ALARM OFF

One of the best things about the holidays is turning my weekday alarm off and not having to turn it back on for more than a week.

I can now go back to my normal sleep and wake cycle, which isn’t really in tune with modern society at all. Though ironically, I am so tired from the weekend, I’m going to bed “early” tonight at 2am. I am, however, going to sleep as long as I want and need to tomorrow morning. What a wonderful feeling that will be.

HOLIDAYS

At work, we usually get served drinks and small snacks on Fridays around 4pm. Tomorrow the drinks and food will be served at 12:30pm, which pretty much tells me everyone at work is expected to leave super early to begin the holidays. I’m sure most people will leave at lunch and just go home. Since I get into work at 10am, that should be two hours and a bit of work and then I get to go home.

Unfortunately, I have a ton of work to do, so I’m thinking I may need to stay a bit longer than that. Sure, I could leave early too but that work will still be waiting for me when I get back with that holiday hangover. Perhaps it might better for me to get as much as possible before going on break.

BLAND

I’ve complained about the quality of the food being served at the studio cafeteria for a while now but a meal this week has forced me to vent again.

One of the options earlier this week was a traditional “Christmas” dinner for lunch. It was roast turkey with gravy, stuffing, mashed potatoes, and steamed veggies. For food professionals, this shouldn’t be a difficult meal to make. All those items are classics and shouldn’t be a challenge to make in large quantities. How many decades has such a meal been prepared in countless kitchens?

I selected that for my lunch because I thought it would be difficult to mess up. I was wrong. At first, everything seemed ok. It looked great on the plate, generous amounts of gravy on moist-looking turkey, generous helping of mashed potatoes and made in-house stuffing. Then I started eating it. To be fair, the turkey, even the white meat, was pretty moist. In it itself should be applauded since the cafeteria loves drying the shit out of every single piece of meat they prepare. Unfortunately, the turkey was bland as a white piece of paper. It had no taste to it at all. It was as if they didn’t season or marinate the turkey with anything. Not a single salt crystal nor a flake of pepper. The meat was also covered in gravy but the gravy didn’t seem to have any flavour to it at all either. When was the last time you encountered a gravy that didn’t have salt in it?

The whole pile of turkey was just a hot gloop of tasteless and bland meat. It had nutritional value but it had no joy to it. The mashed potatoes were alright, at least they didn’t manage to screw that up. The stuffing, however, didn’t have any flavour to it either. It was like they just took pieces of bread and just baked it.

I didn’t finish my plate of food and when I went to dump the rest in the organics bin, a co-worker saw what I had and said, “Pretty damn bland, eh?” I replied it was shockingly bland and I was hoping it was just my portion of turkey but it turns out it was not. The whole mess of turkey they made that day was terrible.

The cafeteria finds new ways to disappoint me.

SNEEZE

Your body doesn’t care what it is doing when it wants to sneeze. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gotten the urge to sneeze while eating. If you don’t get a napkin or tissue in front of you, you’re essentially going to spray your food out with incredible force.

This morning I had to sneeze in a new situation. I was brushing my teeth. I tried to hold it off but it wouldn’t wait for me. Knowing that I had mouthful of foam, I tried to sneeze directly into the sink, thinking it would contain the spittle, foam, toothpaste, and other mouth nasties. I must have not aimed correctly because my mirror got covered in a wide and large swatch of toothpaste foam. The sink fixture, which is super narrow, barely an inch wide, got covered in the remaining toothpaste. What an amazing shot. All of the toothpaste, right on the fixture.

It took me several minutes to clean up the mess. In hindsight, I should have sneezed into the tub. It would have been much easier to hose down the area there. Anyways, I’ll know for next time.

IN ONE WEEK

Wow, it’s Christmas in seven days. I really don’t have much to do to prepare for Christmas, so I’m not in a rush or anything but it is amazing how fast it snuck up on me.

For the first time in a long time, I actually have Christmas Eve off. It’s a paid day off. So this is my last week of work before getting eleven straight days off. I’m most excited about that.

Anyways, time for bed. I hope you all are ready for the holidays.

TALC UPDATE

I’ve now gone several days without using baby powder on my body after showering. It has gone really well. I don’t even notice I’m not all talc-ed up anymore. I believe it’ll be quite easy for me to continue being talc-free for at least the winter months.

The big test, as I mentioned before, will be the warmer months when the talc is extremely useful in keeping my body dry and absorbs the extra water and also sweat. Well, at least that’s still several months away.

MAINTENANCE

I have no great words of wisdom tonight. I need to perform maintenance on this blog so my time will be taken up by that. This work is going to be transparent to my readers but it’s necessary to keep things going smooth under the hood. Thanks for your patience!

WARMER AGAIN

When people mention the mild winters of Vancouver, I think this week is typical of what they mean. The highs this week will be in the double digits, with Friday being 11 degrees Celsius. The lows are barely lower than the highs, with tomorrow no variance between the two at 8 degrees.

Hilariously though, it’s not all sunshine and rainbows. It’s supposed to rain every day until next Monday at the very least. The rain today was torrential. A typical winter week in Vancouver indeed.