The All-New Bunrab

Cindy came over for supper this evening - I managed to find enough counter space and dishes to cook some chicken, chop it up and put it on a salad, and then serve it at a table that had room for us both to sit at and eat. This is an intermittent thing - I get the table cleared off of stuff, and then as I unpack the next box, the table gets loaded up again with "stuff I need to sort through." And indeed, after dinner, we unpacked a few more boxes, and the table is once again buried, though not as badly. Two loaded boxes of stuff I don't need went off with Cindy for various charities - her UU church supports a homeless shelter and a transition program that puts homeless people into apartments, so they always need contributions of food and of household basics - tableware, basic cooking implements, towels, etc.

One thing that has become increasingly obvious: I have too much tea. Every single bit of it seems interesting, and I hate to "get rid of" tea. But honestly, I have five shelves of my pantry cupboards filled to the brim with tea - there are hundreds of teas there. Most of it is well-stored in airproof, lightproof containers - tins or glass - and has not been exposed to heat, so it should still be drinkable. So, if you would like a fat Tyvek envelope full of various tea, email me your address (and full name; I don't always remember everyone's), and you will get a random sampling of stuff. If there's some kind you honestly know you can't stand, let me know that too, because otherwise the sampling will include a bit of everything - black, green, oolong, puerh, flavored, scented, aged, bags, loose, possibly even partial slightly flattened small boxes of something stuffed in there.

While I'm not as bad as some people I know, I do seem to overbuy on food. It's partly the low-sodium thing - when I order by mail, I order quantities that make it economical, and when I find something in a local market, I grab as much as I can because I'm sure they'll stop carrying it. As a result, I have way more canned goods and dried soups and slow cooker mixes than would normally appear on a single person's shelves. And I still don't eat at home quite as much as I should - although my impending budget crunch will help cure that, I suppose.

Steve and I used to joke about using up a lot of our vacation time and vacation money just 2 hours at a time, by eating out most nights. It was a habit we got into early in our marriage, and it stuck. We didn't eat expensive stuff out - just sandwiches, or cafeteria, or Tex-Mex. After I got sick, we still kept eating out, even though our income was less, because, well, we were still better off than average, and could afford it, and enjoyed it. Finding the lowest-sodium thing to eat at a given restaurant became a game. And when we moved up here, from cafeteria country to diner country, Steve absolutely /loved/ diners, and we would eat quite regularly at one particular diner on the way home from Monday rehearsal every week, another particular diner on the way home from Tuesday rehearsal every week, another particular diner on the way home from Wednesday rehearsal every week... usually splitting an entree, so not as expensive as it sounds, or sometimes getting breakfast for supper, which is also less expensive than regular entrees. Well, when Steve died, it was still quite a habit - particularly since I felt so absolutely awful eating alone, and eating at a diner where the wait people knew me gave the illusion of not being alone for a little bit. And in that manner, I ran up credit card bills of several thousand, because my tiny monthly pension doesn't cover that. Well, when I sold the house, I paid that off - but I can't do it again!! And I can't keep dipping into savings for regular monthly expenses - using principle for living expenses is a horrible idea. That stuff is ALL THE MONEY I HAVE IN THE WORLD and I can't eat it up. So this is the point where I have to really, really stop the eating-out habit. I think I can do it over the next few months, if I promise myself one lunch out a week and one dinner out a week for a period; that's an extravagance but if I try to quit cold turkey, as it were, I will feel so lonely and be sitting at home alone all day so much of the time that I don't think I can stand it. So the other thing I've got to do is find volunteer work that gets me out of the house a day or two a week for a couple hours, isn't too much physical labor, and preferably offers lunch or snacks as part of the deal. I suspect that soup kitchens or homeless shelters are too much physical labor (and probably too little air conditioning - I'm far more heat-intolerant than I used to be) so this is going to take some research and calibrating. There are a couple of places I that are of particular interest to me to volunteer; now to find out if they happen to keep iced tea and snack bars on hand for the volunteers!

Saturday evening, we drove over to Shepherdstown, WV (about 75 miles) for An Evening of Wine, Swine & Chocolate at the Pigs Animal Sanctuary, a potbellied pig rescue (that also takes in cats and goats and turkeys and the occasional horse) that I've supported for a decade or more. The evening involved wine tasting, a LOT of chocolate, and a silent auction, plus live folk music.

We don't drink much; we only tasted a couple of wines, then decided on the one we wanted for our complete glass of wine (part of the ticket): West Whitehill Mountain Spice. This is a very sweet dessert wine, spiced with mulling spices. It was served cold here, but could be served heated as instant mulled wine. It tasted great - if one likes sweet dessert wines, which I do - and went nicely with the plentiful assortment of cheese and crackers, and the chocolate: a chocolate fountain with strawberries, bananas, creme puffs, and other small items to dip in it, plus an assortment of chocolate truffles, including rum balls that could compete with the wine for alcoholic power. When we finished our wine - although I'm not supposed to drink alcohol, 4 ounces of wine spread over an hour and a half doesn't seem to have hurt me any, and I've done it before - we had ginger ale, served poured over frozen fruit, which made an excellent punch without any further ingredients. The frozen strawberries cut the sweetness of the ginger ale, which is usually too sweet for me, and then we ate the by-then-defrosted fruit out of the cups with spoons, and the bit of ginger ale that had soaked into it gave it a bit of a zing. A nice idea, and one I think I will repeat when I have my family over for a pool party in a couple of weeks.

In the silent auction, I won the gift basket of a bottle of Chocolate Port with two wine glasses, which, along with the glass we each got for tasting, which we got to keep, means we now have 4 wine glasses etched with the PIGS logo - to add to the 32 wine glasses we already have. Perhaps a bit much for people who drink maybe 4 glasses of wine a year... oh well, there are worse things to have than wine glasses. And our wine glass collection comes nowhere near our souvenir coffee cup collection, about half of which is hanging from pegs around one and a half walls of the kitchen, and the other half of which is still semi-packed, because I will have to hang up more peg racks to hold them.

We visited with the goats and the cats; didn't get over to the turkey pen or the pig barns. We also got to talk to lots of other people who were attending. A safe question to open conversation with anyone there: "What pets do you have?" Because it's a sure thing that everyone there not only had some pet, but multiple pets. We even talked to some other people who had rabbits. We also chatted with a woman who runs a folk festival on her farm, which we may well try to go to. It's the same weekend as the FFRF annual convention in San Francisco, which we might like to go to but going to the folk festival would certainly be easier and cheaper. I have enjoyed the FFRF conventions we've made it to, but air fares aren't that cheap these days, so even though we might could stay free at my brother J's place in Oakland, we probably still wouldn't fly out west. I've been meaning to get involved more in folk music anyway up here; we just got so involved in classical music so fast once we got here, that the folk stuff sort of fell by the wayside. But there are all kinds of wonderful festivals in the PA-MD-WV-VA area, and we should try to get to some!

Anyway. It was an extremely pleasant drive to get there, a nice evening, and an interesting drive back along unlit country roads in the hills. Although the Catoctin Kettle Company, which sells that way-too-good caramel corn, was open when we were on our way there, it was on the wrong side of the road, and it was closed for the evening by the time we were headed home, so we were safe from the temptation of buying their caramel corn and their cherry butter and their cherry cider...