photo saturday: sky blue details

This week has been... (relatively speaking) weird... yeah, lets go with weird.

I made lasagne this week. It was probably more successful than previous versions, but I still didn't really get it completely right... not enough salt in the meat sauce mostly... and maybe not enough layers... but I also don't have what feels like the right shaped container.

When I was a kid, Ma used to make lasagne from time to time, and my memory of it is that it was always these perfect, multilayered cubes of pasta that never fell over or slumped all over the plate. Yeah, I'm not there yet.

Supposedly the answer, according to Ma today, is a deep cake tin. Who knew.

DnD was... basically non-existent this week. I went in for the Wednesday day game only to discover that nobody had bothered to show up. By which I mean the DM and half of the people I've been playing with weren't there.

And I looked at who was there, and I just couldn't be bothered with who was there and what was on offer. So I bailed, wandered around town for a bit and then came home.

Of course, because I hate my friends, we had no game on Wednesday night either. I mean we could have played here with me hosting, but we didn't have enough people for a real game. So, yeah, Wednesday was a bust.

However we did have our first proper session of the Friday night game, which was good. The first session is always a bit all over the place because nobody really knows who their characters are totally yet and the DM is doing a lot of setting the scene work.

But we murdered a horrible doctor with a door, kicked the ass of a bunch of pirates, got drafted into the local militia and got in universe gold that actually made sense again (as opposed to the dumb AL system).

I also made bread again, cheesy bread this time. Although possibly I either used the wrong kind of cheese or not enough cheese, because it just wasn't as cheesy as I would have otherwise liked. And while it was very good bread, it wasn't perhaps as good as last week's cranberry bread.

Otherwise this week was both Haircut Day and Chiro Day. While the temperature was above 35 for one and under 20 for the following day. Urgh.

Both appointments were essentially business as usual... my hair got cut and coloured, my back got chiro'ed. Not much to report beyond that really.

Today was... m'eh. Kind of. I guess.

I'm going to have to actually cook things on the same day I eat them this week... and possibly again until it's time for soup again. Which is just annoying (#firstworldproblems). I mean, I'll live, but still.

After the supermarket, Ma declared that we really needed to do something about my lounge chairs, which would be fine if it didn't cost actual money and stuff. But we ended up heading to IKEA to at least have a look at replacement chairs.

The downside of that plan is that when I bought these chairs originally they were a complete unit, in various colours... now for the same cost they sell a "blank" base with no actual fabric on it, but you also need to buy a "slipcover"... one of which is beige, boring and $50... the other is basically the same, but green and costs $100.

Fuck that for a game of skittles.

So possibly I might get two of the boring beige covers and dye them red. It's not the worst idea in the world.

But that was about it really.

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photo saturday: port grey

Well... this week was... a week.

The chicken soup for this week was okay... not my best work perhaps, but serviceable... and somehow where was a LOT of it, even relative to how much I usually make.

We'll put this week's DnD count at two and a half... there were the two usual Wednesday games (more on that in a sec), but also we had our session zero for the new Friday night game I'm playing with friends.

The Wednesday day game was average for what it was... but it ended up being one big long combat session, not particularly my favourite, because we all end up using up all of our resources and can't do anything at all afterwards. And also nothing but combat for four hours is actually pretty fucking boring.

The Wednesday night game was... hmmm... frustrating I guess. Someone who used to play with us but just stopped coming... twice... just decided to show up again. No dude, you left for like nine months, you don't get to come back and finish up the game with us... especially coming back with a third character. To be honest I wish that the DM had just told him no. The worst part was that his character kept mine alive through a big boss fight and I think we would all have been screwed without him. Don't get me wrong, it's not like I dislike him as a person, I just really don't want to play DnD with him. I can only hope he disappears again soon.

Then Friday was just pleasant... we were missing one person, but we started working out characters and storyline details and whatnot... and it was just pleasant... I made a really good loaf of bread with cranberries in it (with the correct amount of salt this time), which was amazing... plus I got cat cuddles.

We're doing a couple of weeks in a row, then going fortnightly, which should be good. I'm also playing my first bard, so that'll be something...

Otherwise not much of anything to report for the week.

Today was average... I decided I'm gunna try making lasagne this week. I mean I've done it before, but it sometimes has variable results. So we'll see. It's probably more about finding the correct container to put it in... which I'm not sure I have. We'll see.

Afterwards we headed into the city, did random wanderings with incidental shopping.

Yeah... not particularly exciting honestly.

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photo saturday: halves

More photos from last week's excursion.

This week, however, has been a whotsaname... holding pattern.

Or it kinda feels like that anyway.

But, back to the beginning...

I've made tuna mornay a number of times. You could even say "a lot". I think this week's batch is the first time that I've actually properly made a proper mornay sauce. With all the cheese and everything. And of course a healthy dose of spices, but that's just usual for me.

But yeah, I took my time with the sauce this time, and it turned out pretty damn well.

This week was also the start of Daylight Savings... which meant that my body clock was all out of whack for the first half of the week. Weirdly more so on the evening end of things to be honest.

I also got sort of... let's not call it obsessed... but, you know, obsessed, with taking the Hero Forge versions of my DnD characters, throwing them into Photoshop and applying colour. Basically, as I realised towards the end of the week, my version of an adult colouring book. When I've finished all of them, I might post my favourite ones here... we'll see.

Speaking of DnD, there was only one game this week, the Wednesday day game. And, honestly, it was a red hot disaster. A bunch of regular folk weren't there, and neither of the DMs were on my first choice list. And the adventure we ended up playing was something of a mess (or became so because DM).

Next week I'm starting a campaign with new people, but only every other week. Which should be good. Not sure exactly what we're playing yet, but we'll work all that out on Friday.

Otherwise the week was a bit... blah.

Today, likewise, blah.

We did the supermarket thing. Because the weather has gone back to being Spring adjacent rather than Summer orientated, I'm going back to soup for now... chicken soup more specifically.

And then we came back here.

And we did a whole lot of nothing.

Originally we were going to go out and do... something. But there really isn't a something we needed to do. Or wanted to do for that matter.

So there was a period of time where we stood around trying to work out what to do if we went out... before giving up and not bothering. In the end we went over to Burnside Village to look at the pop-up Christmas store that was around last year (same shop, different location), before grabbing some lunch.

And that was that really.

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photo saturday: wonderwalls and weather

Hey, look at that... photos fresh off the proverbial presses (in this case that would be Photoshop).

But we'll circle back to that.

This week has been average with a side order of "oh, I remember warm weather, can we not please?".

I did not soup or stew this week, because overly warm Spring weather. Instead I baked some chicken breasts in the oven on Monday night and had them for the rest of the week in not especially interesting or inventive ways.

On the up side, oven baked chicken is really nice, even several days later.

Oh, yeah, an update on my face and the lack of movement therein. As of right now I'm mostly back to normal. There's still some residual weakness in my lip, but as I've probably said before, that was the first thing to go, so it'll be the last thing to return. It's basically at the point where I don't really notice it or think about it unless I'm rinsing my mouth after brushing my teeth, so that's a plus.

Otherwise, not much to mention from the first part of the week.

Wednesday was all the DnD once again. And both characters had a bit of a rough time to be honest.

The day game wasn't our usual game (lack of DM) so I got to play on the table of one of my friends who hasn't been around on Wednesdays for a while, playing the sequel to an adventure I really enjoyed. The only downside is that my very talkative "French" wizard elf wanted access to some books, resulting in him ending up with an Intelligence score of 1 (instead of 16), so that was fun. He's better now, the DM didn't torture me for long and reversed the effect (I possibly would have done it for longer myself, and I was enjoying myself, although not being able to talk was possibly torture).

Then the night game was... very interesting. I mean rule 1 is always "Don't fuck with time travel". And we got sent back in time thanks to the adventure Macguffin last week, and didn't do everything exactly the same was we did them the first time through. This week was the repercussions of that. It was also one of those "be careful what you ask the DM for" moments, since I'd jokingly complained about him taking a number of characters away from me/us (okay, me)... and he gave some of them back this week. And my character found his "graph paper girlfriend" was back, but their relationship is different and strange and I had a lot of fun roleplaying the confusion (I mean some of it was just regular confusion, no roleplay required).

I amused the rest of the table though. And I had a ton of fun.

We are definitely entering the end game though. It just depends on how long we drag this thing out I guess.

The end of the week was entirely too warm for my liking. I'm sure I go though some version of this every year, but somehow the end of Winter always comes as a surprise and I feel like it's been colder weather for the last 1000 years. And I'm just not ready for the alternative.

Today, the warmest of the warm days thus far, although mostly cloudy, was in fact a different day for us.

I mean it started in the usual way, with the supermarket. And since the weather is cooling down next week I'm making tuna mornay... what I'll do when it's actually Summer, I have no fucking clue. That's one of the things I really like about Winter, I cook once a week and I'm fed. This cooking every day thing is too much work.

Anyway... we came back here and did the usual pfaffery.

Then we decided that while it was warm, it was also cloudy, so we might as well do what we'd originally intended to do today and go down to Port Adelaide to finally check out the street art from Wonderwalls back in March.

Often times overcast days are better for getting shots of the artwork itself, but means that the sky often blows out... so it's a swings and roundabouts thing really. Not too bad overall though. Found all but one (I think) of the pieces from 2019... and even tracked down some ones I hadn't seen from 2017.

However, one kinda massive flaw to the day. We parked down by Hart's Mill to start off, and I got out of the car, headed over to take a photo only to discover my middle finger on my left hand was bleeding. Yep, Ma's car bit me. And by bit me I mean that the stupid metal foil on the inner door handle had started to peel at the top, and I accidentally ran my finger along it when I was opening the door.

What is it with me and injured fingers? I mean it's the same hand as my major finger injury, plus a number of older and smaller injuries with various and sundry scars.

Thankfully the nice people at the fruit and veg market had a first aid kit and gave me a bandaid, but fuck my life.

Anyway, it wasn't an auspicious start to the trip, but it did improve from that point.

We wandered around until just after noon then circled back to the second position for the car and had some lunch nearby.

Then a quick trip over the bridge to capture the Capricorn piece at the top of this post, and we headed back to my place. And we got back here a lot earlier than expected (granted we left here originally earlier than we have been heading out previously).

And man it's been a while since I went through a big group of photos and got them ready for the blog. I both miss it and I really don't, since it takes forever. The end result is worth it though.

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photo saturday: lego space marines

I have most of a face again.

The lower lid on my right eye works again properly, my forehead emotes and everything, basically I'm kind of at the same stage now as I was when I woke up originally the day this whole Bell's Palsy thing happened. I can't quite make all of my mouth do what it's supposed to, but it's coming along nicely.

Yay.

After having grabbed a couple of plywood "trays" from Lincraft a couple of weeks back, and then having used the leftover stain from my bedside table project (based on, but not identical to this one) back when I moved into the Wellington Square apartment last week, this week I put three coats of varnish on it (leftover from the same project) and actually sanded it back between (something I didn't do with the bedside table) and then lined it with purple felt (well, the small one I totally lined, bottom and sides, the other I just did the bottom), so now I have a pretty good looking dice box that splits into two possible dice trays (or dice storage and a dice tray).

And yeah, I know I made a dice tray the little while back with a photo frame, but the base of that was a bit wonk and the dice continually rolled into the corners. It was pretty though.

But the new one is very cool. Problem being I don't have a way to keep it shut right now. And it takes up more room than my pencil case. But it's pretty. And I'll use it eventually.

Also, I have a fuckton of dice. Not really news, but seeing it in a different container kind of reinforces the idea.

Anyway, rewinding... I made a metric fuckton of chilli for dinners this week. I thought that perhaps I wouldn't have enough meat or whatever, but no... I had more than enough, between the beef and the pork and the canned beans and the corn and almost every can or jar of tomato in the house... it made tons.

I will say that I think possibly the "chilli powder" I made up with things that I had in the house the first time I made chilli this season was better than the packet stuff I used this time. I'll have to experiment with that again to be sure though.

Tuesday morning I got out of the shower to discover a giant spider (relatively speaking) just chilling on the edge of the sink. Definitely an instance where clothes are vastly superior to standing there in a towel. But I got him into an empty Nutella container and let him go outside.

Wednesday was DnD day, the day game was... fine. As it seems is always the case, it took us a long while to get our collective act together (which is at least partially also a DM issue, but whadyagunnado), and then a big giant battle. And maybe I did a bad thing at the end by using a spell that still had like 9 minutes left on it to stir up the area, wake up a bunch of bad guys and set us up for who knows what next week.

The night game was... not our usual game. Our DM wasn't available for... reasons (I dunno, and honestly, at this point, I don't really care), so I put forward the option of playing here at my place with me running, but we ended up going to one of the other people's place and her husband ran, which he's done before. It also meant that we got to play the characters who have been together since level 1 about two years ago. And they're now level 15 at the end of Wednesday's game.

It was nice to visit with those characters honestly... they have a very different relationship than the Out of the Abyss characters we've been playing for the last year and a bit. They are beasts though... but they've been beasts pretty much since the beginning. It has always been a good mix of abilities (and people for the most part) to be honest.

Friday I had my chiro appointment, which I was very much in need of. And I had a wander around town for a bit.

Today was, unsurprisingly, yet again, not much of anything.

Given that the weather is going to be warmer next week (urgh), I won't be making soup... I mean I could have, but I'm not gunna. Instead I've bought a bunch of chicken and I'm going to probably do a big oven baked chicken breast thing on Monday night, then invent variations throughout the week. I forsee a disaster by about Thursday... Wednesday at the earliest.

The supermarket was supermarkety... then we came back here, killed a bunch of time and ended up going into the city again for random wandering (I swear, we're going to have an actual plan and do an actual thing next week).

On a related note, fucking Christmas decorations are now available in the shops. As much as I think that Australia shouldn't be trying to do Halloween, there shouldn't be Christmas decorations in the shops until AFTER Halloween. It's like hot cross buns... they shouldn't be in the shops in January. But I acknowledge in both cases that it's a losing battle. And I'm also part of the problem because I at the very least look at the decorations as soon as I encounter them.

Mostly because there is some fucking tasteless tat out there in the world, even in the more expensive stores. Plus the amount of Scandinavian inspired animals, mythology and iconography of late is just weird. Not to mention everything having way too much glitter.

And nothing says "Christmas" like an iridescent crystal (clear plastic) lobster...

That's it really...

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photo saturday: up up and away

Well, I have three quarters of a functional face.

I'm definitely on the mend, basically I can use a big boy spoon and drink out of both a mug and a water bottle without the aid of a straw. It's the little things really.

Given that my lip/mouth muscles were the first thing to go, I'm guessing they're going to be the last things to come back, but there's improvement, so that's all I care about right now.

But rolling back...

Tooting my own horn for a minute, I'm pretty damn good at thick soups that include too much potato (potatoe... damn now both versions look wrong... although it seems the version with an E is the archaic... anyway)... this week was more chicken, chorizo and potato chowder, which I made good and thick. And that meant that I had to resort to spoons instead of straws. But it was fucking tasty.

DnD is, for the foreseeable future anyway, a one day a week event. And for right now, I'm okay with that.

The day game was us finishing off the sidebar game from a couple of weeks ago. And it was fun. Stressful at the end... but designed that way I think (especially since it was updated from an older edition of DnD). I'd also enjoy having the same DM run some stuff for us again later, even if he is a little too fond of using all manner of spiders as monsters (which this adventure had in spades).

The evening game... also stressful. But again, good stressful. And contrary to what I assumed last week, we spent the whole four hour session stuck in "the past", which interestingly seemed like it might have been an alternate version of history... a parallel timeline if you will. But there we were without all our fancy armour and weapons and magic items and doodads... fighting some pretty high level monsters. The one interesting thing, and I'm not sure if the DM fulled planned this or not, was that "in universe" there are three bad guys we met at the prison the first time around and we killed two of the three later... but in this "alternaverse" we killed the same two, much earlier timeline wise, but still. Odd.

And I got to have a very on brand freakout in character, so that was nice.

Thursday was Haircut Day... so I headed up the hill to Tink's place... on the correct day, which makes a difference given the recent past. Cut and paste the usual hair... perhaps more in the silver fading to white blonde vein, but otherwise usual. Weirdly someone she knows is also currently afflicted with Bell's Palsy also... what are the odds?

Friday was... urgh... let's just call it paperwork day. I mean it wasn't the worst thing in the world, but also, pointless busywork. Adventurer's League DnD decided with the start of Season 9 that they would change everything around again... after only having totally changed everything around at the beginning of Season 8. Once again, file under "It wasn't broke to begin with, so you should have left it the fuck alone". But it also means that I needed to do all the logsheet "paperwork" for all sixteen active characters I currently have. Even if one of them was literally just putting in the Season 9 logsheet in front of the Season 8 conversion logsheet. The rest of them I've pulled out of the drawer at least once in the last year, which is nice.

But it was a lot of fuckery. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed the fuckery (because paperwork and whatnot), but if it hadn't happened I wouldn't have been sad for lack of fuckery.

I also had another ciabatta loaf "evolving" all day. I'd made the dough last thing on Thursday before I went to bed, but it needs 18 hours plus another 2 once it's been shaped into a loaf, so I took a break late afternoon to get it from the "scary growing thing in a bowl" to, you know, bread shaped.

The on-going problem with fresh bread is that it is in fact both fresh and bread. Which is just dangerous. I did mitigate that a little by shaping what should be one loaf into two separate loaves... and it worked out pretty well. I do wanna try it as four small loaves or perhaps giant rolls would be the better description.

Also add cheese... because cheese bread.

Today was... look, our Saturday excursions are kinda dull more often than not... it is what it is.

I'm planning on making chilli again this week... because my chilli has been awesome historically (as in the last two times I made it).

Otherwise the supermarket was the supermarket. And look, I know that getting up before 9am to go to work on a Saturday morning isn't anybody's idea of a good time, but you could at least pretend to be an alive and functional human being, Check Out Girly.

Anyway... there was shopping, there was unpacking, there was general time wastage.

Ma wanted to go look at something in Big W... so off we went. There are some benefits to being financially unencumbered... one of which is not impulse buying a giant skeletal spider for $50. It was awesome and the legs were articulated and everything, but what the fuck do I need with a giant skeletal spider?

We poked around in general, grabbed a couple of useful but not essential things. Ma found the thing she was looking for but then made no decision about it one way or the other. So business as usual there.

And that was pretty much that. We came back here, watched the later half of a movie on TV and then Ma headed home.

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photo saturday: peli can't

Hi and welcome to this week's episode of "Yani Has Half A Functional Face", I'm your host, Yani, and I have half a functional face.

Yeah... there really isn't any dramatic news regarding the Bell's Palsy... I mean it's not any worse than it was last weekend, which is good, but it's also not any better. Which is understandable, since I think it's just going to gradually improve for the next month rather than dramatically coming back. I mean I could be wrong, but that makes the most sense to me.

But, I'm... frustrated. I'm tired of only being able to make half of an expression. I'm tired of having to drink all liquids with a straw or risk dribbling on myself. I'm tired of not being able to eat things properly. I'm tired of taping my eye shut while I sleep (yeah, that's about as fun as it sounds), and I'm going to have to do something about that because I'm pretty sure the application and removal of tape to the soft skin around my eye is definitely doing a number on said skin and irritating it. I'm tired of that eye just being weird. I'm also tired of not being able to form words properly.

Honestly, I'm just feeling a little sorry for myself. I'm okay generally, it's just a pain in the butt being "hobbled" like this. Plus I bit my tongue at some point during the week. So that's just painful and annoying. And using a plastic straw all week (including for coffee and soup) is irritating the roof of my mouth.

See, mostly just being a whinger.

Anyway.

I made tomato soup this week. It wasn't bad, although I possibly should have blended it with all the basil in rather than adding some more after the fact. Just led to lumps of green in the soup. Tasty lumps, but still lumps.

I also made a wholemeal loaf to go along with the soup. But I just don't seem to be able to get full loaves right. At least this one had the correct amount of salt in it, but it was, I think, a little underbaked. Could have done with ten more minutes or something.

I also put together the final chair for my table... so now I have a proper four person setting. I still haven't had cause to use it yet, but it's good it's complete.

Not really much else to report for this week.

Wednesday was Double DnD Day... the day game was at the other store, which means we start an hour later... and we neither finished off the game from last week, nor returned to the hardcover book we were doing before that. No, we did something entirely new and different. Something from the upcoming season. Which is one that I really don't care about. It was about what I expected... blah, blah cult, blah blah demons/devils. Not the worst "opener" I've seen, but not super impressive either.

The evening game was good... although at some point I feel like, as a group, we went from "underleveled for combat at this point in the story" to "doesn't last one round of combat". I mean that's partially because our ranger/rogue is a Min-Maxer who keeps accidentally rolling natural 20's. But also because we tend to go the "talk" rather than the "hit things" route, so we haven't really tested our skills for a while.

At the end of the game the MacGuffin machine we were dealing with accidentally MacGuffined and we were "sent back in time" to the very beginning of the hardcover. I would image that the DM is going to let us flail about in our own panic for at least the beginning of the session (I mean, I would) before the machine sends us back to the correct time again. I mean, otherwise, we'll make the fucker run the whole damn book over again.

Given my failure with the last couple of bread experiments, I went back to rolls on Thursday... although I did shove some cheese in half of them and chocolate in the other half. Perhaps not in the best possibly way, but they were very nice anyway.

Then on Friday I made another batch of the ciabatta dough to bake this morning after we got back from the supermarket.

Anyway...

This morning I got up pretty early and got the bread ready for it's second proofing, between that and getting ready, I was basically ready to go when Ma arrived.

This week I'm going to make chowder again, although I haven't necessarily decided whether or not to blend the whole thing down or to leave it chunky and then blend it on a day by day basis. The latter does sound like the better option... but Thursday is also supposed to be 30°C, so soup will seem like a bad idea probably.

We did the usual supermarket thing, came back, I threw the bread in the oven once it heated up, because fresh bread is the best.

Then we headed into the city because Ma wanted to grab some stuff at the Lincraft sale. So we did that, made a couple of other brief stops and then called it quits for the day.

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photo saturday: face

This week has been... challenging.

Let's do this one day at a time, shall we?

Sunday I made chicken noodle soup, and as always the secret ingredient is chorizo sausage.

I also did some more organising and straightening up for the rental inspection on Wednesday.

Monday I cleaned the kitchen... without any great speed I might add, but I also sorted out some things that might not have occurred to me otherwise, all the good stuff.

Tuesday the wheels fell off my portion of the universe.

I got up early so I could get things ready to clean the bathroom and then sweep/vacuum the floors before mopping. It should have been an easy job and I should have been done by early afternoon at the latest.

However, when I was brushing my teeth I realised that I couldn't hold water in my mouth properly to rinse. I mean I could, but as soon as I went to rinse, it would come squirting out the left side of my mouth. Very fucking weird.

I had a look at myself in the mirror and everything looked okay. Maybe I had a bit of a bloodshot eye on the left side of my left eye, but maybe that's usually there in the morning and I just never look. So I went to have breakfast. And you know how you just know what eating something you eat every morning is supposed to feel in your mouth? Yeah, it didn't feel that way. There was definitely a problem with my mouth.

I remember back... I dunno, let's call it ten years, one of the women I worked with just had a stroke in the middle of the work day, in the middle of the office. And that part of that was that one side of her face just went slack.

So guess what conclusion I started walking in the direction of. Rather than just going "nah, it's fine" and getting on with my day, I changed from "cleaning the house" clothes to "going to the emergency room" clothes, and headed out to the bus stop. Going outside, I realised that while I was clearly squinting my right eye, I couldn't feel anything happening on the left eye. And the bus wasn't going to be there for another quarter of an hour.

Suffice to say I went back to my apartment, got my car keys and drove to the Royal Adelaide. Yeah, maybe not the best idea ever if I was having a stroke, or needed to be admitted or any other incalculable number of potential options, but I couldn't stand around like an idiot... plus the fact that the hospital is now just "outside" the city compared with where it previously was, I didn't particularly want to walk all that way.

Anyway, I got to the hospital, did the check in thing and sat down to wait. I had brought my book with me, so that made things not seem as long. But I'm pretty sure that I'd been placed on the triage list right after the few people who came in before me, but before everyone who came in after, with the exception of one old lady who came in by ambulance.

Even so, I think I had a hour wait, give or take, possibly a bit less.

The very nice doctor man (they're generally very nice doctor men, or else if you're a doctor man who looks after me when I'm in the ER then I think you're very nice... I'm easy like that) saw me after a couple of minutes of pulse and blood pressure and all that good stuff.

He asked me to tell the same story I'd told about three times at that stage, asked me a few extra questions, made me make a bunch of faces and expressions, then got me to put my arms in the appropriate diagnostic position while he pulled, then I pushed, swap position, repeat until decision.

I expected him to do the thing they usually do in these situations... disappear for five or more minutes to consult with some random faceless colleague before coming back to tell me whatever he had to tell me. That isn't what happened.

Instead, once the arm pushing and pulling and facial gymnastics were done he just looked at me and said "it's not a stroke"... which was a giant relief, not gunna lie. And then he followed it up with "have you heard of Bell's Palsy", which I had, but not enough to remember what the hell it was if I ever actually knew.

Turns out that it's a mostly inexplicable infection of the major nerve that controls the muscles of one side of the face or the other. It comes on in about 72 hours and takes up to a month to return to normality, with it disappearing completely in the majority of cases.

But at least it wasn't a stroke.

Although, fun fact I discovered... if you are having a stroke it doesn't affect the muscles that control your eyebrows... the rest of (half) your face, sure, but not the eyebrow. People are weird.

I had to wait around a bit while he wrote up a letter for my GP and a prescription for all the lovely drugs (in this case, steroids and anti viral medication)... but they moved me out of the treatment bay so they could actually use it.

I think I got to the hospital some time around 10:30am and I was home again just before 1pm. Not the worst ER experience I have to say. And that does include the trip across the road to the chemist to get all the lovely drugs and some eye drops.

And then I still had to clean the bathroom and mop the floors.

At least it kept me occupied and gave me something else to think about that wasn't half my face no longer functioning.

It did give me considerably less time than I might otherwise have had though, but I got everything all sorted and clean and ready for Wednesday's inspection. Including a call to Ma when I was finished cleaning (and she was home from work) about all the drama. I put some tape over my eye overnight just to ensure it stayed closed like it's supposed to, and called it a day.

Wednesday I spent essentially the whole day playing DnD and let my rental inspection happen on it's own time.

My face (or half thereof) had clearly progressed or not progressed, or whatever the right term is. Suffice to say that I could tell it was "further along" (I'm avoiding words like "worse" right now) and I could only half raise an eyebrow on that side.

It also got progressively harder to pronounce my B's and my P's throughout the day. I'm not sure whether more or less talking all day sped up the timeline or not, I would suggest not so much to be honest.

But we had a new DM for this particular part of the adventure, and as is always the case, those people who are excellent at playing their characters also turn out to be excellent DMs. And it was a smaller table size, only four of us, so all in all, a pretty good time was had.

And I got to play a character I haven't touched in forever and work out who the hell he needs to be... or who I'm going to turn him into. Which is always great.

The only issue came at lunch time, when I went down to the food court and looked around and wondered what in the ever loving hell I would be able to eat for lunch. I'd already worked out that I was unable to drink from a pop top bottle of water, so I did a lot of wandering before ending up getting chicken nuggets. Still a challenge, but I made do.

After DnD I headed home, found the "Thank You" card from the inspection (I swear that they are never consistent about what they leave behind, ranging from the card to nothing to a full report sheet), and made the dough for ciabatta loaf that needed to be left to rise for 18 hours, before heading out for the evening game.

We've all been freaking out about taking on a beholder (a big floating eyeball monster with a bunch of eyeballs on stalks for the uninitiated) since our last session a couple of weeks ago, and we geared up with a plan and whatnot... only to have our ranger/rogue score two natural 20's, one in the surprise round and one in his first attack, single-handedly killing the monster.

The amusing thing was that the ranger/rogue's player had spent the previous two weeks learning to 3D print so that he could print a beholder mini and then paint it in order for us to have it for the game. And it was out on the table for a grand total of about 5 minutes. I mean he did it to himself.

Thursday was mostly okay... except by that stage I realised that a) I need to eat my breakfast with a teaspoon in order to prevent appearing to be a toddler with a face full of breakfast and b) I need to drink all liquids, both hot and cold with a straw.

So yes, that does in fact mean that I have used a straw in my hot coffee during the latter half of this week. Come at me bro.

But seriously, it meant that my face had finally settled into the final "nothing much works on the right side" final form it'll be in for the remainder of the month more or less.

The only thing of interest I did on Thursday was turn the dough from Wednesday afternoon into an amazing and huge (yet very crusty, in the good way) loaf of ciabatta bread. By the time I got around to shaping the dough and then letting it proof again, I think it spent about 20 hours sitting around doing sweet fuck all and about 10-15 minutes of me actually interacting with it in any way, plus 45 minutes in the oven.

I also decided to introduce the hand mixer to my chicken noodle soup, since it was just getting too damn hard to eat, given that the teaspoon method takes for fucking ever. I also resorted to a big fat chunky straw for what was left after some bread dunking. This is my life right now. Straws.

Friday I had my GP appointment in the early afternoon, but on the way to the bus stop my back had a bit of a dummy spit at me. I mean I get it... sitting in the ER for however long, plus cleaning the floor and moving furniture and whatnot, then the usual Wednesday sitfest, I totally get it. Annoying, but I get it. I might need to go and see my chiro early next week, even though I only saw her last Friday. Again, annoying, but I'd rather go than not go.

I also made the dry mix of a cinnamon and cranberry loaf before I left... except it turns out that instead of putting 1.5 teaspoons of salt in, I put 1.5 tablespoons (or 4.5 teaspoons) in. And that's never good (more on that later).

To be honest I probably could have skipped going to the GP entirely. I only did it because the lovely ER doctor recommended it, but it turned out to be a big nothing really. I mean don't get me wrong, my GP is a lovely old duffer, and he did make a suggestion about the steroid tablets which I'll probably follow, but it was really just a "how you going" check and not much of anything really.

He did comment on how well I was handling it... and yeah I get that, but that really comes down to two factors. The first being that at least it wasn't a fucking stroke. The second being from an episode (A Quarter to Midnight) of the 1980's British kid's show Press Gang... "panic later, it's an old girl's trick" (that's how I remember it anyway)... there's nothing to panic about yet, so why panic now, if I need to panic later I'd rather save my energy for that.

Mostly though it was about ten minutes of chat and then I came home again.

And I set the bread off, but honestly, it did feel like something wasn't completely right in the first hour or so... but I assumed it was more about the fact that the recipe had milk and sugar in it, as opposed to the excess of salt.

Today I got up earlier than usual (well, with the exception of this week anyway)... because there's something about waking up with your eye taped shut that just engenders a sense of wanting to be up and about the day... plus I had dough to shape.

So I got the ill-fated loaf ready for it's second proofing, and was ready to go before Ma even got here. Which meant that we had an early start at the supermarket and were back earlier than usual.

I decided on tomato soup this week. I mean I definitely needed something that was already blended... and I haven't made tomato soup this season yet.

Then we came back here, I put the bread in the oven and we did the usual unpacking before trying the bread. I felt like it was way too salty, but I'd also put some salted butter on it, so I honestly couldn't completely tell. But later when the bread was totally cool and I didn't add any butter, it was super obvious. A shame really. But we'll call that a trial run and try again later.

We ended up going to IKEA to get the last of the chairs for my table, but we only did the lower floor, because there wasn't much point doing the whole thing.

And that was it really.

Like I said, a challenging week... with more to come it would seem.

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photo saturday: sky high

This might be the Readers Digest version of a roundup... mostly because not a lot happened.

I have an on/off relationship with minestrone soup. When I get it right, I get it... otherwise, urgh. This week I got it.

I also learned to make bread. I say "learned"... I saw a no-knead, four ingredient bread roll tutorial on YouTube and followed the instructions. And it worked. Very well. Dangerously well in fact. As in, provided I have flour and yeast in the house, I can now make bread from now until the end of time. And then eat it. Dangerous.

But eating bread you made yourself, fresh out of the oven... nothing fucking like it!

There was only one game of DnD again this week. Wednesday's day game. A low combat game, which is never a bad thing, and there's nothing quite like having your character get into an argument with another character while you're standing at the front door of a lizardfolk enclave. That's definitely a "to be continued" though.

Otherwise I did the first tidy-up pass for the inspection next week. And make a second lot of bread rolls.

Then on Friday it was Chiro Day... which felt entirely like it had been much less than a month since the last one.

Today, likewise, not much of anything... but like the distilled version of that.

I'm going back to chicken soup again this week. I need something quick and simple, and that seemed to fit the bill.

We did the shopping thing, came back here, fell into a slight YouTube knitting hole again, and then Ma needed to head off at about noon. So, yeah, that was that.

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photo saturday: cbd bt 2013-2019

“To say goodbye is to die a little.”
Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye

This week has been, on reflection... odd.

The above image, I'll get to. But lets roll the tape back.

Last Saturday night I ended up putting the new table and chairs together. Well. The table, and most of the chairs, but it turned out that I needed an adjustable wrench to tighten up the nuts holding all the bits together. So I put together as much as I could, and then first thing Sunday morning I wandered down the road to Mitre 10 and bought a cheap wrench. Then I reorganised some of the layout of my apartment (it doesn't feel like a massive change, which is good) to give everything a new home.

Now I have a dining table and three out of four chairs.

Well, technically I have the dining table and the "bar table" and high stools I had previously, so it kind of looks like I have two many tables. But fuck it.

Sunday night I made chilli. Good chilli. And I think the appropriate unit of measurement for the amount of chilli I made is "a metric fuckton". And it was made even better by having it with rice and adding a blob of sour cream. Niiiiiice.

But while I was making chilli, one of my Monday DnD players, Canadia, messaged me to see if I wanted to come and hang out one night during the week. Normally I might have just said "thanks, but no", but instead I thought "fuck it" and arranged to go see him Tuesday night.

Monday was still DnD-less. And once again, I sat down and watched a movie (and again, one with subtitles, so I had to pay attention).

Tuesday night, I went and hung out with Canadia and Canadia's big dumb adorable dog. It was a pleasant evening. We got pizza, we talked crap, I got much big dumb dog love.

Wednesday was Double DnD Day. The day campaign was... I want to say "giant clusterfuck"... but I don't think it was that exactly. But when you decide to battle the pirate captain when your whole party is close to single digit health... and then you as the druid turn into a giant crab, grapple the captain and start to drag him to the bottom of the ocean, accompanied by the only other character in the party who has a swim speed. And you go unconscious but you're not dying, so you actually don't know what happened to that other character when you wake up an hour later and she's gone, the pirate captain is gone, the guy from the crows nest is gone and the rest of your party has been hiding/locked themselves in the captain's cabin for an hour. And then you run into an NPC with exactly the same (thematically appropriate but uncommon) name, being temporarily played by the player whose character is currently missing, assumed dead.

And as a player, you're 100% convinced the DM didn't kill off the other character, and you have a very strong idea of where in the world you could find them again, but as a character you're 100% sure they're dead, so why would you continue looking. Yeah.

Wednesday night's game was likewise interesting. Less easily defined. That adventure is so much more "interpersonal drama during the potential end of the world". We, as a party, are suffering from "too many options overload" at present I think. We don't have a specific plan for how we want to approach fighting the Big Bad(s), and the characters aren't agreeing on a course of action. Plus the DM is basically letting us have more than enough rope to get all tangled into knots.

Sadly, no game next week, but the week after we either have to kill a vaguely unkillable floating magic eyeball with a deathray or investigate a machine that sounds essentially like a TARDIS without a box that could also kill us all or make us all babies or old people or never have existed.

Good times.

Thursday and Friday were fairly quiet... although I got a message at some point this week saying that the week after next is my rental inspection. Yay. And by yay I mean urgh. On the up side, it's actually on a Wednesday this time, so I'll already be out of the house.

Today was Ma's haircut day... so I got up, did a super, bumper, "I need stuff in my house because reasons" supermarket shop this morning, then came back here, unpacked, did some shuffling around of things in containers and suchlike, then hung out and watched stuff on YouTube until Ma arrived.

We had a further conversation about what is rapidly becoming The Scarf Project. Which is what happens when you're making shit up as you go and not working from a pattern. And by "you" I mean Ma, because as I said last week (possibly) knitting is basically magic/alchemy to me. But we have a plan. Well, we had A Plan last week, but Ma didn't necessarily pay attention to the plan, and then the plan became Not A Plan. But hopefully it'll work this time. Fingers crossed.

We're deep in the "fucked if I know what we're doing" woods at present... there are basically no interesting movies on at present or at any time soon. It's so weird, we managed to go to the movies pretty much every week (or at least three out of four weeks in a month) for what feels like years and years... and now, there's just not a damn thing for large stretches of time.

But I digress.

We decided just to go into the city and do a wander. Because why the fuck not.

So we essentially hit all the same spots we almost always hit when doing the wander up and down the Mall. We weren't really looking for anything, but sometimes not looking at things you don't want is an okay way to spend an hour or so.

Afterwards we were going to grab some food... but honestly, food courts on a Saturday, one of the sadder things. So Ma suggested Burger Theory, which indeed sounded like a plan to me.

Which brings us back around to the start of the post and today's image.

I had a thought while we were walking down the road... I realised it had been a good long while since I remember seeing anything on social media from Burger Theory (since I don't do Facebook), and there was a sense of dread about what we would find when we headed around the corner.

Turns out the little voice in my head was right, there was a completely different (burger) story there, and a quick search discovered that BT closed their CBD store in mid June and are only operating at Flinder Tavern in Flinders Uni (which is only open during the week sadly).

Firstly, why the fuck did nobody tell me? Secondly, I realised later that with one thing and another (and probably due to the fact we saw a very limited number of Fringe shows this year) I hadn't actually been there at all this year (or at least, I hadn't posted an Instagram pic, which I did every time). Third, I'm a sad panda.

The image above isn't every BT burger I've ever had, but I think it's ever BT burger I ever had/photographed in the brick and mortar store between 2013 and 2018 (well, 38 burgers, 2 frozen custards and 2 shots of the store). If I'd gone for every BT burger or shot of the BT food truck, it would have been a much bigger image. All the way back to the giant chocolate chip cookie that started, no, not started, cemented my relationship with BT.

Rob and Dan have been nothing but sweethearts to me since the beginning, and I've been one of their biggest cheerleaders. They've always done what was right for them, and they've never played safe. Be that cooking black beans or quandong chutney until the wee small hours, branching out to Pearl's Diner (those pulled pork buns... *drool*), the brief appearance of the breakfast menu (and the fact that I got to try that out before it was officially launched), the Art Burger series (those art prints still have pride of place on my wall), the Melbourne store, or making their burgers with kangaroo meat (and to the haters I say a hearty "go fuck yourselves" and I bet most of you never even bothered to try it).

And the Upside Down (or Inside Out, I forget) burger (second from the bottom, second from the right) is still my favourite of all the Burger of the Month offerings. I mean a toasted sandwich burger, what is not to love.

I certainly hope it's not the last we see of them... but even if BT were to disappear entirely, I know that Rob and Dan will succeed at whatever they turn their attention to next. However if it does, I want the damn Truck Sauce recipe (for personal use only).

I just couldn't bring myself to actually have lunch at the burger place that's taken over the old BT spot. I mean I'm sure they're perfectly lovely, I just couldn't. Too soon.

Anyway, we ended up having lunch at Betty's Burgers and Concrete Co... which wasn't bad. I mean the patties were pretty flat, and they really need to throw their buns on the grill. But the flavours were pretty good, and they get bonus points for onion rings.

And that's it really.

An odd week.

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