My Monday chores include, in addition to whatever housecleaning I can motivate myself to do, making vats of tea. Thanks to Chuck, I have four 1000-ml bottles and one 500-ml bottle, made of some hard plastic (they're designed for use in a lab, so they're pretty sturdy). I generally drink about 1500 ml of tea a day, so I fill the four big bottles on Monday, and then fill the 500-ml bottle each day. I prefer Assam black, made by Honest Tea, changed up occasionally with some Jiangxi China Green or some Kashmiri Chai. I didn't like the latter as much as I thought I would, but I'm working my through the batch I bought; I go through at least 15 bags of the Assam each week (I put two bags in the 1000-ml bottles). I've never really liked Earl Grey or mint, and I didn't like the Honeybush at all when I tried it. I do like the Chamolime, and it turns out that it is an incredible sleep aid for several people I know, including Chuck (really: they drink a cup and crash), but I don't go through much of it. I have to order the tea online, because I've never been able to find their tea bags--only their bottled tea--in stores. Anyway, I shlep a big bottle and the small bottle to work every day, refilling the latter from the former and keeping the former in the walk-in. It's handy, because I like tea (obviously), and the bottles don't spill when they get knocked over, unlike, say, styrofoam coffee cups.
I'm finding that, now that I've said my piece to Chuck, I'm mostly sad. For me, for him. Neither of us wanted to get to this point, and, you know, despite everything, he's not a bad person, and all of the good things about him are still there, and some of them are better than when we met. He got in the habit of lying, in part because he doesn't believe anyone will love him the way he is, in part because he's smart, and he found it easier to lie (to most people) than to tell the truth. Between his disorder and his addiction (and they often go hand in hand), it's a testament to him that he's not in even worse shape than he's in.
I think he's capable of making (and really wants to make) the changes he needs to make, and he certainly knows he's got to do it for him, not for anyone else. And, as I said to him, if he gets it together, he deserves to be with someone who can trust and love him in a way that I simply cannot at this point. I would like to be able to be friends with him--though I think he really doesn't want that, and I'm not going to push it. I can still work up some anger and fear over the tens of thousands of dollars this relationship has cost me, but I also know that, if he does make those changes, he's going to want to make amends to me, too. And if not, well, there's nothing I can do about it. It makes me sick to my stomach to think about it sometimes, because I've done this before, i.e., found myself in a financial hole and had to dig my way out of it. Jane and I have talked about this a lot; she saw me dig myself out of the last one, too. As I said, I can work up a good fury about it, but other times, I'm more "whatever" about it. Sitting around whining about it isn't going to help one little bit, so I can only do that for so long. Similarly, castigating Chuck or myself for the situation isn't going to put food on the table or pay the rent.
I'm determined to get out of the house today. I'll do some more copyediting, seeing as how the next batch just showed up in my inbox, but I have to get out. And probably taking a shower first would be good.
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I was wondering if there might be some way to combine yoga and punching bags, and then I remembered: You're a baker. Back when I had a suitable table to work on, and I was a pediatric nurse, I used to come home and make bread. Best -- or anyway most violently -- kneaded bread in town, I promise.
Damn. I need to find another table. It's almost redundant now, there are so many incredible breadshops in Berkeley, but I'd like to make bread again. And we've pretty much got the rat-piss smell out of the oven. (Lab rat. Escaped snake chow. Could be worse. But: male.)
Except I don't knead bread by hand any more . . . turns out that dough hook on my Kitchen-Aid DOES have a use. Not that I make bread at home much, and, at work, I tend to make huge batches of everything. (Example: I make croissant dough in 100-pound batches.)
But I do find cooking of any kind to be meditative. What I really need to do is start a new needlepoint. And I've been squeezing in a few minutes of yoga maybe three days a week, so there's that. Not the hour about which I fantasize, but I figure a few minutes is still an improvement over no minutes.
Rat piss? Eww.
Eww is right. It wasn't in the oven itself, but in the insulation in the back of the stove, where the little rat bastard had made himself a comfy nest. (He's escaped by overbalancing the snake's lunchbox and knocking it off the sideboard, and the lid popped open. The snake's a nocturnal species -- ball python -- and I don't feed him till after dark because he's more likely to eat then, and I'm not into long drawn-out suspenseful torture episodes.) The rat's long gone, but it took forever and repeated doses of Nature's Miracle to get the stench out of the oven.
At least we knew it wasn't carrying the plague or something.
No, the cat didn't catch him. The cat points rats. Also fish that have jumped out of the aquarium; I think I blogged about the dojo loach he called my attention to, in a spot I'd never have noticed it until it died and stank. It was still wiggling, so I put it back in the tank and it's still OK now, a year or more later. Tough fish.
You gotta worry when you can say about a household incident, "At least we knew it wasn't carrying the plague or something." I won't say my standards are higher, but the scale is definitely different.
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