sporadic fulfilment

i haven't been properly high in so long...i suppose that's a good thing.

4 more days of school left!

so after pestering my instructors for several months to get me a pig's head, i finally got to spend the past week making head cheese completely from scratch...it was lovely fun chasing my classmates around with one of the eyes spiked onto a carving fork. the head cheese turned out pretty awesome as well.

also, evidently, your humble narrator is not the kind of girl to bring home to meet your girlfriend...

mass upheavals

changes...let's see...

-broke up with boyfriend of 4-plus years late last month; things were rapidly going downhill, so i left before we could no longer remain friends. (see, if i blogged more often, this would be an impassioned play-by-play of emotional torment that y'all could experience vicariously -- lots more amusing.)

-moved out: i now have a private room w/balcony & a throughly normal, gay-ish roommate who is starting to realize i may not be the 'moderate drinker' i said i was.

-school, ironically, is the only thing keeping me sane & coordinated right now. i was probably the only person in my class who liked the month we had to do of butchery...i even got to take home & cook lamb brains (lots of work, doesn't taste like much) because i requested a head-on lamb to work with.

- i got 3 people to taste my brains.

- currently a week into a month's worth of learning how to wait tables in a formal dining room setting. i have to wear a blouse. and a bra. it doesn't help that i have no manners or social graces: i keep calling people 'you guys' & forgetting to use my side towel. haven't broken any glassware yet.

-i am most definitely not front of house material.

word of the day:

"carminative."

('medal' is now a verb)

so the olympics are done, all the tourists are going home & the fancy, uber-expensive pavilions & public art are being dismantled & life goes on...

(i never did get around to spending $10 on a beer. or going on the zipline with its five-hour line-up)

working as a kitchen grunt ("second cook") for the stadium-that-shall-not-be-named sucked ass (as the kids these days say it). all i did was reheat food on an industrial scale & drink all the free coffee i could handle; the high point of my days was making the salads for the 2 ladies with food allergies.

maybe vegans are good for something after all.

word of the day:
pugnacious.

what's been happening these past few months:

- got fired from my cashiering job. right before christmas.

- cooked my first christmas dinner ever: roast goose with couscous (dessert was chocolate mousse cake)

- quit drinking; for a week once, & for just over 3 weeks most recently - i'm currently off the wagon...

- i actually *like* school & am doing remarkably well.

- getting slightly excited about the olympics because i will be working downtown & i'll have to deal with the chaos & the tourists regardless of how i feel about the whole thing.

first day of class over; i'm the only one who looks like she came in off the street. teacher already said i shouldn't be carrying a pocket knife.

i don't look forward to a year of wearing the silly hat. everything else still holds promise.

word of the day: "phylum."

2 weeks until school starts !!!

i'm currently employed part-time as a cashier in a not-too-busy department store. (my first time working retail, by the way) it is run by a christian union & an alarming percentage of the employees & customers wear crucifixes of varying blingitude...i swear i feel my skin burning every time i go in.

also, the presence of customers makes my nose itch uncontrollably, & i worry that i look like i just did a line because i'm constantly trying to covertly itch my nose.

recent culinary awesomeness:

five-spice duck fat breadsticks, bacon fat confit of quail, & brussel sprouts cooked in goose fat with cream & bacon -- not all in the same meal, of course.

(guess my current obsession)

word of the day: "oedema."

updatage

watching soylent green for the first time & being surprised at how *antiquated* it is.

so i'm to start classes in mid november & the first portion of my tuition is due in mere weeks, scrambling for student loans.

spent just over a month washing dishes at a mostly lunch crowd, mostly greek food restaurant, but got dismissed over ongoing pissing contests with the pre-existing dish guy; kinda bad, because i got along with everyone else there & they were doing beef wellingtons the day after i left - i'm sure i could have talked my way into helping.

there's a honeybee hive on one of the outside rafters of my house.

word of the day: "propolis."

now with 90% percent less beer money!

still unemployed, just even broker than before. got my acceptance letter from vancouver community college for my culinary arts program; don't know when i'm starting, but with any luck, i'll be commuting downtown for classes every weekday during the olympics next winter (yay! traffic jams!)

the garden is doing well. this year i've planted 7 different kinds of hot peppers as well as some heirloom tomatoes, beans, & squash. the opium poppies are loving the sun but no sign of the pot plant yet.

...the urge to sell my books, pack up the cat & just leave town is still there. doing my best to not listen to it.

i wish... out of work again, by the way.

so now i've been doing the office furniture in the vancouver convention center expansion (yes, the overbudget, for the olympics, most-people-won't-get-to-set-foot-inside-the-place-even-though-their-taxes-helped-pay-for-it one) for the past few weeks, working for the guys i worked for before my most recent gig because they're enormously busy all of a sudden.

[lots of 'f's & 't's in that sentence...]

& the reason i'm mentioning that, asides from keeping my hypothetical audience updated, is that the boyfriend & i struck up a deal wherein he shaves his winter beard off a month early(it made the bottom half of his face look like a crotch) if i stop wearing my disintergrating leather with holes where the pockets used to be & now i'm stuck wearing a black velvet frock-coat to a construction site; i end up taking it off, turning it inside-out, folding it up & putting it in my bag the moment i'm on site, & then freezing my ass off during coffee breaks.

being right on the waterfront doesn't help either. i had my salad blow away one time...

word of the day:
"somnolent."

"in these current economic times"

- got 'let go' last week from my job as a furniture installer, am looking for work with little sucess; going back to school is starting to look better & better...

-accidentally gave myself a bald spot on the left side of my head due to over-enthusiastic hair trimming. good thing it's not too warm for hats yet.

- january's rent still isn't paid off.

-smoked tobacco out of an actual tobacco pipe for the first time. it was less harsh than cigarettes but not as mild as smoking out of a hookah & didn't get me dizzy.

word of the day: "jeremiad."

christmas was fairly low-key this year, chinese takeout & perogies for dinner -- mainly because we were snowed in, being in the suburbs & all.

going anywhere meant having to slog through knee-deep drifts of snow because nobody shovels the sidewalk & the city can't manage to plow the streets because we live in a 'temperate rainforest' & it doesn't ever snow here.

new year's eve consisted of seedy bar-hopping as per usual. my resolution for the year is to take up smoking, but only good cigarettes.

word of the day:
"chthonic."

as in: 'i would like a gin & chthonic, please.'

marathon

had the runs all week...too much beer & not enough other vegetables, i guess.

smoked crack cocaine for the first time about 2 months ago; only did it once since. i liked its high better than the one coke gives me: i got the same hyped-up/jumped-up giddy feeling but without the paranoia & numbness. tastes better than meth too.

harvested many bucketfuls of tomatoes (cherrys, beefsteaks, & smoky purple ones) & a big bowl of chillies (serranos, cayennes, jalapenos, & little purple ones. the habanero didn't grow) from the garden, spent august-september (i'm 23 now, by the way) putting tomatoes into everything to use them up. all that's left now is the herb garden; planted some tulips under the fig tree. red, striped, & dark purple ones.

it's december & the grass is still green outside. that will never stop disturbing me...

work is going ok, got a steady job building office furniture some months ago -- there's still a lot for me to learn so i'm not bored yet -- i'm getting strong for someone my size, calluses on my hands & bruises on my legs. the only aspect of my life i don't lie to my parents about since moving out & they still freak out about it.

words of the day:
"havocado."
"actionable."

nope, not dead yet...

the cat & garden are doing well, though the nasturtiums are taking over.

have not left vancouver except for a weekend a coupla months ago in victoria (- on vancouver island, not somewhere more exotic)

going on 2-and-a-half years with the boyfriend...

had a drunken breakdown & cut most of my hair off with my pocketknife in the bathroom of a bar.

feeling rather selkie-like these days, fighting the urge to run away from the ordinary & resume haphazardly exploring.

-- & i'm thinking of going to cooking school. hey, if i'm gonna learn a trade, why not pick one that's stressful, messy, & not all that lucrative? might drive me to blog more often.

is this what growing up is supposed to feel like?

just finished a 3-week stint at an unheated & rat-infested warehouse where every day started with a small chinese man in a facemask banging a gong & shouting in heavily accented english that everyone should stop what they're doing & "clean poo poo" -- start sweeping up the piles of shit left by the rats the night before. the other 7.5 hours of the day were spent packing hippie goods into boxes, taping up boxes, measuring boxes, weighing boxes, & printing up labels for boxes; i got to inventory boxes too, just to switch things up a bit.

one hour lunches & 45-minute coffee breaks are your friends in situations like these. they also allow you to get fired without feeling too bad about it.

word of the day: smorgasboredom.

post-x mas carnage report:

dec 23rd -- got really drunk while out visiting friends but i still had enough manners to vomit in my fedora as opposed to on the people on the bus; my hat turned out to be leaky so we still got kicked off the bus & had to walk/stagger to the grocery store to do the last of the christmas dinner-shopping...the boyfriend & i somehow managed to catch a cab back home. i have no recollection of it.

dec 24th - 25th -- woke up at 7am to start cooking, yours truly had multiple mini-freakouts because it was my first official 'proper' christmas. i was also hungover until about 2pm.

a ship of meat!!!

this is what christmas dinner looks like if one's dating a rabid carnivore who also happens to be: a professional chef, intoxicated, & obsessed with pirates. it's a deboned turkey (covered with bacon), stuffed with stuffing, on top of a 'hull' consisting of several racks of ribs (larded with strips of bacon & slow-cooked in bacon grease), on a 'sea' of mashed potatos & yams (covered in cheese). i was supposed to make the sails out of puff pastry, but we forgot to get flour the night before.

people started arriving around 5-ish, the booze started flowing tsunami-like, as opposed to merely torrentially when it was just the 2 of us. the party itself? you know, the usual blah, blah, drugs, yadda yadda, antics; presents got randomly handed out & opened around 1 in the morning & the rest of the party was spent wading through drifts of paper, trying to not step on those who'd crashed out & was semiburied by blankets & giftwrap.

all but a few went home to fall down & recover around x mas midafternoon.

the wreckage

dec 26th -- those of us still standing went to see 'aliens vs. predator 2' before disbanding. i had nightmares about meat all night.

yesterday -- spent comatose.

today -- i'm typing this after i had to pull a shit-encrusted piece of feather boa out of my cat's anus.

words of the day:

"confussied."

"umwelt."

updates, updates, updates

- got my impoverished, yellow-trash ass booted off welfare a coupla weeks ago & am scrambling to make my half of the rent by doing random & distasteful odd jobs like cleaning inches-thick layers of pigeon shit & feathers out of air ducts, & working with children.
- am doing initial research on setting up a small saltwater fishtank, now that it looks like i won't be moving anytime soon.
- i have started collecting antique teacups & jello cookbooks.

word of the day:

"sweatheart."

give me whiskey or give me death. preferably whiskey.

this is a header.

this is where something witty wiil eventually go & you will shower me with accolades for it because it is so damn clever.

not now though, because i'm too sober to be clever.

alt. productivity

spent the whole of wednesday on crystal meth, & all of yesterday recovering from it... & yes, before you guys say anything, i know the shit's bad for you; it was a calculated one-time-only go at it, done in the company of people i trust, just so that i know what it feels like.

strange thing about it is, you don't even notice the high it self much -- you're just extraordinarily motivated, focused & hyper-aware: lot's of stuff gets done -- you don't get any visuals or any significant mood changes, it's the day after that you feel completely exhausted & kinda sorta realize that hey, you forgot to do simple things like eat or shower or sleep...

like i said, it's not something i'm gonna go out & get addicted to.

well, that was quick...

found a new place already, just waiting to move in. it doesn't have much of a view or a kickass window big enough for 2 people to sit in -- nor is it directly above a bar -- like the old place in nelson did, but it is close enough to the skytrain that sneaking on & going downtown/wherever is no big deal, & at $670 & twice the size, it's about as close to spiffy as one can get in vancouver right now. gotta do something about the mustard-colored paintjob, though.

back in vancouver

...& looking for affordable housing that isn't a slumhole or an hour commute to anywhere interesting sucks balls.

missing the boyfriend & my cat ('cause they, along with most of my stuff, are still in nelson waiting for me to find a place first) , seems like i've degenerated into a whole 'nother realm of cliched turmoil, doesn't it?

word of the day:
"pylorus"

all these things that i've done...

haven't posted in a while & if i wasn't so intent on trying to keep something of a personal record of stuff that i can look back on when i'm senile & rickety & cackle at, i'd probably delete this blog.

- tried 2CI for the first time (about time i had a new drug to experiment with!) & didn't like it: too expensive & i spent the first hour or so of my trip lying all drooling & puking in the bathtub. acid is better.

- made creme brulee from scratch for a potluck-type thingie.

- gonna be moving back to vancouver at the end of september. can't believe i spent a whole year out here.

- have acquired a kitten some weeks ago; her name is toast.

word of the day:
"flummox."

last september was the last time i tasted chartreuse.

got sucked into playing video games for the first time in my life & am now hopelessly addicted to grand theft auto: san andreas...there's just something gratifyingly wrong about beating virtual people to death with a big purple dildo.

words of the day:
"fop." & "sodderly."

thinking about making butter tarts with rasins soaked in orange brandy. still can't believe my life now revolves around Welfare Wednesday.

my boyfriend folds laundry better & faster than me...

popgadget

snorted a couple lines of grape-flavored pixy stix yesterday just to see what would happen (it burned my sinuses horribly & i felt headachy for a coupla minutes but that was it: you can't get high off of pixy stix, apparently) .

that's how bored i am.

...spent v-day with the boyfriend watching lost & drinking bottles of 20-to-30-something year-old beer i bought from the local antique store.

i'd urge y'all to go buy up all the antique beer you can find & horde & savour it like the delectably malty & highly potent liquid awesomeness it really is, but since when have i done anybody anything nice?

sporadic fulfilment

Monday, October 25, 2010

Saturday, October 09, 2010

Sunday, June 27, 2010

mass upheavals

Monday, March 01, 2010

('medal' is now a verb)

Tuesday, February 09, 2010

Monday, November 16, 2009

Monday, October 26, 2009

Saturday, July 25, 2009

updatage

Wednesday, June 17, 2009

now with 90% percent less beer money!

Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Monday, February 16, 2009

Tuesday, February 03, 2009

"in these current economic times"

Friday, January 09, 2009

Monday, December 01, 2008

marathon

Tuesday, July 08, 2008

Saturday, February 23, 2008

Friday, December 28, 2007

post-x mas carnage report:

Wednesday, November 28, 2007

words of the day:

Friday, November 16, 2007

updates, updates, updates

Monday, November 05, 2007

word of the day:

Wednesday, October 31, 2007

give me whiskey or give me death. preferably whiskey.

Friday, October 19, 2007

alt. productivity

Saturday, October 06, 2007

well, that was quick...

Wednesday, October 03, 2007

back in vancouver

Wednesday, August 22, 2007

all these things that i've done...

Monday, June 25, 2007

last september was the last time i tasted chartreuse.

Monday, April 16, 2007

Saturday, March 10, 2007

Saturday, March 03, 2007

Thursday, February 15, 2007

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