Bounty

I can't think about work, because it's wearing me out. And writing about it here is probably a bad idea, no matter how few readers I have. One never knows when the Google gods may deliver one onto the screen of one's coworkers.

So: food. Though first I must tell you that my furniture, it is here!!1eleventy!!

No pictures for you yet, however, because (a) the sun room bricks are still being stripped (and oh what a pain in the ass that project is), so the floor is covered in plastic and the walls are ugly, and (b) the bigger chair is, indeed big--bigger than I thought it was going to be--so I need to rethink its placement. It's a gorgeous piece of work, and the price could not be beat, so I have no regrets about buying it, but it is quite large, and requires aforementioned rethinking. So nothing is in its space yet, and, in fact, much of it is draped in fabric so that Loaner Cat doesn't decide to claw at it. I also broke down and got a new futon--and a handmade cotton and wool one at that, from a place in Montana. So, yes, expensive, but comfy, and I can no longer count the slats of the bedframe while I'm in bed.

Anyway, this is the time of year when there's basically a bounty of food, and I love it. Sunday morning I dragged Friend to the local farmers' market--it's a small market, but it has a lot of organic farmers and my favorite cheese people, and I like supporting neighborhood things. At the market I got fresh mozzarella, cheese curds (that was an impulse purchase), even more tomatos (my farm share has been very tomato-heavy, but so have my lunches), a quarter loaf of miche, a bag of thin green beans, a dozen ears of sweet corn, and two containers of peaches. Friend went back to his house for the afternoon, while I scraped more paint.

So, for dinner: more of the eggplant stuff I've been making, this time tossed with chunks of crystalized ginger, soy sauce, olive oil, and a bunch of crushed garlic, baked, and then tossed with some light coconut milk, soy sauce, balsamic vinegar, rice wine vinegar, and fresh basil. Sweet corn--I made it all, with the intention of cutting the leftovers off the cobs and using in my lunch salads this week. The green beans, steamed/boiled until just tender, then glazed with a little butter and some salt. A tomato/basil/mozzarella salad. Caramelized onions, with some sliced venison ring baloney thrown in. And for dessert, crepes with peaches that had been sitting in lemon juice and ginger syrup.

Seriously, this shit was so good we ended up eating dinner standing up in the kitchen. We couldn't even get ourselves to put together plates and sit down. It was fucking amazing. Not terribly dignified, but dignity is overrated. Plus, I managed to make another dent in the farm share, just in time for Monday's delivery (lettuce, four kinds of tomatos, parsley, and peppers, which I promptly gave to a neighbor).

It was huge wads of food, too, so I gave Friend at least a third of it, maybe a little more, to take with him for his lunches this week (my payback to him for shlepping back & forth to my house just for dinner). I've been feasting on the leftovers as well, and it's heaven.

But peaches, oy. This morning I cut up the rest of them and tossed them with more lemon juice and ginger syrup and stuck them in the fridge, because otherwise I'd have a counter full of mold within another day or two. I love peaches; they are such an incredible feast for the senses, what with that intoxicating scent, and that incredible taste, and the juice running down your arm if you eat it in bites. But if you look at them sideways they get bruised, it seems. I practically carry them wrapped in cotton and bubble wrap and they still seem to get mottled practically instantaneously. No matter; the cut-up peaches should last a few days, so it'll be fine.

Change

Well.

The Big Transition continues at work, and it's taking its toll on everyone. While I can rant with the best of them, there are days when I think that I am least . . . deeply bothered? freaked out? of all of my coworkers. It's really kind of fascinating to watch (and to have a hand in, for that matter). Some of it is definitely age, but most of it, as I think I've said before, is that I have changed "careers" multiple times in my life, sometimes by choice and other times not so much, and each time I've done so, I've had to learn a whole new field. On one hand, of course, this is a bit stressful, but, on the other, it gives me something new to learn, and it has given me experience being discomfited, if you will. The people within whom I'm now working have (a) worked with the organization for at least 10 years, and (b) worked with each other for at least 10 years; at this point, they have worked out all of their miscommunication and their routines and their divvying up of the world.

Suddenly, the world has gotten much larger, and it has new stuff in it, and they must work with people who do not have any clue how they Do Things, and there are many more Things to Do, and some of those things are Very New Things. This all makes for much discomfort and dislocation, and, as we all know, people deal with that in different ways. (I actually think my boss created the position for me that s/he did precisely because of my experience with such dislocations.) As I have been saying, despite the multiple frustrations we experience with each other, no one is lazy, malicious, or stupid, and that is huge. No one else seems to think it's as huge as I think it is, but I think it's absolutely vital. It doesn't mean that we're going to be able to work everything out with no bumps or irritaitons or rashes, it just means that the people involved are capable of working it out, are unlikely to sabotage working it out, and will likely work hard to work it out.

It's also true that I have lost a couple of battles--that makes it sounds too dire. It's true that, in several arenas that I think are important, the person who is making the decision doesn't see/agree with the things I've observed and pointed out. I do think it will backfire, in a big way, but some mistakes have to be made for people to understand the flaws in their systems.

What's also interesting and sort of amusing to me is that the people who are, at least theoretically, taking over chunks of what I have been doing, are both multitudinous and freaking out. Seriously--and not to pat myself on the back--but it's taking three or four of them to even begin to do what I have been doing single-handedly, and they haven't really taken over yet. It's more like they look over my shoulder as I keep doing big chunks of it. And criticizing, of course, when they're not freaking out.

The other thing around which I have not yet wrapped my head is that they don't seem to forego vacation time when there's something big due. The last two Big Things--including the one where we/I fucked up--included vacation time by people who are supposed to be taking over big chunks of what I do, and the vacation time was within a week or 10 days of the due date. Which makes no sense to me, and probably explains why I have nearly maxed out the amount of vacation time one can accrue. One of them included airplane tickets to a foreign country, so that's understandable, but that person also arrived back in town and started fucking with my Plan, because That's The Way WE Have Always Done Things (even though I could only have discerned the Way YOU Do Things through psychic abilities, and was therefore taken aback and peevish).

And, truly, I'm not being critical there. Having a Way to Do Things that actually includes people other than oneself does probably mean that one can take vacations, and there was no way to know that this particular adventure really didn't allow for vacations for the people in charge of getting it done. Lessons have been learned, i believe, but there's still a lot of freaking out to do.

Not by me, though, if I can help it. Loaner Cat does what she can to refocus my attentions, which is always good. I've also been reading again. There for awhile I was rereading a bunch of stuff, but suddenly I'm back in New Book land. And my latest somewhat guilty pleasure has been the George Martin books, or the first one, anyway. People whose opinion I trust (all online) seemed to like it a lot, so I figured I'd get the first one and see whether I like it, and, so far, it's entertaining, A potboiler, for sure, in the manner of Dorothy Dunnett, I'd say, but I admit to liking her stuff, too, way more than I probably should.

I'm always a bit annoyed at comparisons to Tolkien, though. While I freely admit that Tolkien isn't for everyone, and while i have registered my various objections to the film versions here, and while I recognize that Tolkien's inclusion/treatment of women leaves much to be desired in many ways, I fell under the spell 35 years ago, and it's not going to change. More to the point: the issues notwithstanding, Tolkien's fiction was an outgrowth of his philology and linguistics, of his invention of new languages and the creation of backstories around the beings who spoke those languages. While others have certainly created whole worlds out of whole cloth--Ursula LeGuin's Earthsea, for example, which I love--that world creation takes a different form. It's neither good nor bad (except for the occasional author who apparently consciously tries to emulate Tolkien in some way, which is a project doomed to failure), but it has a different origin than Tolkien's world creation.

Thus, while I am only part of the way into the first volume, I would liken the Martin books more to Dunnett, or, I suppose, LeGuin, than to Tolkien. But Tolkien got a big boost with the movies, and nobody knows Dunnett, mostly, so, to sell the books, Tolkien gets thrown around, which does a disservice to both him and to whomever is supposed to be the "new" Tolkien.

Look, people, Tolkien is sui generis. Unique. Singular. Stop using him to sell things that Aren't Like His Works At All.

Count Me Out

Remember that big thing I was working on in June? The important thing worth a lot of money to my organization? Well, in the mad dash (not created by me) to get it submitted in time, I ended up going over the page limit, so we lost the money. We can likely get it back, by doing a big thing (and counting correctly this time through), and the people who kinda-sorta took it away are also trying to make sure we get it back and are covered in the gap, but, yeah, a little stress. Fun times.

The whole experience has been useful in a meta way, to me and, I think and very much hope, to others, but fuck, this is NOT the most fun way to learn these lessons. I already knew these risks existed, but control over things was kinda ripped from my hands in the days prior to its due date. Which is not to say that it's someone else's fault that I cannot fucking count (though one coworker was quick to point out to me privately that the only time in my long experience at this where I've made such a mistake is the one wherein others were fiddling, at the last minute). I've tried very, very hard to keep that observation between us, rather than starting the fingerpointing in team meetings that has so far been avoided. There's no point to it except as a defensive measure, and that hasn't been needed.

Meanwhile, this weekend was another exercise in using the things that were closest to going bad in the fridge. So: last night we had salmon with a warm chutney (mango, tomato, onion, and fresh basil, barely warmed in a bit of butter), white bean dip (rosemary, onion, garlic, and white beans, cooked in chicken broth and then pureed with some olive oil) with carrots and slightly steamed broccoli (both from the farm share), and eggplant (farm share) tossed with rehydrated dried pears (because I didn't have apricots), crystalized ginger, lime juice, and olive oil, then baked, then tossed with coconut milk and lime juice and soy sauce, with the whole shmear mixed with farro. It all was quite tasty.

Today's exercise was to use the bag of sweet cherries that was starting to get kinda soft in the fridge. I was thinking I wanted something with chocolate, so I pitted the cherries, macerated them a bit with a little of the chocolate port I bought on Friday, then cooked them on the stove with a little butter to soften them up and further infuse them. The vanilla went in the cherries, too. The batter was a combo of things and utilized flax seed, whole wheat pastry flour and all-purpose flour, cocoa, some ground hazelnuts that had been hanging around forever in the freezer, and the usual stuff--butter, sugar, baking soda (not powder), and eggs. I haven't tasted one yet, but they sure smell good. The rest of the cherries are sitting in a little red wine and will be used for a sauce for venison, I think, along with some caramelized onions. Plus there are a few more eggplant to use, and I have some kale I have to use as well.

So the things I (will have) used up this weekend included, from the farm share, tomatos, broccoli, kale, some of the onions and garlic and basil, and most of the eggplant (all of it by the end of dinner tonight, I hope), I also used up a bag of cherries, a bag of dried white beans, some old hazelnut flour, and some old cocoa (it turns out I had two UNopened tins of cocoa powder, in addition to the one that was open), and continued to work my way through the whole wheat pastry flour that's been hanging around. I also used up my brown sugar, so must buy more of that.

I find that I enjoy this exercise, by and large; it's an interesting challenge. It has the unfortunate effect of making me feel more virtuous than is probably warranted, but still. I'm getting lunches out of it, too, as I basically try to cook as many things as possible, even if I/we only have a little of it for that meal, because then I have lunches, too.

Anyway. I'm exhausted--Loaner Cat was rambunctious last night, and I haven't been sleeping all that well anyway--but a nap is probably not possible. So: time to stare vacantly.