A California Yankee in King Cake's Court

I think I need to get on some kind of anti-anxiety meds. My nervous system was already fried from the past decade of *waves hands around* and I feel like I've been in constant fight-or-flight mode for the past month. I keep breaking out in stress rashes, especially under my eyes, which has always been a sensitive area. That feels great and looks even better, as you can probably imagine. Weird time to contemplate it, but I really feel like I need help, and since at least 90% of my current anxiety is coming from external sources I have zero control over I'm pretty sure talk therapy ain't gonna do shit, even if I could afford it right now.

Honestly, I probably should have been on anti-anxiety meds years ago. I manage with a cobbled-together system of ritual behaviors, exercises like "name 10 things you can see, 5 you can touch, and 1 you can smell", essential oil, and gummies, but like, I have health insurance.

Saturday I made eggs and toast, then read for a while. I had my monthly-ish Taco Bell craving, so after showering and dressing, and picking up some prescriptions at Thrifty Way, I got a Crunchwrap Supreme. I went to Rouses, and after coming home and putting away the groceries I vacuumed the downstairs rugs, then my bedroom. I made a diffuser blend of lavender, cedar, chamomile, lime, and jasmine.

I did some dusting, then went back into the closet to clean another section. I cleaned maybe a 3rd of the floor; I tossed a couple trash bags of stuff, which made room against the back and side for the stuff I actually needed to keep (my sewing box, a couple of vintage train cases I use for short trips, my huge London Fog bag, some shoeboxes full of negatives and photo CDs). That was the section where the back clothes rod is, and I can now actually walk into my walk-in closet and reach my dresses and skirts without having to bend over a pile of junk.

A lot of what I threw out was shoes--they were too beat-up to donate. Around the time I moved to Louisiana was when I realized I just couldn't wear heels anymore, my feet and calves always hurt too much by the end of the day. So I went through a period where I bought tons of cute flat shoes, thinking if I couldn't wear heels at least I would go out of my way to have a variety of attractive flats. But the climate in Louisiana is really hard on shoes, they wear out much faster here than they did in California. And then flats also started hurting my feet, because they have no support. So I started wearing Converse low tops and Hey Dude shoes, but I never got around to throwing out the flats.

I had them in a couple of those hanging canvas shoe rack things that each held a dozen pairs, and I almost threw them out when I threw out the shoes. Then I realized, I don't need to use these for shoes. So now I have toiletries (deodorant, talcum powder, etc.) in the cubbyholes that aren't holding my boring comfy shoes (I only have 3 pair right now).

I did my junk journal page for the day and did some hanzi practice, and after supper I couldn't find anything I wanted to watch so I just started season 3 of For All Mnkind.

Sunday I made the pumpkin doughnuts from the baked doughnuts cookbook. They were really good; in addition to the usual spice blend they also had pureed pumpkin in the batter.

Yes I also made bacon, because I love bacon and Sunday breakfast is usually the only time I get to have it.

I watched Dateline and changed the bedsheets and started my junk journal page, and worked on a few simple collages. The bug is starting to bite again and I have those Life magazines; I also want to get some from the 1980s from the same eBay seller. Weirdly, they're more expensive (8 magazines instead of 10 for the same price) than the older ones from the 1960s and 1970s. Maybe circulation had started going down and they just didn't print as many of them? Or maybe there's more demand since Gen Z seems obsessed with the decade (it was their parent's childhood and young adulthood; I remember a lot of teenagers being obsessed with the 1950s and 1960s when I was that age so that tracks).

After showering I washed the sheets, then washed some old knitted ponchos I found when I was cleaning the closet. They were made for my grandmother by one of the other residents in her assisted living place, and I took them after she died because they reminded me of the afghans we had when I was a kid. One of them is a chevron pattern in different shades of brown and cream, and I swear we had a blanket just like it.

I baked a batch of dog treats, made grilled cheese for lunch, made tuna salad and hardboiled some eggs for my work lunches this week, and made some onigiri, also for work lunch. I mix flavored cream cheese (garden vegetable this time) into the rice while it's still hot, which in addition to adding flavor also keeps them from drying out. I use nori on the bottom, front, and back, using kitchen shears to cut the excess off, then roll the sides in toasted sesame seeds. They came out perfect and I'd forgotten how satisfying it is to make them.

I opened one of the packs of seaweed snacks to see how many were in each one, because sometimes there's not very many. But these have 8, which is the right size for eating them with tuna for lunch. Then I decided to just eat the package I'd opened, and that's how I discovered that Penny apparently loves roasted seaweed.

I held out the first piece as a joke, and I wound up having to give her a few more.

I made cabbage rolls for supper, something I've never made before. I was thinking of Eastern European dishes I could use my Vegeta with--not that you can't use that on almost any kind of food. It was kind of a labor-intensive, you have to parboil the cabbage, then make the meat stuffing (which also has rice, so I made a lot of rice yesterday), then make the rolls, then gently simmer them in some kind of stock or broth on top of and covered with a layer of cabbage leaves for nearly an hour. It was good, though. Phil even said it was good; I told him "It's the food of your people!" Phil's family came from Poland in the 1890s and they'd completely lost touch with the Polish branch of the family 50 years later, so while it seems likely Phil lost relatives to the Holocaust he doesn't really know who they were.

We're getting into the home stretch of Carnival (Mardi Gras is a week from tomorrow) and frankly I'm getting a little tired of king cake--people keep bringing it to work, too--so I bought a honey bun cake from the Rouses bakery. After supper I watched some more of For All Mankind, finished my junk journal page, and finished a couple of simple collages.


I think I'm going to trim the glitter page off the edges, because using it as a frame sort of ruins the illusion that the trunk is full of seawater, which is the effect I'm going for.


Soup ads make the best collage set-up, I swear.

I'm reading Things They Lost, which is this weird magical realism-ish novel by a Kenyan writer about a girl whose mother is always going off and leaving her alone in their crumbling old sort of haunted house. It's good, but for some reason yesterday I decided to re-read Rebecca for the millionth time. I'll go back and finish it, though.

I think I went a little too hard on Saturday. About an hour before I went to bed I reached over to grab something and felt an abdominal muscle pull and cramp. It felt like a sharp rebuke, like it was saying "I know laparoscopic gallbladder removal is not a big deal in the scheme of things, but you had your abdomen open in 4 different places and an organ removed a week ago, you need to calm the fuck down". Okay, listening.

Saturday I made breakfast, then went to the grocery store. I have 2 big re-usable grocery bags, and using those instead of letting them use the plastic bags in the usual wasteful way (like 2 items per bag) was my first mistake, because those bags are heavy. Normally it's not a problem, but I probably shouldn't have been lifting heavy loads just yet.

I vacuumed the downstairs rugs when I got home, which was probably another mistake. But of course I didn't do it last weekend, and they really needed it. In my bedroom decluttering rotation I got to "clean around/under my bed", which wasn't too much work but still involved getting down on the floor and crawling around, reaching under the bed for stuff, dragging a heavy bag of trash downstairs and heaving it into the garbage can, then bringing the vacuum cleaner upstairs to get under the bed.

I needed a rest by then, so I put on a yacht rock playlist (getting hyped for the HBO documentary later this month) and finished Wolf Hall. I was wondering where Mantel would leave it; I thought it might cover Anne's downfall, but she left it at the moment of Cromwell's height, after Thomas More has been executed and before Anne's 2nd miscarriage, which was really the thing that doomed her. I think I'll leave him there, people always say the sequels weren't as good--not that they're bad, just that the writing doesn't achieve the same kind of perfection--plus, I know Tudor history pretty well. If you're going to make Cromwell your hero, I don't really want to follow that through to his end.

David made quiche for supper, and afterwards I decided to re-watch Dune. I hadn't watched it since 2021 and I wanted to see it again before watching the second part.

Sunday I made pancakes and bacon for breakfast, watched Dateline, then decided to start part 2 of Dune. I figured it was going to be long (2 hours, 43 minutes) and I didn't want to be up until midnight watching it. I watched about an hour, then took a shower and changed the bedsheets.

I made white chocolate brownies with cream cheese frosting, a batch of tonkatsu sauce, boiled some hot dog octopuses for my lunches, did some dinner prep, and started Just A Shot Away, Saul Austerlitz's history of the Altamont Speedway Rolling Stones' concert, one of the things (along with the Manson Family murders and the Kent State shooting) often cited as "the end of the '60s".

It's a surprisingly moving book, not a just a "then this happened, then that happened" recitation of events but one that seeks to make Meredith Hunter more than "the answer to a trivia question" and to put him in his proper context, which was as a young Black man in a place that wasn't always welcome to them; the counter-culture had its own forms of segregation.

It's so weird to think that happened in Livermore. Even in my day, Livermore was the most rural part of Alameda County, and the Altamont Pass was the most rural part of Livermore, an eerie landscape of parched brown hills sprouting groves of enormous wind turbines. It wasn't a place anyone I knew ever went on purpose, just someplace you went through on the way to somewhere more interesting.

I was coming back from taking Penny for a short walk in the afternoon when the Amazon driver met me in the driveway to drop off some bento accessories I'd ordered. I seem to have a smaller appetite since the surgery, but not in a problematic way so I'm not concerned about it. There's no nausea or anything, I just seem to be satisfied with less. So I've been a little more purposeful about my work lunches and actually using all my bento stuff, and it seemed like a good idea to re-stock all the little picks and cups and bottles.


This is today's lunch: carrot sticks, grape tomatoes, and some mixed greens with blue cheese, hot dog octopuses (yes the picks make them look like they have eyes) and a Babybel cheese, and the little container has some tomato bouillon powder which will make a cup of broth. The other layer of the bento is vanilla yogurt with a handful of blueberries, a few white chocolate chips, and some shredded coconut.

I made tonkatsu for supper; that, and the white chocolate brownies, were meant to be for David's birthday, which was 2 weeks ago. But the first the downstairs a/c broke, then I was recovering from surgery. Better late than never.

After supper I finished part 2 of Dune. I wonder how far Villeneuve is going to adapt the series? I've never read any of the sequels but I know about a lot of the super weird shit that happens in them, culminating with (spoilers for a book published before I was born) Paul's son turning into some kind of immortal human/worm hybrid god. Hard to imagine that in a movie, but I guess if it was gonna be anyone it would be Villeneuve. (Or Guillermo del Toro.)