still not dead, btw

Some stuff:

I had a dentist appointment on Tuesday morning, the upshot of which is that I have a few new cavities (still tiny, still easily fixable) and have two new appointments (this coming week and the week thereafter) to get them cleaned and filled. I have been told to floss more and also get some new fluoride rinse.

I really wish Ithaca would fluoridate the municipal water supply. I'm pretty sure any sane community would. I suspect it's the hippy commune back-to-nature types that prevent it. (...On that note, I kind of wonder how many anti-vaxxers there are in town. They seem to be related delusions.)

I ran into Landlord Dude at my laundromat last weekend, which was bizarre since he and Landlady live halfway up the lake -- maybe he was washing curtains for one of the other houses they own in the neighborhood? Anyway, he gave me his cell phone number and said to text him on Thursday as a reminder to drop by on Friday with the new lease. I took the opportunity to mention my smoke alarm woes and ask for a new model. He duly dropped by today and we signed the lease, but he couldn't bring the smoke alarm for some reason (I forget exactly what, but it was stupidly mundane and probably legit) and will come by tomorrow while I'm at work to install it, and also give me a photocopy of the new lease.

I have been really, amazingly, mind-bogglingly tired, which I am about 90% sure is a depressive response. Just... detached and drifty and gray and always, always bone-deep exhausted. I'm also about 90% sure it's situational rather than my brain going haywire of its own accord. I mean, here I am under prolonged stress and uncertainty; it's not very surprising that my body and brain are just like, "Nope. Not dealing with this. Try again in August."

It's especially frustrating because there are a bunch of things I NEED to deal with, in preparation for having no job, but it is SO HARD to dredge up the spoons. I think maybe a list would help, so I could lay out all the necessary items and then break them down into little manageable steps and try for one thing a day, but I don't even know where to start.

Fuck it, I'm going to go finish paying my credit card bills. That is my One Thing for today. (Actually, it is my Fifth Thing, since I already put away laundry, and met with Landlord Dude, and bought groceries, and finally answered comments on "In the Absence of Sun (The Grief Inside Your Bones)" -- basic necessities of life, and an attempt at pretending I can do social interactions.) Yeah. Okay. Bills.

*resolve face*

wherein Liz continues her adventures in slow-cooking

I cooked some elbow noodles to add to my previously mentioned pork experiment and am having the first serving as a belated dinner. Conclusion: not terrible, but next time I will use less rosemary, a bit less pepper, and probably no cinnamon. I'm not sure about the ginger.

I think this would probably work better with a real sliced apple, of a very tart cooking variety (rather than the over-sweet "eating" varieties), and maybe a splash of white wine to make up the difference in the liquid and further cut the sweetness, but yeah. Not terrible at all.

It's particularly not terrible in comparison to my old pork-and-applesauce dish, which I used to cook in the oven in a covered Corningware dish. That always came out with overly tough meat and tooth-aching sweetness in the applesauce. Here, the pork is nice and tender, and the spices and cranberries and onion (not to mention the slow cooking) have kept the applesauce from turning into a concentrated sugar blast.

Also, it is hard to go wrong with elbow noodles, in my personal opinion. :-)