The GirlAlive Blog

Stuff this week.

I’ve got a bit of the scatterbrain this week so I’ll just throw out a bunch of stuff.

First of all, the government of the UK is being stupid. Someone has proposed a law where if someone is accused of illegal file-sharing (accused, not tried and convicted, just accused) their whole household could have their internet access cut off. Without a trial. Which means that file-sharers who get caught will hack into their neighbors’ wi-fi and innocent people will be cut off from the internet. All without a trial. There is a petition to stop this idiotic crap from happening. If you are a UK resident, or a UK citizen living overseas, please go and sign the petition.

I have no interest in reading or watching anything Twilight related. It bores me. It is just another stupid romance novel, but with more bestiality and necrophilia. When I see pretty jewelry on Etsy I sometimes thing, “Oh that’s nice,” but when I see it labeled as “Bella’s” thingy or “Edward’s” something, I surf elsewhere and refuse to buy it on the basis that someone might mistake me for one of those Twilight people. So I loved this comic.

Also, my niece and nephew are awesome. Exhibit A. Exhibit B.

Julia Nunes has a silly new video. It is entirely worth watching.

That’s all.

Looking up

Things are slowly improving here. I still have no job and no money. I think one of the bottom points was when my credit card raised my interest rate to 30% because I was late on a payment.

My parents are helping me sort out the credit card by shuffling my debt around. I’m hopefully going to be getting unemployment benefits soon. Plus, the Job Centre here is helping me out a bit.

Husband got his ultrasound the other day. No gallstones. Which means he can eat fat again, but we still have no idea why he has constant stomach pain. Probably the duodenal ulcer he had before is back again. So still nothing spicy.

Food. And lack of food.

I miss food. I miss things with flavor that don’t leave me hungry shortly after.

My husband has gallstones. Probably. He got the temporary pseudo-diagnosis over a week ago. He doesn’t even get an ultrasound to confirm it until next week. So he can’t eat anything with fat in it until he gets surgery. It took weeks to get an ultrasound, so I dread to think about how long it will be to get surgery.

You all know I hate the American health care system. But there are times that it is good. Gallstones, for instance. I had them back in 1999. I had health insurance, and it’s one of those things that is basically always covered. I had no job, but the whole surgery only cost me about $25 out of pocket. I got an ultrasound the same day as my initial diagnosis. I got surgery a week later. I was home the day after surgery and was out at clubs with my friend Heather 5 days later.

On top of gallstones, my husband also has acid indigestion and possibly a healing duodenal ulcer. So he can’t have anything spicy or acidic. To sum up, I can’t have a dinner that includes fat, spices, tomatoes, or basically anything with flavor.

We also don’t have money. I’ve been out of work for about 3 months now. I have credit cards back in the US that cost me about £200 a month. Which I don’t have. My husband can scrape together a little bit of money for food. It comes out to about £5 per day for both of us. As long as the heating bill isn’t too high.

For the last few weeks, it has been an endless cycle of pasta with bland sauce, mashed potatoes with whatever we find in the freezer, and canned vegetable soup. We have some meat and stuff in the freezer, but we can’t eat it because it has fat in it.

I’m so bored with everything we have in our kitchen. I don’t have a problem with low fat cooking. That’s how I got gallstones in the first place (they’re God’s punishment for eating healthy). But the usual way to cover how bland low-fat food is is to make it spicy or tangy or interesting. I can’t even do that. Last night we had macaroni with tuna and fat free salad dressing. With the cold I’ve had for the last month, I literally couldn’t taste anything. It was a big bowl of pasta texture with flecks of tuna texture.

If you’re a friend from the US, send Bacon Salt! If you’re a friend from the UK, for Christmas what I’d really like is some Chinese food. Something deep fried and Szechuan flavored. Or maybe a curry. Cause if I don’t get some real food that tastes like something soon, I’m going to be tempted to try to remove my husband’s gallbladder myself.

Today is Husband’s birthday. Unspiced chicken with lettuce (with a side of pickles) is his special birthday dinner. And he might be able to have a few bites of low-fat cake. Hooray. My birthday is next month. I want Peking Style chicken and a tub of Ben and Jerry’s. Chances are, husband will still not have had his surgery, and I’ll get to have something flavorless served on top of something boring.

Birthday Pickles

Thursday is my husband’s birthday, so I’ve spent part of this week making pickles. That seems weird, but I’ve kind of gotten used to it. There’s a story behind the pickles.

My husband and I got married in April of 2005. It was a tiny courthouse wedding, so we had another big church wedding in October of 2005. After the wedding, we had a ton of leftover food, like with most big catered events. We especially had a lot of veggies and dip leftover. Carrots and celery could be used in soups and whatever. But what were we going to do with a huge tupperware container of sliced cucumbers? They’d go squishy within days and they can’t be frozen or anything. I had recently seen an episode of Good Eats where Alton Brown make pickles. It seemed like a reasonable idea.

I made the cucumber slices into bread and butter pickles. My husband had never had bread and butter pickles before. They don’t do the wide variety of pickled cucumbers in the UK that you can get in the US (Polish and German influences in the US and stuff). He apparently fell in love with the pickles. Since then, every year on his birthday I ask if he wants anything specific for his birthday dinner. Every year without fail, he wants pickles. Every anniversary, he wants pickles. He’s even asked for them for Christmas and Thanksgiving.

It takes about 3 days to make them properly, so I don’t make them as often as he asks for them. But we have no money and I couldn’t really afford a present for him this year, so I made pickles. They’re cooling in the kitchen right now, and should be fully pickley by Thursday.

The Recipe for Bread and Butter Pickles (can also be found on page 125 of the Girlalive Cookbook).

1 ¼ (566 g) pounds cucumbers, cut into slices (Usually about 2 large cucumbers, with the ends cut off and fed to the guinea pigs)
1 onion, sliced very thin
2 Tbsp (30 ml) kosher salt (or half that amount of table salt)
2 cups ice cubes
1 cup (240 ml) cider vinegar
1 cup (240 ml) sugar
¼ tsp (1.25 ml) turmeric
1 Tbsp (15 ml) mustard seeds
½ tsp (2.5 ml) celery seeds
¼ tsp (1.25 ml) cayenne, or to taste

In a large bowl combine the cucumbers and onion, sprinkle with salt, and toss well. Add the ice cubes and chill, covered, overnight.

Drain the mixture in a colander and rinse under cold water. In a saucepan bring the remaining ingredients to a boil, stirring. Add the cucumbers and onions and bring to just a simmer, stirring. Transfer to a bowl and cool. Chill the pickles, covered, for 24 hours.

I’m not going to go into how to put them in jars for long term storage and all that because I’ve never done it and I don’t want you blaming me if you try and get botulism. So just keep them in the fridge and eat them right away. In the fridge they’ll probably last a week or so. Unless my husband finds out they’re in there.

I’ve done it with thick or thin slices, and most of the time I forget the ice cubes, and it turns out just fine. It seems to be a pretty forgiving recipe. The only problem I had initially was that celery seeds are very hard to find in the UK. Husband found them at an herbal medicine supply place.

Real friendly, or Seattle friendly?

My husband and I have been planning to move back to the US, or maybe to Canada for a while now, but the question remains of where to move. I grew up in Duluth, and a significant portion of my family still lives there. My brother lives in Illinois. A bunch of my family lives in Iowa. Quite a few of my friends live in Minneapolis and St. Paul.

It’s pretty easy to look online and find information about the cost of housing and job markets in different places. It’s even pretty easy to look up information on bus schedules and routes. Pictures of local landscapes are plentiful. But the one thing that is probably most important is nearly impossible to quantify. There is no way to measure how friendly the people are.

In Minnesota, the people are friendly, with provisions. Out in public, people keep to themselves. Even staring at a stranger is considered rude. The norm is to simply ignore all people you don’t know and if you can’t do that, short and polite noncommital statements only. You see, in Minnesota people mostly believe that if you are too friendly you are inviting someone deeply into your life. Minnesotans are not against friendship, but they also don’t want to commit to a friendship until they have collected the necessary information to know if you are worth it. But once you’re accepted, you have friends for life. My mom still exchanges Christmas cards with people she worked with 20 years ago. I am Facebook friends with a ton of people I knew from high school, college, and even the one year that I worked in Duluth before I moved to Scotland. Once you’re in, they will be on your side for life. They want to be in each other’s lives in a good way.

Seattle is a different story. I lived in Seattle for 5 years. People there are welcoming and friendly from the first minute you meet them, but they don’t mean it. They expect friendship to only exist while you’re standing in front of them. Out of sight, out of mind. If you change jobs, your former co-workers won’t talk to you again after that. People from Seattle will have long friendly conversations with you on the bus one day and look at you as if they don’t recognize you the next day. Relationships are friendly, but completely shallow and fleeting. I had a group of “friends” that I hung out with several evenings a week for about two years. I went on weekends away with them. I even went to Russia with some of them. When circumstances in my life changed and I stopped attending the same church as them, they all disappeared from my life. Now, about half of them won’t even accept me as a facebook friend and the ones that will never speak to me. I witnessed several of them be very friendly and welcoming to someone when they were in the room and then talk about how annoying she was when she left the room. Basically, you can’t trust them for a real friendship. They might be friendly, but that doesn’t mean they want to be your friend. (To be very clear, I have a few actual friends from my years in Seattle, but most of them were not originally from there.)

Then there’s Edinburgh. There is no definition of “friendly” that applies to this area. It was even once voted “the unfriendliest city in Europe.” If you’re the least bit different, they will taunt you in the streets and harass you even if they’ve never met you. They make it very clear the first time they meet you that they don’t like you and want you to go away. I’ve met some friendly people here. I had some great co-workers at my last job and I even still keep in touch with a few of them. My husband’s family and friends have been great. But they seem to be the exception rather than the rule. Most of the people here hate outsiders just as much as the people of Seattle do, but they’re much more open about it. In some ways, that’s preferable. I don’t have any illusions of friendship here. I know that I don’t have friends. They don’t wait until you’re out of the room to say how much they hate you.

So where to move? It’s hard to know where I can move that the people will be genuinely friendly. There is no easy statistical friendliness index. Even if there was, Seattle would no doubt come off as very friendly, even though you’re more likely to find real friends in Minnesota, where people seem cold and distant. I don’t have any answers on that one.

I won something!

Okay, so a while ago I happened upon a fairly amusing web site called I Hate My Message Board. The first attraction for me was the snack food reviews. It’s always fun to find someone else who is willing to try all kinds of weird foods just because they’ve never tried them before. There was a contest there for the scariest product. The item I really wanted to enter was a thing I found at the new Lidl here. They had a special on Greek food, including a can of “musky octopus”. Not only was it a horrifying CAN OF OCTOPUS, but they felt the need to include the modifier MUSKY. But I did not enter that product in the contest because the scary can of octupus cost something like £3.50, and I would never ever ever eat it. For £3.50 I can buy quite a lot of food that I am actually willing to consume.

Instead, I entered the product from my British Food site that scares me the most. You’d think that would be Marmite, but it’s hard to see how bad Marmite is without tasting it. No, the one that frightens me the most is the hot dogs in a can.

Today Tracy announced the winners of the scary product contest, and it was me! Hooray! British hot dogs are the scariest product her readers could find. Although the placenta shampoo is pretty darned creepy too.