The Return

J. and W. came back today.

Boyfriend was feeling a bit meh.

I thought I'd celebrate the first and remedy the latter by baking muffins. Sadly, my feet are covered in mosquito bites that have reached full allergic potential. Putting on shoes hurts. So I sent Mr. Grumpipants on his way to buy things like flour, sugar, eggs, bananas, butter, muffin paper thingies and cocoa powder.

Because we're an international couple, there was some discussion as to what exactly was meant by 'cocoa powder'. It wasn't Nesquik, was it? Really? Then what did I mean?

Boyfriend is still amazed by my demands of cooking stuff from scratch. Mixes are so... easy! I don't see the point of paying three euros for maybe one euro's worth of flour, baking powder and sugar, mixed in a bag, even if buying the ingredients seems more expensive at the time. The fact that my man can actually cook and bake like a master once he has a recipe did not help his cause on 'but you only need to mix in oil and eggs'. We have the technology, we have the skills and buying mixes saves about five minutes off a ten to twelve minute process. No one is in that much of a rush.

If I got paid a euro and a half or more for every five minutes' work I did, I'd be making eighteen euros an hour. Times seven hours a day, times about twenty-one days a month... That's a pay of 2650 euros a month. For measuring out dry ingredients and pressing a button on a paddle mixer. Even if I subtract taxes and health insurance from that, I could be living quite comfortably off of my highly specialised abilities of pouring and reading. And knowing better than to smoke around large quantities of dry, flammable, aerosolised materials, I suppose, but I'm pretty sure such crimes against common sense and Darwinistic theory get punished by death quite quickly. For those wondering what I'm talking about, go to youtube, look up 'flour explosion'. Go on. You know you want to.

So Boyfriend set off, certain he'd get something horrendously wrong and we'd end up with baked bads rather than baked goods. I was pretty sure the only thing he might need to ask about was the cocoa powder, but once you stress that you're not making chocolate milk, most women people who work in supermarkets should know what he was on about.

Ten minutes later, my cell phone went off.

Did I mean wheat flour? Yes. This type? Any type. Germany has a very foreigner and beginner-unfriendly system of sorting flour into affordable flour, but with a cryptic, angricultural type name which states the type of grain and a number or named flour with a big hint as to what they can be used for and charging double for spelling it out for you. I'm pretty sure that anything that comes in one kilo packaging and states 'wheat' as its source can be used for baking. I could've used my dark meal that I bought to make dog biscuits with, but fibre doesn't belong together with vanilla sugar and butter in my book.

Next came the predictable, the cocoa. He'd actually found a box labeled 'cocoa powder for baking purposes', which is the German helpfulness equivalent of being spoon-fed by the staff in a restaurant. He was pretty sure it was right, but was the amount okay? Yes, the amount was fine.

He came back with everything, so we set to baking.

First came the low-fat, low-egg muffins with raspberries. I was going to throw in some vanilla sugar, but forgot. I also forgot to melt the butter. Powerful spoon action from Boyfriend - Super Cook solved the last problem and reduced the frozen berries to manageable little pieces.

We put those in the oven and tried again with high-everything chocolate muffins with banana pieces. We did try and melt the butter this time, but I forgot that butter, once overheated, explodes. Yeah, we still need to clean our microwave.

By the time we needed the oven again, the raspberry muffins were done. So we put in the chocolate ones, left the dishes in the sink 'to soak' (read: to not get put in the dishwasher due to infantile laziness) and arranged the raspberry ones on a plate with a note saying 'Welcome back from Boyfriend, Sis and Wolk'.

The chocolate ones are delicious. I know, because I checked. Four times. They're definitely delicious.

By the time J. and W. got home, there was a raspberry one missing, too. I guess someone was checking if ninjas poisoned them while we weren't looking. They hadn't: Boyfriend is fine.

The welcome back get-togeter was relatively quiet. There were awesome T-shirts, hello's and yum-tasty-muffins. A few thank yous were thrown in for taking care of the cats (Boyfriend and Sis did this).

I tried a piece of muffin, but it was definitely missing some vanilla sugar to give it a bit of oomph.

Iggy tried to liven things up. He found a dog blanket that smelled of dog, saw it wasn't his bed and decided it must therefore be his litter box. Luckily, J. could understand this. Iggy spent the rest of the time playing with Leon, who spent half of the time playing back and the other half being a massive canine pervert, trying to mount the puppy. They must have played for over half an hour. Our little ball of fur and happiness even went so far as to accept treats being given to him, because it were long treats, keeping the evil, evil human hands far away from him. Iggy's little doggy face was licked clean (making it all wet and spiky-haired) by the time J. told us we were being thrown out because she was tired after the long car ride.

 J. also had bought too much treats for her dogs, so we went home carrying an empty muffin plate and an armful of treats. Iggy went up by himself, then went up even further. I was once again the evil one who said 'No, bad dog!' to this behavior. He almost didn't do it when he noticed I was displeased, but then decided he was going to anyway. It might seem like a small thing, but I keep having this horror image of someone leaving the door open, Iggy being frightened and fleeing (he can only go up stairs, going down is a bit too much for his tiny body to manage) and then excreting his fear where our neighbours keep their shoes. I don't even know if the people upstairs like dogs.

So now we're home, washing stuff because the new shirts smell like cigarettes and I finally have enough coloreds to warrant a load. And I suppose I should go put the dishes in the dishwasher and clean the microwave before we get vermin.

The Oopsie

I pissed off Sis today.

It all started last night. Late last night, to be precise. One of Boyfriend's friends didn't have time to show up today, so he decided to show up one day earlier. I was slightly skeptical, since both Boyfriend and me had to get up at eight the next day, but usually we manage.

Not this time.

I went to bed between midnight and one. The boys were watching a very hilarious movie. With a lot of shouting. A very long movie. I was still awake at three, at which point my body demanded I feed it before I was allowed to sleep.

I had been, up til then, been very proud of my not taking a nap that day. Come morning, I was cursing my not napping. I made Boyfriend message Sis that I'd be coming a bit later, since I was too tired to coordinate any of my movements. Sis sent back a very grumpy text about me not having to come in at all then.

True, I'd overslept on Wednesday, but falling asleep on the job seemed worse than being late.

So I didn't go to the store.

Then Iggy decided to pick up where the boys had left off early in the morning. Boyfriend left and Iggy tried to howl for about twenty minutes. Then he found a squeaky toy, dragged it to the door I'd closed, and went to viciously attacking it in front of the door.

Yeah, I didn't sleep.

Around noon, Boyfriend came home. He was dead tired, too. We let Iggy out, where he did his good dog thing, and then went to bed.

I don't know why, but it seems I've evolved to not be able to sleep without Boyfriend giving his blessing to it, or being next to me in bed.

Eventually, we woke up. Then we got distracted. By the time we got out of the bedroom, we had to split responsibilities. Boyfriend was expecting friends, and we had close to no food whatsoever in the house.

I ran to the store, bought the essentials (and chips and toffifee, because I buy stupid stuff when I'm hungry) and got back. I got the wrong bread, our less-than-favorite milk and cereal and broke the health streak we're on and got some deep-frozen pizzas. Could've gotten a few onions, some meat and another tin of tomatoes and made some bolognese sauce, or gotten bacon and carrots and made mash, but I didn't.

It's now close to eight and I've done nothing really productive today. Unless giving Boyfriend's friend something for his tummy ache counts as productive. My towel project still isn't dry. My feet are covered in mosquito bites. Can't clean the oven, because we might need it later. And it'll be dark soon, so I can't reorganise the wardrobe anymore, either. If I close the window, I can put on the light, but the bedroom will get stifling hot. If I let it open and turn on the light, more mosquitos out for my blood will come and suck me dry.

Next time, I'm just getting up in the morning.

The Domesticity

So far, we've cooked a lot of meals ourselves this week. Went to the store and cooked them from scratch or defrosted something we had leftover (easier to cook for four than for two) at some point after I invested in freezer-safe containers.

Then the folding board came, and I wanted to fold stuff. So I had to do laundry. Our laundry basket was full, anyway, so I did it all. Today, the only loads big enough to warrant doing were towels and Iggy's blanket, all the rest was done or three items of the same sorting group (Our current sorting groups being darks, lights, coloreds, towels and dog). Boyfriend vacuumed today, which caused Iggy to pee on me when I picked him up to prevent him crawling God-knows-where, but that still didn't add enough laundry to the list.

Boyfriend wants soft and fluffy towels, and I sort of agree that our freshly washed towels have been a bit sandpapery as of late. The internet blamed our lack of dryer, our use of fabric softener and our spin cycle for this. I can afford a basic dryer, but not if I want to, say, have enough money left for another couple of months. We could swipe someone else's dryer, but we're lazy and it's a hassle. So I eliminated the fabric softener from the washing, added a rinse cycle to get rid of any leftover soap and fabric softener and programmed the machine to not spin.

When the machine had run its course, I realised I had just ordered the 'basically all your towels, done extra wet'. The natural consequence of this was that the towels, once hung up, gave us two options: mop or start building an ark. We put down the two oversized towels to catch the dripping while I washed Iggy's blanket (without laundry softener for his widdle nosey-wosey, but with a very thorough spin cycle, thank-you-very-much). After that, the towels were still soaked, but no longer actively wetting anything else. So I spun the oversized towels and washed them. And spun them. They're meant to stand on, not to wrap around our baby-soft bodies.

Then I realised our kitchen was a mess. And I mean a real mess. Boyfriend's gone back to buying bread of the non-sliced variety. This means, apart from that my bread consumption has plummeted because the slicing machine frightens me, that the counter and surrounding area's are covered in breadcrumbs. Oh, and we had dishes that desperately needed doing. Including a nice pile of hand-wash only dishes. And there were some groceries that had gotten forgotten behind the microwave and needed to find their place in the world kitchen. And some empty bottles that had fallen over and gotten hidden by the rest of the mess. Things pile up easily in kitchens the size of a three-dimensional postage stamp.

So I cleaned that.

We have a pile of empty plastic bottles, which need to be taken to a bottle bank in Germany (and I have no idea where one is located near us) which I feverishly wish gone.  A few minutes ago, there was also a creatively filled (read: smooshed together), big grocery bag full of old paper and recyclables, but Boyfriend was kind enough to remove those for me.

Still on my to-do list? Refolding the wardrobe, putting all the laundry we did in the wardrobe, finding stuff to cook for dinner on the days to come (though tomorrow is looking a lot like ordering-out-day), cleaning the oven and finding a non-conspicuous way to dispose of the icky old cutlery holder that is taking up space on our serving trolley. My current idea is stomping it to death while Boyfriend is out and then blaming Iggy when he gets home. He's already demonstrated his fierceness on the dust bunnies stuck in the broom and some paper towels we carelessly left in his reach. Who says he wouldn't destroy the hard plastic monstrosity when given half a chance?

The Progress

We cooked our own dinner again today. True, it was a pasta bake, but it had vegetables in it, so we gain health-points where we lose points to laziness. Peas totally are vegetables. And we took light cheese rather than full-fat. Yes, it's still pasta covered in cheese and sauce, but we're trying here!

And I finally filed down all the pre-gelled nails I'm allowed to use. It only took me half an hour or so after the first half hour of mindless filing without any real progress. Then Sis went like 'If it's really that thick, you're better off using the dremel'. I know that if it had been people's nails, I wouldn't have been allowed within ten feet of the thing, but it were plastic nails on sticks. The only one likely to get hurt was me.

Yes, there's dremel tools in nail salons. They're slightly smaller and probably slightly less likely to stab, but it's still something that works best when you crank it up to twenty thousands rotations and go ngeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeew with it. The pile of dust that came off of the nails was impressive. If it were cookie crumbs, I could have made a pie base with it. But it was pink, non-edible dust that didn't even have an attractive smell. I damaged one or two of the nails, but a bit of shaping with a file or a generous dollop of building gel took care of most problems.

I used my file to get rid of any unevenness my very, very fluid building gel inevitably caused from being left to gravity. Some people can apparently do nails with the stuff. I'm putting the thick, gloopy stuff on my Christmas wish list. Hell, I want the thicker one, with a sun blocker in it. No idea what that's good for, but you can sculpt little gel castles with it and harden them if you have sufficient patience and skill. Mine just sinks to the sides and corners, causing build-up and hot spots.

And when I got home from doing groceries with Boyfriend, Iggy had peed and pooed in the house. We were only half-upset about this though. He'd namely peed in his litter box. Excitement all around! Poo is relatively easy to clean up, but pee forms irritating puddles that dogs can apparently smell until the end of time. Also, he pees more than he poos. If he makes a habit of doing it in the litter box, I'm okay with an occasional accident because my rain-shy pooch isn't sure about doing his thing during a drizzle yet.

Oh, and I used the folding board. It's still magical. Even more magical was that the laundry I folded has disappeared into the bedroom by the time I got home. Maybe if I'm not totally exhausted after going to the doctor tomorrow (God knows what he'll put me through), I'll take out the folding board on my part of the wardrobe. It's not that the stuff in there's not folded. It's just folded very clumsily. And unevenly. And it's sort of rumpled, too. Who knows, I might have more space than I thought.

In the meanwhile, there's a load of darks that are as good as dry and a pile of towels that need to be washed, too.

The Wonderfold

(I'm skipping posts? Let's compensate!)

I suck at folding laundry. Trousers and underwear and socks are easy, but as soon as it's worn on the top half and it's not a bra, I'm lost. I know the theory of it, I know several techniques for it, but in the end, picking up stuff I folded always ends with the stuff falling apart.

What I wanted, really, really wanted, was what Sheldon from the Big Bang Theory has: a folding board. Not one of these measly squares with a hook Brabantia thinks are folding boards. No, I'm talking a huge, folding, plastic monstrosity. With holes and a step program and the potential for making killer folds. Something that OCD people stock so the width of their clothing stacks is always perfectly the same

But it's big and I thought it would be expensive.

Anyway, I was bored on Sunday and looked it up on the amazons after seeing cardboard ones elsewhere. The cardboard ones didn't look very sturdy... First on the UK amazon, where it was expensive, but not as expensive as I thought. Then, there was Sheldon's model. With 'made in Germany' and the German name for it underneath. Off to the German amazon I went. Within 30 seconds, I learned that the plastic folding board, including shipping, cost 7 euros and some change. I spent about half an hour playing the should-I-shouldn't-I game before ordering it.

It wasn't stocked by amazon though, so I was pretty sure I would get it maybe on Friday. I was wrong. My shipment confirmation came yesterday morning and this afternoon, Sis came to our apartment announcing Boyfriend had a package.

Yes, I'm still using his name to order stuff. If I'm spending money on mail, I want it to arrive. The mean part of this was that Boyfriend was expecting a small package, so when a huge one (the box was a bit too big for the contents) with tape from a to him unknown company arrived, he was very confused. I was confused, too. It couldn't be mine... could it?

It was. It wasn't the blue one from the amazon picture, but it came with a manual to fold all kinds of tops, a pair of trousers and a towel. It's purple. It matches our drying rack. Complaining about it seems childish and spoiled.

We still had the drying rack out, anyway. Yes, we're slow in getting the dried stuff into the wardrobe. I tried folding a shirt according to the instructions: fold bottom of the shirt up to fit the board, flip left, flip right, flip bottom piece, done. It worked. It was easy. It didn't fall apart when I was done. Genius.

It doesn't work on jeans, but it works on everything else I've tried so far. I'm so giddy to use it again, I'm doing laundry.

The Risotto

We tried new things today.

First of all, there was the ridiculously easy mushroom risotto.

Boyfriend wasn't very excited about this one. It's a dish that has 'mushroom' in it, and mushrooms are his mortal enemies. But I know the secret to sneaking them past his defences, since he told me a while back.

We used the tupperware chopper for all the chopping necessary, which made an easy recipe even easier. First, the onions with the butter. We avoided the garlic crushing/chopping by using garlic grains, which means we didn't have to buy a whole bulb only to use two cloves of it and have the rest go mouldy. Dried thyme is hard to do cheaper, so we bought the cheapest we could find. It turns out, buying it loose in a bag rather than in a pot halves the price. We were too lazy to search for risotto rice, and amazon promised it would be costly, but we had pudding rice, which the internet said we could use and which is a lot cheaper and thus less painful when we screw up. We didn't have chicken stock cubes, so we used beef stock. We're no drinkers, so we used more stock instead of wine. We just chucked in about a litre of stock with the unboiled rice mixture and shoved it in the oven. Ikea pots are oven-friendly that way.

Next, the mushrooms to be added. No portobello mushrooms exist in the land of affordable foodstuffs which we call our local supermarket, so we went with fresh button mushrooms. There were frozen ones available, which were cheaper, but... Well... We were sort of too hungry to wait for them to defrost.We cleaned the fresh ones and then threw them in the chopper with a glug of cream, as instructed. We were meant to chop them to a paste, but Boyfriend is the resident chopper and he was gleefully turning and turning and turning and... Well, there were no chunks to speak of in the resulting sauce.

We took the baked pot from the oven, added the sauce and let the remaining heat cook the mushroom mix. Ten minutes later, we were eating. Both me and Boyfriend loved it, even though neither of us have any idea what risotto is supposed to taste like. It looked like the picture did and tasted 'mushroomy', which was the main description of the video recipe.

We paid about 15 euros for the ingredients, and it makes at least four generous servings, though the spices will take us a while further and we didn't use the full half-pound of butter. We basically have to buy more mushrooms and onions if we want more risotto. 

The Doggie Wash

I didn't post yesterday because, well, nothing much happens if you sleep the day away. So today, we have the official 100th post.

Today, we washed the dog.

I didn't get up early. We weren't very well prepared. But Iggy has been downright stinky for the past week and we wanted to take care of it.

As if the gods disagreed with this plan, our shower's half-clogged. W. and J. are on holiday, it's Sunday so all the shops are closed and the casino downstairs isn't mob-owned, so there's no drain de-clogger available to us. We did not let this stop us in our plan.

I put on a shirt J. had given me which she didn't want since it didn't fit right and is very much too big on me. No one wants it, but I needed some protection between Iggy's claws and my nipple piercings.

First, we tried getting him wet.

It took a while to get the temperature right. We didn't test that one on Iggy, but rather my wrist. Not too hot, not too cold. Then there was the problem of water pressure. Getting his back wet is easy, getting his chest or underside wet... not so much.

Iggy looks like some kind of low-level, face-eating video game monsterling when his face is wet, by the way.

Surprisingly, though, he didn't struggle much. First there was the shock of OMGWATERNOOOO, but he pretty soon figured out it was nest-temperature and, well, not doing much.We only have one setting on our showerhead where the water pressure might be classified as approaching high. We never use that one, since it comes with a pathetically small water beam. Iggy got put under the 'rain' setting, which is gentle and soft and impossible to get to a painfully high setting. There's drizzles that come down with more power than that.

Then physics turned against us. By the time we'd slow-walked Iggy into getting everything wet, ending with his face, his back had dried. I'm used to a thick-furred cocker spaniel that takes hours and hours to dry even if you towel and blow-dry for an hour. Iggy's not that kind of dog, apparently.

So we adjusted our plan. We re-wetted Iggy's back, shampooed it, and rinsed it out. Then his paws, then his butt (which was very dirty and icky), his underside (almost no hair there) and then his chest and face. Iggy did not appreciate any of this. I'm assuming it's because there's a slight scent to the soap and he can smell that it's not his smell.

Worst of all was his face. Iggy's face is this little cloud of hair, hiding its shape. So I didn't figure out he got his dad's face. A pug's face. He has no nose bridge to speak of. Any and all water that runs down his forehead ends up in his nose. At first, that was just a trickle, and he licked it away in and adorable fashion. Then I had to actually get the water on there and he sneezed. And sneezed. And sneezed. When I finally took it away, he'd had enough, as I'd been assuming he would. He tried to scramble out of the tub, despite the fact that I was keeping his forepaws off the ground and his hind paws had no purchase whatsoever on the tub.

Boyfriend held Iggy as I got a towel. He didn't mind being toweled that much, but still fled to a spot against a wall when I set him loose, where he could see the enemy coming.

I picked him up, got a chew stick and wanted to put him in his basket... Except his blanket was as dirty and stinky as he had been, and underneath, the basket was covered in sand.

Introducing Iggy to the vacuum had not been on the to-do list, but we couldn't let him sleep in there.

The blanket got thrown next to the laundry hamper, and I plugged in the vacuum cleaner. Iggy, at this point, wasn't sure what the big orange thing was, or why I was pulling a thin black tail out of it. Then I switched it on and he ran for cover.

It was only a short vacuuming session, and not a very big area to vacuum, but Iggy had hidden as far away from the orange monster as possible. When I came to pick him up and put him back, he disagreed. So far, he'd been soaked, soaped, toweled and then I'd stolen his blankie and set a monster on his safe spot. I'm very much back to being classified as 'the evil one' in the household, even if he spent a few minutes relaxing on my chest last night (after a lot of minutes of shivering and shaking). Getting a hold of him took a bit of effort.

I put a fresh blanket in his now-clean basket, put his toys back in and then plunked him down in the middle of it. He hasn't moved so far, but he still trusts his basket to keep its invisible force field up and keep him safe. Which doesn't mean he looks up suspiciously at every noise we make for now, ready to bolt if we show signs of taking him back into the bathroom.

Oh well. I'm going to take my anti-vertigo tablets and see if I can get the oven clean.