Weekend of Epicness

It started Thursday as all epic weekends should. Thursday was beautiful outside, Little G Man's first birthday, and my ex dude and his gf and her kids came to town. So it was pretty rad. We went to the park and lil G loved it. It's amazing to hear that super laugh from babies. Like absolutely pure happiness. Awww melts my bitter heart. I hung out with Harm and Jess and helped them get ready for the family baby bday dinner that night. Then Jess and I went out because she randomly had Friday off. And we got to meet the drag queens! And I was told I get to be Grand Duchess of Juneau. Holy fucking awesomeness! I was seriously floating after they told me.
So Friday night I had to work the drag show bartending. I was third on but they needed me pretty much as soon as I got there. We were slammed. Ran out of just about every glass we had. It was fabulous. Plus by trying to keep up with the dishes I was able to have a good view of everything. It was so packed I had to hop over the end of the bar when they called me up on stage to be sworn in. Glad I had a few shots, I was way nervous. And luckily there was a huge spot light in my face so it was like there was no one there. Not a PACKED bar. It was just plain great. I felt so amazing after. And it was towards the end of the show, so I didn't have to work much later. Spent the rest of the night chillin at the then almost empty bar with some new to town fucking rad ladies and then called it a night.
Saturday was crazy. Happy birthday to Ver and my fave sissy, Jen. Woke Ver up to give her her presents cause I had to go help Harm with G's big bday party. Bought a bunch of balloons and set the place up. Then babies started showing up. Lots of babies. Luckily S showed up too and we turned her jeep into an open bar :D Then she and I decided to head downtown to find the queens. Never found them before we had to head to the show. S said she'd be in charge of the sound so she could get in for free. And it was in no way her fault but the sound was horrible. The mic's kept reverbing and the cd's wouldn't play. At one point the queens brought out a boombox and put a mic next to it and then did her routine. It was rad. The stupid sound made the show go later than Friday night. So it wasn't until 2 that we were able to get the queens back to the rondy. Oh but we did. We packed the place and danced and it was so very superb. I wish we could have stayed open later, it was seriously just getting started and we could have made the bar way more money.
I helped do the dishes since they had just got slammed. S apparently went and broke up a fight and came back with blood splatter all over her face. Eww. Fucking drunks.
Didn't really get out of bed till 3 on Sunday which is what I needed after all that. Had the worst service EVER at Donna's. They weren't even busy! Effers. Then I finally got to come home and shower. Oh glorious shower and my bed. Ahh.
And today is the final day of the weekend, thank you Mr. Seward for purchasing your folly! Let's see what it brings to end the epicness.
Oh yes, on a not good note, Friday I come home to get ready to work and Ver tells me they haven't seen Frank in a few days so they called the pound. He still hasn't come home :( Last night I had a dream he was in my room, it was so real. And then I woke up and he's still gone. If some family found him and loves him, by all means, KEEP HIM! He's evil and hates me. But in no way to I wish him harm and I'm a worrier and ugh. I hope he's snuggled up somewhere safe.

Sicky McSickstein

That's me. It crept into my awareness Thursday. Obviously I was a lil tired after going out for St. Drink-a-ton, and I may have smoked a few cigarettes while out. So that's what I attributed the slight annoying scratchiness at the back of my throat. Oh it'll go away, it's just my body telling me to keep on not smoking. Right? Riiight. Until I woke up Friday morning. I'M SICK. Noooooo! My head felt like some evil elf snuck in during the night and filled my head with boulders. Asshole elves. Happened to have some Sudafed, gulped that down and went back to sleep. Unfortunately, awoke still sick. Fuck. My amazing roomie who I will love till the end of time and then still, brought me top ramen, 7up, theraflu and tissues home on her lunch break. SO NICE! So armed with all that and some of her throat numb-er spray stuff, I loafed in bed all day and watched Gangs of New York. Which I realized I had previously watched only up until his dad gets killed. Which is like oh 15 minutes into a two disc dvd. So I stayed awake even with my heavy duty cold meds and watched the whole thing. I liked it. Daniel Day Lewis is so good at being bad!
Saturday I woke up even sicker. Awesome. But I had promised Ver I'd watch her get a tattoo on her foot. So I made myself take a shower and get slightly prettied up. Which was a challenge because once I got to the tattoo shop and looked in the mirror I realized I looked like Kate from the Bad Girls Club. On her hungover mornings. My eyes were squished inside of my puffy cheeks. Ugh awesome. Later on I got more medicine, which I think slightly reduced the chipmunker look of my face.
So today is Sunday, day three of my stupid head cold thingy. It is soooo nice and sunny outside! I don't want to take meds today. I figure I'll just blow my nose a lot and say things with a th more often. And I thinks we's going to the beach. Yay!

More Pics

Here are a few other things I've done in the last few weeks.

Everyone loves nekkid ladies right? Well they should.

Acrylics on canvas board.




Sharpie on shelf backing.


This is my beautiful home.




I been ah cookin'
Lentil Burgers made from leftover Mjeddrah


Sweet Potato chips. Delish but time consuming as fuck.


Sooooy Milk


And shmee...
I kinda gave myself a blondish streak or something.

Pictorial Post

I made soy milk today. Woo effing hoo! I bought a soy milk maker years ago when I was a full on vegan. And used it a bunch. But then moving, not being a vegan, etc, led to it staying in it's box. I'm certainly no vegan but I am tired of extraneous shit in my products. And supporting companies who are owned by companies who are owned by the devil. I'm still not sure of how good soy is for me. It seems you can find a watertight argument on either side. So in the future I do want to experiment with brown rice and almond milk. I was asked why I don't drink regular milk and my immediate answer was, well I'm not a baby cow. The end. The only reason I am even going to the trouble of making "milk" is because I love me some cereal and I want to start baking more. Not because I'm an infant bovine. So here are some pics from the process. Enjoy.

The goods.


Soaked soybeans. Took a damn hour to squeeze them out of their skins, but it makes it taste better.


While the machine was doing it's thing, I had time to have a nice lil snack of leftover moroccan-ish veggies and couscous. YUM.


Tada! Soymilk and Okara, the pulp. It's good in all kinds of stuff. Hopefully I use it.



And a good reason to stay inside and be kitchen crafty.

Veg-tastic Voyage

Last week I bought dried lentils and barley and thought I'd experiment with them. I found an easy seeming recipe for the lentils called Mjeddrah. It was pretty easy and simple. And I had just made my miso dressing so I was excited to try it with it. It was good and hearty and made a lot more than I needed. And since my fabulous roomie is on the meat end of the diet spectrum, she's no help to make it disappear. So the idea of lentil veggie burgers rolled around in my head for a while. Until finally today I looked up recipes. I basically followed this one, plus the video was fun to watch.

How I made them was, I toasted four pieces of cracked wheat bread in the oven. Ground them up in the food processor along with black pepper, granulated garlic, cayenne pepper and some shards of Parmesan cheese. Yes I cheated and didn't make it vegan. But I happened to have the cheese on hand from last nights pasta and figured I'd try it out. Then I added the left over mjeddrah to the food processor and a few squirts of Braggs and mixed it all up. Put a little bit of safflower oil in a pan and got it fairly hot and dropped gobs of the mixture into the pan. I let them cook for a long time and kept kind of pushing them farther down so they would get more browned. They don't get super firm as they are a pureed mixture, but as they were cooling they felt like they were getting firmer. I tried the little one and let the others cool and then froze them. I had a little mixture left over so I made little patties and then halfway through I broke them up and cooked them. So now I have veggie crumbles for salad or wraps.

Yesterday I made pasta for my awesome friend S. It was red kale, butter beans, sun dried tomatoes and a can of Italian tomatoes and probably 6 or 7 cloves of garlic and spices tossed with whole wheat linguine and shards of Parmesan cheese. Basically sauteed everything together, starting with the garlic and kale. I ended up smashing the beans once they had simmered a bit. I think it made a nicer thickness and got rid of the canned bean taste. It was pretty tasty. She liked it and when a different friend came over later she had some and she liked it as well. It's always nice to know that other people like my food. I have such weird tastes and usually lovey roommate looks at me a little weird when I create stuff. So ha! Normal people liked it! Yay!

My miso dressing. My fave sister in Seattle always makes me make her a huge batch of it when I visit. I don't follow a recipe, I made it up so it's all by sight and taste. But these are the ingredients if you want to try it out. In order of amount, btw.
Oil - I use safflower or Enova, whatever you like. A little flax seed oil is great.
Vinegar - Rice, red wine, or apple cider is good. Even balsamic but it'll change the over all taste.
Dijon Mustard - This is magic. One it tastes goood. Two, it acts as an emulsifier.
Maple Syrup
Miso - I've only used white. Usually three tablespoons or so.
Garlic - Usually two-four cloves, I use a garlic press. Best invention ever.
Black pepper
Cayenne pepper

So basically put it all together and whisk till the miso is dissolved. I haven't used my food processor to make this yet but that seems like a pretty handy way to get it all emulsified and the garlic chopped up.

The next culinary ideas I have rolling around are breads, soy milk and Moroccan stuffed peppers. The peppers are for this Sunday dinner. HDot and I have decided to have Sunday dinners with her lil G man. I'm pretty excited to have someone to cook for and to hang out with her more. And her little dude is seriously the cutest kid on earth.
The soy milk I've made before. I own a soy milk maker. I don't know if it still works, it's been shipped back and forth between here and Kansas a few times. But I bought soy beans, and damn they're hard to find!, and if it works I'll be making some. If not, I'll be buying cheesecloth and making some.
Breads. I want to know how to make bread and have it be good. My mother was born in her fathers bakery in France. He baked bread every day up until he died. One of my only memories of him are his big arthritic knuckles covered in flour kneading dough. It's in my genes somewhere, I just have to cultivate it.

Wet cats, Adrenaline, & Heath Food

Starting from right now going backwards. Mother effing Jack has magically become an outdoor cat today. And so far her favorite activity is to go out the little kitty door, stand in the rain until she is soaked and then come downstairs, whine and meow and run up to me (and my computer) and shake dry. It's awesome. Oh and while she's standing outside soaking up EVERY raindrop, she's standing in mud. Little kitty paw prints everywhere. They'd be cute if they didn't go across my bed!

I volunteered to help clean out the bar storage unit with the lovely S today. We both felt like not doing it when we got up however. So we went to breakfast out in le valley and then decided to go to a matinee. Drove back downtown to watch either The Crazies or Legion. Couldn't decide so we flipped a coin. The Crazies won. HOLY HELL! So good. I didn't realize how tense it made me until we left the theatre and I was shaking. I seriously flipped out and couldn't stop looking around and just feeling unsettled. Good job movie maker peeps! So then we decided why not be really lazy and make a full day of hookie and go see Legion. So we did. Decent movie, nice amount of blood right off the bat. A bit slow in parts, but perhaps that's because I felt like my heart hadn't calmed down from the prior movie. After our movie marathon S took me over to H Dot's house to have dindin. H and I decided to have dinner and have it be healthy organic stuff after watching Food Inc the other day.

Talk about a horror film! Having been a vegan I know a fair share about how bad feedlots and mega farms are, but can usually ignore it for the most part. For a while now I've been feeling a pull back to some kind of vegetarianism. This sealed the deal. I remember learning about all the bad shit animals go through. I remember how bad that food is for us. For our planet. I'm not saying people shouldn't eat meat. That is entirely up to the individual. But I know there's a better way. And genetically modified foods? We are fooling ourselves if we really think we can outsmart mother nature. Seriously, we can't bend nature to our will. We are not invincible. As much as we'd love to think we're unstoppable because we're at the top of the food chain, we're not. At the rate we're going, there won't BE a food chain to be on top of. We can only fuck with nature before we fuck ourselves. You know that whole thing about how we only have one Earth? Well it's true. We keep breeding down plant species until there are fewer and fewer varieties left. The strong ones! The big ones! The ones that will feed us forever! Until that day when the one last variety of tomato succumbs to some new mutated, pesticide resistant bug and then we've successfully sent the tomato into extinction. Go us!

One of the best things the movie got across is that we all make a difference. Watching the majority of the movie there is an overwhelming feeling of hopelessness. That we can't turn to the government because they're in fucking bed with Monsanto and whatnot. Which is a damn waking nightmare. But what we can do is choose. Every time we shop, choose organic, choose items that specifically say non GMO, grass fed, etc. It will make a difference. "They" will notice. Our money is our ballot and we can make "them" change with each and every cent we don't spend on CAFO downer beef and hormone laced milk. At least I fucking hope so. Hope is all we have.