To where it bent in the undergrowth:
Another fine October Sunday spent walking in the woods. This time we went here.
Find it, please
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Beautiful Fall Day
I had a boatload of school work to do today and I got some of it set up while the better-half took an early afternoon nap. When I heard him wake up, I went downstairs and asked him if he wanted to do something. I had no ideas but I really didn’t want to sit at my desk all afternoon.
He asked me if I minded going somewhere and if it was OK to leave the windows open while we were gone. I agreed to both and then he went to check on directions. I changed into a pair of sneakers.
We ended up going for a walk in the other part of our fair county. This picture pretty well sums up the walk:
I’m on the dole
Updated 10/24–seems the VEC has changed its mind. No checks for me. Assholes.
I applied for unemployment at the beginning of the week and, by god, they’ve already processed my claim. The downer to this is that I have to register with an online job finder service. It works like 50 blind monkeys designed it. Why there’s not an option to “upload resume”, I’ll never understand. Instead there’s some sort of stupid question gauntlet that you have to go through. Because I have to, I went through the gauntlet. Until I’m told I have to go there again, I’m staying the hell away from that site.
I’m a professional with a very specific career goal. I’m not sure that website is really going to be of much help to me. I understand why it’s there, but it’s not really for the whitest of white collar folks. For real, I sit around all day reading a bunch of documents and then I talk to people. Once I’ve gotten all the information together, I turn it into training courses. How is a website that wants to know if I know how to fill out a form* going to help me? Whatever. There’s the hoop and here’s my jump.
*Really, there was a question about if I knew how to fill out a form. As I was filling out a form. Meta? Irony? Stupid shit?
Posted in Generic Thoughts
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Cozy evening
We were going to have dinner and then a fire pit session, but instead had a cocktail, peanuts and a fire pit session. Don’t know about dinner tonight because it’s much more cozy to stare into the fire.
Posted in Generic Thoughts, Watching
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Unemployed
It’s over. In one way I’m glad because it has been more than 6 months of exhausting emotional and mental crap and in another I’m sad because good work was just tossed in the trash. I kind of want to sleep for a week.
To quote Miss Scarlett, “Tomorrow’s another day.”
Posted in Generic Thoughts
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It occurs to me
It occurs to me that in a week my complaining is going to take a real hit. Without work to grouse about, what am I going to do with my time?
I’ve been kicked off the network 3 times today. Makes it really hard to do the first real task I’ve had in 2 weeks. My task? You’d like to know about my task? I’m so glad you asked.
My task is to go through all of the video that my diva co-worker left in her office. Some of them actually belong in archive boxes and others are either old or who knows what. But I need the network to compare video titles to what’s on her bookshelf.
I was in the office for a couple of hours on Wednesday to move electronic files out of reach so that folks wouldn’t steal as they packed their offices. I heard our Director telling people they could only take with them what they brought in the door.
I’m not sure if I was able to thwart my diva co-worker or not when it came to the electronic files, but she took every single office supply out of her office except a few gimme pens. And, as far as I can tell she took every file off her machine (yes, it’s possible that she deleted and didn’t take the files). I’m not going to miss her.
Posted in General Spleen Venting
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The Kitties
As you may remember we have stray cats who congregate at our house. We are eventually going to have them fixed–which should be sooner rather than later because the cat population is insane. Thanks for nothing lame-o dude down the road with all your horny barn cats.
Anyway, there are favorites in the group and one of them is Fuzzy. He and his siblings have decided it is super cool to hang out on the pool cover. I just looked out the window and Fuzzy was out there by himself which is unusual because that little guy loves company.
Seeing him on the pool reminded me of pictures I took over the weekend.
Jim and Fuzzy on the cover. Look at how happy Fuzzy is to have his brother (same mother/different litters) kick him and then lick him and then kick him and then lick him:
Interrupting the fun was the pool pump. It checks for water every few minutes.
Very interesting:
Posted in Watching
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Day 8
So there are eight working days left at my place of employment. Nearly everyone has been hired by our client except for a few of us that they’ve either actively screwed or are like me and said hell no.
I worked yesterday and actually did some work-related tasks. I also got quite a bit of reading out of the way and wrote a short paper for school. Today I’m off and then for the most of the rest of the week. There’s a quick meeting at work tomorrow that I need to be present for–can’t really blow off meetings when there are so few days left to reschedule.
Next week I’m bringing in a couple of camp chairs because we’re not really sure how long the furniture is going to be around. We have some mischief planned for the furniture that stays. Nothing too dangerous or illegal, but definitely a pain the ass for the client organization. It’s the least we can do to pay them back for being such asshats. Ever wonder how long a piece of baloney will stick to melamine cabinets?
Posted in Generic Thoughts, Thinking
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Mmmm, carnitas.
We had taco truck carnitas tacos while on vacation. The idea of making our own has been lingering (or shouting, whichever) in the back of our minds since that beautiful day in July.
We found a simple recipe and decided to go for it this weekend.
We started by slamming pork shoulder, the juice and sections of an orange, a cinnamon stick, bay leaves and some garlic into a casserole dish:
The meat cooked for 3 1/2 hours. I found myself going outside just so I could come back in to smell that porky goodness:
Don’t worry all that liquid is removed from the meat and separated into juice and fat. Some of the liquid went into a pot to make salsa verde. Some of the fat was added back to the shredded meat:
Then the meat spent some time under the broiler while we finished making the corn tortillas (yes, from scratch). Tortillas are pretty easy to make because it is basically water, salt and masa. Hard to mess up and a brilliant payoff of corny goodness.
Look at that crisp, yet still tender pork:
And, the final product with salsa verde, onions and cilantro, cheese and avocado:
Posted in Eating
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Fig Tart and Garden News
Our fig bush is producing right now and we’ve had this idea to create a savory tart out of figs and a puff pastry sheet that’s been languishing in the freezer.
Today we took some garlic and rosemary and heated them in olive oil and added about a dozen sliced figs. We stirred that around until it turned into what looked like pie filling, adding a bit of water to help things out.
Then we spooned that mixture over half of the rolled out puff pastry and then I added a bunch of goat cheese. We folded over the other edge of the pastry and sealed it.
We baked it for about 20 minutes and let it cool a bit before we sliced two pieces. The better-half decided that some drizzled honey should be added to help with the sweetness factor. He’s the one with the sweet tooth in the family. The honey was a good addition and I added it to the recipe when I jotted it down (well, I typed it, but you know what I mean).
In other fresh vegetable news, we pulled up all but the roma tomato plant this morning. The hurricane last weekend didn’t do any favors to the already pathetic garden and the tomatoes had pretty well stopped producing anyway. We still have the pepper plants and I am once again impressed with how well the serrano peppers do here. Tomorrow, I’m making pesto to freeze.
I’m thinking of pulling at least some of the annuals out of the pots around the pool and starting lettuce seed. The plants are about done anyway and lettuce does so well in pots. I’m going to have to cage the pots, though, to keep the stray cats out of them. God knows that’s not the kind of fertilizer we want.
Posted in Eating, Gardening
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