I have a new blog project:
My my my, don't we clap on the 1s and 3s!
I am truly hoping this is something that I can do with others for a year, and do by myelf when they get bored of it for as long as it takes for me to get bored of it. I have been in a funk for the last couple of years...at least two years, but possibly more. My job was weighing me down, my daughter's mental health struggles were weighing me down, I was weighing me down, being in Missouri was weighing me down, the state of the world has been weighing me down...I've been drowing for a long time. I think I'm sick, too. For the last two years, my body has felt off. I keep telling my doctor I feel wrong, she keeps gettting my bloodwork done, but when it comes back with weird measures, she waves it away and says she's not concerned. It's been two years of the same things being off. My WBC, my neutrophils, my monocytes, and...something else. She says she thinks it's just stress, and she could very well be right, but I feel very dismissed that she isn't discussing that with me. Coupled with gaining twenty pounds in two years despite my lifestyle not really changing, and coupled AGAIN with the sheer amount of persistent pain I am in that is definitely related to my cycle and just keeps getting continuously worse....there is something nasty going on in my pelvic region.
This is all to say that not even the sheer joy I have at having my oldest live with me full time like I've wanted for twenty years has been able to pick me the fuck up, so I need help. Therapy is a no go for me, so I'm trying to self therapize. I've moved away from blogging with any kind of regularity, and I want to get back to that, so blogging is a thrice weekly activity. It is intended to be done with Amber, but I have already decided that if she is unavailable for whatever reason, I will blog alone. And then three nights a week, I will draw/color with my family. I do not spend enough time with them....Alex and Rhyann have their own little lives that they tend to, Derek has his work and then hobbies and things, and there really isn't much of anything that I have to help me through. I'm listless and sad and bored.
So that blog project is, I hope, something I can stick to and help me feel like I've go something that's for me, too.
I have been cooking, though. Cooking and baking.
I live in a house full of atheists, which is delightful, and I am working toward STAUNCH anticapitalism, though I still engage occasionally, but these things together mean we don't celebrate any holidays. Really, even for birthays, we have moved to giving the kids experiences instead of things, because I am both delighted by ephemora and also who needs more impermanet junk? Not my kids. Not my husband. Not me.
We do have ONE thing we celebrate, and that's New Year's Eve. Every NYE we have a charcuterie night with booze and movies and music and goodies. Derek and I went shopping for this year's NYE Cheese Me, Please Me bash and while preparing for the cheeses we were going to buy because I really want to focus on small creameries with ethical practices (we were subdued in contrast to The Great Holigays of 2022 NYE celebration), we found a store in Springfield called The Brown Derby. This place...wow.
The cheese section:
I was very tempted to get this just to try it out. I sent a photo of it to Rhyann as a fun curiosity, but ulimately did not end up purchasing it.
Some of these creameries are ones we are very familiar with, and big fans of. Cypress Grove, for instance, is home to two of my favorite cheeses: Humboldt Fog, and Midnight Moon. Midnight Moon is perhaps my very favorite eating cheese (as opposed to a cheese that is used in a dish, or as a topper to a dish.A snacking cheese is maybe a better term?) in the world, and I truly love the Humboldt Fog.
I was very depressed that they didn't carry Midnight Moon, but it was alright....we were on the hunt for a very specific cheese. Rogue River Blue from Rogue Creamery. We heard about it somehw, someway...I really couldn't even tell you how...but I had to track it down. Knowing we had our NYE cheese bash coming up was the perfect excuse to spend an entire day driving to Springfield and traveling around Springfield. Not that we are the kind of people who need excuses for food.We have very literally driven four houors to have lunch at our favorite Chinese place an then driven four hours back;we have come VERY close to hopping in the car for a drive to Chicago to eat and then driving back hoome...that's a 6 hour drive. We love food. Love. Food.
Brown Derby had it, but Derek initially brought me Rogue's Caveman Blue, which is incorrect and stupid. Thankfully the chesemonger was listening and heard me tell Derek, "...ok, that isn't the right one. We're looking for the Rogue River Blue" and pointed us in the right direction. The cheesemonger was very informed, and was a delight to speak with. Derek told me later that when I asked the cheesemonger if a 50% off cheese was discounted so hard because it was disgusting, they looked VERY taken aback. I had noticed, and it made me laugh, but it was a genuine question.
We wandered around to the wine section, which I forgot to take a photo of because it was pretty decent and I was looking for Orin Swift's Mannequin (one of my favorite chards, and the price point is pretty fucking great, as well), but they didn't have it. They only had Abstract, which....yuck, we were not impressed...but I continued to look around. Derek and I noticed a truly great label:
It looked very of Dave Phinney's ouvre, it is just a really awesome label.
I ended up asking if they carried Mannequin, was told they only carried Abstract and Prisoner (double barf) but had I tried anything from The Crane Assembly? I had not, so I was brought over to the label Derek and I had been admiring several minute before. We were told about Crane Assembly being a new Dave Phinney project, but at the price point I was not willing to take a chance on it and figured I would talk to the wine people I know to see if they had tried it.
Wine people is my dad.
My dad had not tried it, so Derek and I were just kinda...meh. We grabbed a bottle of Veuve Clicquot (Verve Clicker to us, and it never ceases to delight me when my dad is like, THAT IS NOT HOW YOU PRONOUNCE THAT. I know, dad. That's what makes it fun!) and a bottle of Grgich Hills 2021 Fume Blanc. I was delighted by our little cart:
And I looked at it and thought, wow! We're being so good this year, nothing wild for our NYE cheese bash!
Derek exchanged our Veuve for a bottle of Cakebread Merlot, explaining that the kids don't drink anything with bubbles, anyway, so champagne is a bit of a waste, and both of us prefer Cakebread, so it was a switch that made sense. No need to tell me twice!
We went and looked at the hard liquors and the bar accoutrement. We have a very impressive alcohol collection, and one of the musts for our forever home is either a wet bar that we can turn into a little speakeasy corner, or the space to create our speakeasy corner. As a general rule, when we want to try a liquor, we just shell out the money for the entire bottle, because fuck the mark up. If we hate it (like we hated Lagavuin, Dalwhinnie, Kilchoman, some rums, there have been lots of bottles we've bought and hated) we hate it, but we have still spent less money than trying it at a bar. The only exception I can think of at present is the Macallan 25. Derek had been absolutely ACHING to try it, and when they didn't have it at our reliable whiskey place in Honolulu (Bar Leather Apron really is a pretty great little bar, and if you find yourself on island despite how much I would personally tell you to not fucking go because you don't fucking belong there, it is worth a visit if you need a cozy little place that is swanky, pretentious, and almost exclusively catering to higher price tastes), we found a place that had it on Maui, Cane & Canoe, which I wrote about in detail in my Maui trip recap. Derek got a single shot of it...A SINGLE SHOT....and it was $350. I have lost the fucking plot.
Walking up to the register I was like, ok, I bet we're at about 200 bucks, which won't be so bad, I know I won't be spending more than 100 at Hy-Vee for our snackies, we're on rack I'm so proud!
Bitches.
300 dollars later and I was embarrassed to be like...but we still need other things at Hyvee. :/
So we went on over to Hyvee, I grabbed our snackies and two more cheeses, some of my noods, some of my chippies, and while I did spend less than 100 bucks, I was still like....welp. So much for moderation!
But New Year's Eve really is the only holiday we celebrate. That's it. We don't even do birthdays anymore, we just cook whatever the birthday person wants for dinner and desert, and we try and take a trip. We are thankfully not matching the Holigay Blowout of 2022, that was about a grand, and never again with that mess. Not because it wasn't amazing...it was...but because a lot of the cheeses were gross (looking at you, mimolette, you tastelike skanky cigars and worn out feet) and we had to sramble to find recipes to use the rest of the cheeses in and STILL a lot of them were lost to forgetting about them.
When I got home, I put together all of the cheeses and wines we will be having on NYE:
I'm not going to lie to you, that Sarvecchio parm? Gone. I needed a parm to add in to the pastina I made, it was all I had available, and I was like, fuck it. And I have slowly been eating at it since. There are a couple of bites left, but not enough for NYE. So one cheese down. I maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay drive to Osage to grab another one from the Hy-Vee up there, since I also need to replenish my Polar Pink Apple and I know for sure they have that there, but NYE is in three days. I don't actually think I'll get around to it. I am supremely lazy.
