Author: Teel

I’m so tired right now, but if I go to bed now, I’ll wake up at stupid o’clock in the morning. This morning after the long, tiring day yesterday that ended so late at night, by body tried to wake up at around 5:25AM, all by itself. I was able to convince it to sleep until around 8AM, but this lack of sleep is threatening my health. Maybe I’ll go lay down and see if I can’t just sleep through until the sun comes up again.

OOH! There’s a good idea. A sleeping pill. When I take those to try to fall asleep, they don’t help with the falling asleep part, but they always seem to extend my sleep several hours past where it should be. So if I take one now and lay down, will I sleep through to a reasonable hour, or still wake up at dumb:thirty in the morning.

Also, does anyone know where I can get a clock with proper times on it? I can only find ones with numbers, none with “lunchtime” or “dumb:thirty” or just the day of the week, which are the sorts of times I tell naturally.

Yay! I had a good Christmas.

I woke up at 3AM to put the fish in water so it would be ready when I needed it and planned to go back to sleep for a couple of hours while it soaked. Except I couldn’t sleep, so I got up and started working on the baccala around 4AM. Around 10 or 11, the whole thing started getting to me, the repetitive nature of what I’d been doing for 6 or 7 hours making it all seem silly, like a word repeated too many times. Then I kept doing it until I was totally out of flour, finishing around 1PM. So, nine hours on my feet, cooking the then bizarre-seeming food. Good start, eh?

After that I went to my older sister’s place where everyone was getting together for supper. I guess there was some conflicts or something, because two or three (or more?) people had to run out crying over the course of the afternoon, but as usual I had my politics & drama filters on, so barely know what was going on. Anyway, the food was good, if thermally confused, and apart from the people who felt the need to run out crying, the company was good too. I think everyone had a good time. Then everyone opened presents.

I wish I had had the money to buy everyone more than baccala. Everyone looked so happy opening their presents. Heck, I was really happy opening mine. I just … wish I could have added more to that. Anyway, I got a lot of really good and thoughtful things. In no particular order: the Minority Report DVD, A stuffed Gir (watching Minority Report with me right now) and a Gir postcard, the out-of-print Material Issue CD I wanted, the most recent book in the Series of Unfortunate Events, some disposable razors, some Mint & Eucalyptus Foam Bath, a couple of calendars (one a daily trivia calendar, which will help me pick up a few more useless tidbits of knowledge), and two double boilers (one small, and one extra small, which is great). I think that’s it. Ooh, and some chocolate I just ate.

From there, Angela and I went on to meet up with Zoe and Amy and some of their family, and Raoul. Zoe and Amy were very thoughtful and generous, giving me not just free popcorn for a year at Harkins, but $1 drinks for a year at Harkins, and Harkins movie money as well. Which for those of you that know me and my tendency to watch 2 or 3 or more movies a week, every week, already know is a great set of gifts. Yet they did not stop there. They also got me a variety of coal-tar-based shampoos and scalp treatments for my itchy, flaky scalp. Hooray! And then we all went to go see Catch Me If You Can, a very fun and entertaining movie that makes me want to find a copy of the book it was based on to add to my collection of books I haven’t found time to read, but love the movie versions of.

Then home, and very tired, but still feeling good. So happy about my coal tar (already, I’ve begun treating my head with it) and Harkins accessories that I sent another thank you email to Zoe and Amy. Sent out a couple of last-minute Merry Christmas emails, and … did I comment on something? I don’t remember. I was so tired. It was after 11PM by then. A long, but very good day, overall.

Okay, so when I was making sure I had all my ingredients together these last couple of days, I thought I had everything covered. But it turns out that I don’t have two bags of flour and one bag of sugar, I have two bags of sugar and one bag of flour. According to my estimations, and the small size of the bag of flour I do have (I thought the larger bags were flour and the smaller one sugar), I’ll need a LOT more flour to get this job done.

Are grocery stores even open today?

I tried messaging my younger sister, who has to work today, and may be able to bring flour from her house here on her way to work, but if that doesn’t work out I don’t know what I’ll do. I’m going to go see if I can work out if any grocery stores are open today. Running out of flour would just suck.

Oh, and Merry Christmas.

Okay. It’s 7:30PM on Christmas Eve. Why am I still seeing ads encouraging me to go shopping for Christmas presents? It’s too late. Even Kmart, which ads tell me has been open for several days without closing, closes in 30 minutes. Heck, my bank closed today at 3PM.

Holiday shopping better be over. Stop trying to get me to do something impossible, TV. Stop trying to get me to go to stores that are closed already. Just show me the Farscape and be done with it.

So, I was out shopping today after depositing my Unemployment check, and I had a short list. You may recognize it:

A loaf of bread, a bottle of milk, and a stick of butter.

Well, not exactly. A loaf of bread, a container of egg nog, and a pound of butter. And I ended up also buying fresh fruit, because fresh fruit is always on my grocery list. How could I get to 5 servings a day if I don’t buy fruit on every shopping trip? Anyway, my initial reason for going was that I absolutely need butter for the baccala making tomorrow. I had less than a stick of butter left, and while the recipe doesn’t call for much butter, I’m making quite a few batches of it to use up all the remaining fish & to try some other ingredients in the mix as well.

So there I was, standing dazed and light headed* in the grocery store, fruit in my basket and butters and margarines and … who knows what they make Promise and ICBINB out of? Anyway, I was going to just get a pound of the Land O Lakes butter that was on sale, but as long as I was looking at every available butter, I noticed that the top shelf of butter was “European Style” butter.

Those of you who know me know that reading those words basically decided for me that I would be buying the more expensive butter. I read the labels and compared the prices and tried to determine which of the “European” butters I would buy, and whether I would have a good excuse to do so when I did. I guess the difference between normal butter and “European style” is in the churning. The labels say that it should be a sweeter, creamier butter, and should make all my baked goods better than with regular butter. We shall see.

I bought half a pound of the European and a pound of the on-sale regular butter. I’ll use the European butter in the first couple of batches of baccala in the morning and see if it still tastes like baccala, or is worse or better. Then I’ll switch over to the regular butter so I have European butter available for future baking endeavors, to see if it makes a difference there.

Oh, err.. then I found the light egg nog (they didn’t have Shamrock Farms, which is my preference) and the bread and came home.

*See my post on being sick. I’m not feeling altogether well right now.