaminess.  (Shut up, ya filthy minded trollops.)  It's the depth of the sauce and the pungency of the other ingredient in the dish that sinks into the paneer and flavors it up, and the sum is far, far greater than the parts.

As tends to happen, home-made is infinitely better than what you'd buy at the store (plus you know what's in the stuff you made.)  The difference is astounding, both in flavor and texture.  Home made is like a sliceable cloud of rich,wonderful potential. Store-bought, even the artisanal stuff, is like someone took a golf ball and beat it with a rock.

 I will never buy paneer again!  And cheap? Holy crap I saved $3.00 a pound! To fuck around and have fun in the kitchen!

Here is a link to the recipe I was making:

https://aishcooks.com/2015/10/29/saag-paneer-creamy-spinach-and-paneer-curry/

_____________________________________

Holy shit I've been married for 37 years.

Ask me this tomorrow, I won't know the answer since I'm the one who forgets sizes, phone numbers, birthdays,  holidays and anniversaries in this house.  The Biker is the one who has a memory that borders on the eidetic. I have a memory like a rubber hemorrhoid doughnut.

And so 'twas me that went "Ruuh?" 

 

when he announced yesterday that we would be staying the weekend in Anacortes, and here I am, aniversarying my ass off, eating expensive chocolate in bed and drinking Bushmills out' the neck of the bottle, ripped to the tits on a certain schedule A substance and lolling about en dishabille in our snazzy hotel room.  It is BLISS, children.

I've gone over our Anacortes holidays so many times here I won't tire you with it.  Suffice it to say that this is our ideal getaway spot and dream retirement destination.   It is what Washington State is really about.  Unlike the little red blight of Trump holdouts and fundamentalist-separatists that is the Fourth Corner where I live, this is the Washington I moved to, lo back these many years ago, back when the Stainless Steel Amazon was but a wee Stainless Steel Amazette; where everyone is tolerant, where the ages and races mix and share cultures and music and ideas, the exact opposite of what the rest of the world thinks America is like.  

It was a SUCH A RELIEF to get out of lockdown, out of our house, out of Sumas, out of the Fourth Corner, and come down south into the real world again that I literally cried on the way here, I was so happy.  It also helps that it is an astounding Fall day. The sun is out, the sky is bright blue, the leaves are burning down towards Winter in every color imaginable, and all the fields are plowed and black, waiting for the rain to bless them.  Everyones gardens are glorious with the years' last flourish of color - and the home gardens here in Anacortes rival mine, and many surpass it.

I look back on the bad times in our marriage and am absolutely fucking amazed that it lasted this long. You take a ferociously intelligent, German, hardass mans' man from Alaska and add a study addicted, flamboyant Bi-feminist-hippie street fighter from Portland Oregon and there's going to be an exchange of Molotov cocktails occasionally.  We've almost gotten divorced twice. Signed the papers and everything.

Yup.  

And yet here we are in defiance of all logic and common sense, 37 years together, having a blast, behaving badly, watching Mila Jovovitch shoot mutants on TV and joking and laughing and doing our favorite things and you know what?  This is the LARGE LIFE. We know each other better than any other person on earth, and have each others' backs because we consciously decided to do that thing.  Our marriage is so much deeper and means so much more now, compared to the days back when our relationship was based on a mutual predilection for Jaime Lee Curtis, Phillip K. Dick, motorcycles, antisocial behavior, marathon blow jobs and carbohydrates - interspersed with being pissed off at our daughter.

________________________

I am high as fuck. It's awesome.

Gimme A 'C'!

 

I'm doin' it!  I'm doin' it! Right this very moment!  I am making paneer! OMG THE EXCITEMENT!!  Yes it's just action action action here at Rancho FirstNations as I hope to shit that I don't screw this up!

Turns out there is a metric shit-ton of recipes and videos out there about how to make this stuff.  I am armed and ready as I'll ever be when it comes to preparation. Everything is laid out, and I'm just waiting for the milk to heat up.  Then the magic happens. My only worry is that the leg of pantyhose I'm using to drip the curds doesn't fail me.  I shoulda got size large instead of medium.  Man, those first world problems suck.

___________________

Thank you Vancouver Island, British Columbia for being where you are, sheilding us from the two  'cyclone bombs'  that hit this last Sunday and Monday.  What we got here at the Rancho was a typical Autumn smackdown. What Vancouver Island got was apocalyptic.  The seaward coast got a beating, but it was the strait between the island and the mainland that was a screaming blast channel of oh fuck no.  If I have any B.C. lurkers out there, I sincerely hope that you came through that OK and that you're doing fine.  

I'm using a Canadian weather station just over the border to track my weather, because it's in the exact same microclimate that I'm in and shares the same geography.  (If you stand in the right place here in Sumas you can actually see the light on the automated data collection site just over the line.)  

I followed the course of the weather all through those past two days and it was frightening to see the kind of extreme weather phenomena that Vancouver Island was taking.  The winds hit the island from the West, went south down that coast, then took an abrupt turn at it's southern end and headed straight north through the strait!  I keep thinking of all the beautiful homes and the yachts and docks that must have been at the mercy of that wind, the flying debris, the waves and the sideways rain.  That rain was hitting my house like a firehose. I hate to imagine what it was like there.  So hey, Canada, get in touch and let me know how you're doing, OK?

For weather geeks: Check it out here - 

https://www.theweathernetwork.com/ca/news/article/photos-record-setting-bomb-cyclone-slams-british-columbia-pacific-northwest

Is This The Real Life? Or Just ADHD?

 

                                   ...fucked up at Safeway, but got two dozen eggs for meeee......

 I just did the most inadvertent Karen thing ever.  

I bought a dozen jumbo eggs (the most awesome and expensivist and super coolerist of all the egg groups) got out to my car, didn't find the eggs in my bags and went back in with the receipt.  The checker said 'Oh! Sorry! Just go on back and get the same thing.'  So I did!  And hippity hopped back out to my car only to find the eggs still in the shopping basket.

Oh shit.

So I trudged back in with the eggs and went to the checker and said "It wasn't your fault, it was mine. I'm so sorry. Here, what do I do with these?'

The manager shows up, smiles and chuckles and says, 'Go ahead and keep them. Once they've been out of the store I can't take them back, they'll just get surplussed."

I look at their smiling faces, and what is the first thing that pops out of my mouth? Not 'Thank you!' Not "Why, how nice of you!" No.  I sing "I'm gonna go egg-ing cars now!" and prance out of the store.

It hits me in mid prance. "What kind of a moron am I?  Did I really just sing the neener-neener song?  Oh my God, do they think I did all that just to get free jumbo eggs?"

I am bummed.

As I'm driving away, I tell myself  'Come on now. My motives were pure, it was a mistake, I'm not the only weirdo they'll see today' but it isn't working, so I decide to cheer myself up by singing Bohemian Rhapsody.

Now, I can sing the hell out of Bohemian Rhapsody.  It never fails to get my mind out of a bad groove. And I put my heart into it.  So I'm driving through farm country just belting out Bohemian Rhapsody with all my soul, and when I get to that high note? That sustained 'Meeeeeeeeeeeee'? I give it my all, full voice, and throw my arm out the window dramatically,

 

...and see a police car.

And look down at my speedometer and see that I am doing 70 in a 55mph zone in rural Lynden. 

I am so fucked. 

But fortune smiled on me! I was not stopped! Don't ask me why!  All the way home I was imagining how I would have had to explain to the cop why I'd been driving with one hand on the wheel, speeding and for all appearances screaming at the top of my lungs.  All I know is that I burned up a lotta weird old lady karma points in less than 20 minutes this afternoon.

_____________

The Story Of The Great Paneer Hunt

I am a slave to saag paneer.  When I have to have it, I let nothing get in  my way.  I will drive all the way to Blaine for paneer, although I don't have to usually. 

You see, there is a large population of people from India on both sides of the border in this particular area, and dairy is insanely expensive in Canada for some reason, so we have two dairy stores no less that five blocks from my front door. We get lots of folks coming down through the Sumas crossing to load up their cars with the stuff, so I'm usually able to feed my Jones with little effort.

Today was not that day.  NOBODY has any paneer.

There are two craft cheesemakers in Whatcom County who make the stuff, never mind the big companies! The stuff is sold in all the big grocery stores! Costco carries paneer!  Wal-Mart carries paneer! They even carry paneer in the gas station Quickie Marts! IN THE QUICKIE MARTS FFS!  7-11 CARRIES PANEER!!!

Not today.  Today there is no paneer whatsoever in all the land.  I made calls. I looked online. I went to the outlets, the quickie marts, the supermarkets, gas stations, dairy stores, you name it. Nothing. Nada.

How does this happen?  Cows are not exactly an endangered species. Particularly around my neck of the woods. I HAVE BEEN DENIED PANEER AND I AM NOT HAPPY ABOUT IT AT ALL.

So I'm gonna make my own.  Yup.  It's come to that.

Pray for me.

Ad Astra Per Aspera, Y'all

The first time I was married I wore a ladies tailored jacket and skirt set from the 1940's.  It was all the way style and sharp as hell and fit my curvy little frame like a glove. No I don't have any pictures. Just believe me when I say that the outfit was the only good thing about that marriage.

I love well-tailored clothes, and when I'm forced to interact with my fellow humans I'll go thrift something vintage and show up put together like a brick shithouse, makeup, hair, the whole package, looking good.

Now here comes 2021 and this shit is in style:

                             Look at my crotch dammit! Look at that red stain ON MY CROTCH!    

I SAID LOOK AT MY CROTCH!  LOOK AT THIS UNFORTUNATELY PLACED DICK SHAPED MONSTROSITY ON MY CROTCH! LOOK AT IT!!!!!!  

Why in Gods' name are people spending money on deliberately ill-made, deliberately ugly clothes? Patterns that accidentally on purpose seem to be shooting out of your babymaker or your barking starfish? Immense images of Nicholas Cage? Shirts made out of 1/3 a shirt from Goodwill and 2/3 a shirt from Ship n' Shore for the love of Christ, deliberately askew so the buttonholes don't line up and the collars don't match? And what's up with the palette? Everything I look at seems to be variations on 'oatmeal and homicide' ffs. The general effect that the designers seem to be going for is 'What a dead-cat hoarder would throw on to go dumpster diving'.  And the models-!  Grim anorectics without eyebrows, man and woman!  I've been all over the web looking into this trend and it's just a joke. A very bad joke. The intentional asymmetry, the intended ugliness, the absurd 'Whoopsie! This pattern looks like it's shooting out of my ass!' bullshit just eludes me.

This is not to say that I'm a fashion plate by any stretch of the imagination. But then, I live in rural America and I'm 61.  We all look like bull studs from the 1970's out here, and yet our clothes are bilaterally symmetrical and don't look like they were sewn by people experiencing a psychotic break.  

I've lived through some unfortunate trends, and of course there's always the extreme-o schlock that you wear for shits and giggles. But this crap has made it from the edge runways all the way onto the racks in Wal-Mart.  Hell, even the lady at the counter in my pharmacy here in Sumas is wearing this shit!  If anybody out there can explain the thinking behind this trend I'd be grateful.  Puzzled, but grateful.   

_______________________

 So far I'm into attempt #3 of Watching Aquaman All The Way Through. The only thing that keeps bringing me back is Jason Momoa, and not just because I want to roll him in sugar and pretend he's a lollipop, either. 

                                                                     DAMN.

Well of course I looked up 'Images/Jason Momoa Naked', do you know me?  Let me tell you, the sheer amount of Photoshopped Jason out there is astounding. The one where he has a blank white stubby little dad bod, a pop can - sized black dick and a Jason head is a masterpiece of surrealism.  All from ultra-sketchy Russian porn sites, per Image search, so please don't send me any pix that you might have found, because I'm not running a very robust antivirus program.

Long story short, I finally succeeded!  I would have written Aquaman off as time wasted never to be regained save for the presence of Mr. Momoa, who to my astonishment and gratitude turns out to be one of the most natural, funny, and accomplished hot male actors since the notoriously lickable Brad Pitt also turned out to be a fantastic actor with infinite range!

He is way more than just another '2nd tier action stud', and I'm looking at you, Mr. The Rock. Take a seat.  (Vin Diesel gets my pardon because motherfuckin' Vin Diesel. Similarly Shane Diesel, another action star. Ahem.) I can just picture Jason in one of those quirky Wes Anderson movies alongside Bill Murray.  Tell me what you think!

The Future Is Now!

 

                  Me in my newly updated home, chillin' in my electric throne, all metal and shit. 

 

Electrical service up to code and brand spankin' new from the pole to the plug-ins! A clean attic that is entirely innocent of dead starlings and heaps of old remodel detritus past!  And as of 12:30 today, FULLY INSULATED!

Hell yes!  I have polkadots all over the outside of my house since we went for blown-in insulation, and yes, I'll have to go around and seal those, but the heater hasn't gone on since they left!  It literally feels like a different house altogether!  Rancho FirstNations rises from the mire to reach for the stars!  Somewhere a horse neighs!  A flock of birds darken the skies! Lightning strikes a distant hilltop! I CAN LIVE IN MY HOUSE AND NOT FREEZE MY FUCKING ASS OFF!!!!!!

So naturally, I decided to watch 'Aquaman' to celebrate.

It is a very bad movie.  

Of course, like everyone else, I am not watching it for the plot.

    

Superhero movies don't need much of a plot, of course. What matters is making the action, props and backdrops look credible and all of a piece.  Aquaman is just a whole lot of no style, bad CGI, and Jason Momoa wearing jeans to swim in the ocean.  WTF jeans. You'd think being Aquaman he'd be ready to deploy at a moments' notice and always have a banana hammock on under those Wranglers, but no. Kicks off his shoes, though. 

How do I know so much about swimming in the ocean in jeans?  It's a thing in Oregon, where most of the beaches are gravel and there's a lot of interesting cliffs, rocks and huge piles of giant beach logs and trees and wrecks and shit to climb around on.  You don't plan on swimming, but you're near the ocean and things are slippery and covered in barnacles and old rusty spikes, and you'll probably fall off something, so you wear jeans and cheap tennies. And when you do fall in, it's not fun. It's cold, sandy, smelly and salty. You chafe and bitch for the rest of the day. So would Aquaman.

What I have enjoyed lately is 'Suicide Squad' (despite the overbearing presence of Will Smiths uninteresting character,) and 'Harley Quinn - Birds of Prey.'  In fact, Birds of Prey is DC getting back to it's roots, when superheroes had a sense of humor and weren't all dismal, angsty carnage junkies in weird costumes.  Plus hot women who kick ass WITHOUT being metahuman!  About fuckin' time, DC

_______________ 

And now a message from the 1930's!

I made the mistake of trying to follow a curry recipe that I'd seen demonstrated on a cooking show.  There is no way you can make a proper curry without the right utensils, come to find out.

 Heretofore I'd been doing my best with a broad, shallow frying pan and making all kinds of mess, trying to strain tiny ingredients out of hot oil quickly, using a ton of paper towels, strainers and bowls, desperate for curry.  

 

                          The indignity of Curry Desperation. It isn't pretty and it isn't pleasant.

After watching the nice man from India make his curry, my brain finally kicked in and I dug out my big ol' cast iron chicken fryer from about ninety-some years ago and cranked it up.  

My high-sided chicken fryer with the lid was the TICKET.  Here this dude on television had been merrily straining and frying and seasoning and adding and subtracting and flipping shit around using something like a deep, high-sided wok.  Well of course he wasn't a mass of orange oil stains and onion fragments; he had a decent pan to work out of.  Once I had that chicken fryer crackin', it worked like a charm! AND I HAD CURRY!  

So if you've been struggling to make curry, buy one of these beasts.You can get one new, but they're expensive -$40.00 is about midrange - and you'll have to season it in the oven about five-ten times before it's ready to use. Do you want to spend two days oiling, baking, cooling, and burnishing a seven pound mass of iron? Lid and all?  No you do not.  And no, the new ones are not pre-seasoned for sour birdshit. They're just blackened and have had a spritz of canola oil. That is not seasoning. That is a recipe for culinary disaster.  The solution?

           Here is what you want.  High sides, two handles and a domed lid with a loop handle.  
 

Get one from an antique store. They're usually cheap, because they don't display particularly well. They're already deep-seasoned, too.  All you'll have to do is wash it out and give it a couple of fresh seasonings in the oven and you're off to the races. You can use it as a Dutch Oven. You can deep fry with it on the stove top. You can even make bread in it! These damn things are handy as all get-out.

As for mine? I inherited mine from my mother in law, who inherited it from her mother, so free, so HA.

 

Come Out Come Out Wherever You Are!

 I'm here!  I'm Bi!  Get used to it!

Today is National Coming Out Day in America, and I thought I'd just publicly own my URGES here online!