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In retrospect, I should have lived blogged this. For that huge FAIL, I will always be sorry. We were, however, very caught up in the memorable moments of the past few days.
Background: ex-felon who rents the house across the street is a nuisance. He hits on the women in the neighborhood, married and single, and doesn’t get the standard social cues of “leave me alone, you freak. I’m not interested.” He rides his Harley on the street (and on the sidewalk, because why wouldn’t you?), at incredible speeds and with incredible amounts of noise, any time of the day or night. He neglects his child. He shouts. He accuses. He has a parade of skanky people in and out of his house, day and night. Some leave so high they can hardly walk and also try to engage in conversation with cars.
He is, in other words, a bad-ass MoFo who is pathetic (and even sympathetic) in his own ways.
But he’s, at last, no longer a neighbor. Here’s how it went down; times are somewhat approximate.
Tuesday evening, 8 pm. We note suspiciously normal older couple at house across the street. They haven’t arrived on loud Harleys, they haven’t driven motorcycles down the sidewalk at 50 mph, and they do not appear interested in either buying or selling meth. They are clean, and it’s even possible that they shower regularly.
Tuesday evening, 8:01 pm. I find Brooks downstairs and ask if he’d recognize neighbor’s landlords, since I think they may be across the street.
8:01:14 pm. Brooks is now in the front yard, innocently watering. Watching from the window, I realize I was right–those were the landlords.
8:02 pm. Brooks waves at landlords, who cross street and engage in conversation.
8:09 pm. Animated conversation continues.
8:15 pm. Brooks comes inside, confirms that they are the landlords, and gives me the GLORIOUS news that the problematic tenant is being evicted for non-payment of rent.
8:15:10 pm. Celebration ensues. Continue reading Anatomy of an eviction > part 1 (Tuesday)
My newly arthritic ankle tells me that rain is likely today. This is an outcome I didn’t see coming when I broke my foot months ago, and I still hope it’s just coincidence that every day there has been rain in the last month, I have woken up with inexplicable soreness. I find this quite amusing but at the same time annoying.
The one confounding factor to my newly-minted weather predictor is that I had a wee bicycle accident last weekend. More of a falling over than an actual crash, it involved trying to go up a hill and finding the limit of my atrophied muscles. However, I did fall over on the offending foot, so…maybe it won’t rain today. Either way, life is good.
This falls under the “I have the best boyfriend in the world” category. I’m headed off to southern Oregon today for my sister’s birthday celebration. Even though it’s a Saturday morning, Brooks got up at 6 am to go to the store so he could send me on my way with fresh, homemade buttermilk biscuits and sausage. I’m torn between AWWW! and wow!
The recipe he is using is from Cook’s Illustrated The New Best Recipe. I hear the sound of the food processor cutting the butter into the flour now. Yum.
I have been puzzled for several weeks about what this sign outside of the St Johns Burgerville could possibly mean:
One of the many great things about Brooks is that he always takes my crazy suggestions seriously. A recent one has to do with his upcoming garage remodel. Or to put it more accurately, current garage destruction, digging of enormous hole for garage basement (because what garage is complete without a basement?!), and construction of a much larger, lighter space for the cool garagy things he has.
Since the garage is separated from the house by a patio area that is outfitted with a grill, I suggested that he might want to consider making that wall of the garage out of some kind of glass door. This would expand the patio area if needed, allow for balmy summer breezes, and inspire envy the next time he has a motorcycle work party. And then I found these. And they totally work.
But what’s even better is the website itself. Clearly, The Folding Sliding Door Company devotes most of their energy to making super fly doors, not web design or copywriting. And while the site is functional enough–you can, for example, get a “quotation”–it is full of charming near-use of the English language. The best part is their “why buy from us” page. Apparently, there are MANY manufacturers out there masquerading as “folding sliding door specialists.” Many. And that information is accompanied with the following dire warning:
We specialise in folding sliding doors only. The design and manufacture of folding sliding doors is an exact science. Do not buy from chancers.
Do not buy from chancers! Love it! Love their doors too, so the website is an added bonus.
In early April, we went to Coos Bay for a night and then drove back up the coast the following day, following the route below.
View Larger Map
Somehow, the weather god smiled on us and granted sunny, clear skies all day. We stopped a thousand or so times (Brooks was very patient!) and as a result, there are some pictures.
I meandered to the edge of a small bluff and looked over, and what do you know, there the ocean was, straight below me. This is totally unlike the beaches I grew up with, where you could sidle up to ocean over a huge distance of flat land, which is right next to…another huge stretch of flat land.
Highway 101, on this stretch of the coast, often feels like it’s hanging over the ocean. You get these stunning views of sea on one side and forest on the other.
Of course, there are also plenty of places where the FREEZING water is more accessible. Had to fight off the urge to jump right in…
That’s all for now.
(Click image for larger version)
This is from several weeks ago. We were driving over the bridge, and the sky seemed typical of Portland’s sunshine mixed with storm clouds of this time of year.
Red pozole is a comfort food I have eaten a lot of in my time. Not being a fan of large bones in my food, I used to always pick around the meat and go for the broth when I had pozole in Mexico growing up. Piled high with your choice of thinly shredded cabbage, cilantro, sliced radishes, a squeeze of key lime, and with a tostada shell to scoop out what you want, it’s a pretty fine food.
My own variant calls for more….user friendly…cuts of meat, and I never feel obliged to use the traditional pork. In fact, today I am making a pozole using chicken. Since I have a cold and am feeling pretty miserable, I wanted something easy, warm, spicy and chicken-y, and as luck would have it, we had everything necessary on hand.
Easy red pozole
Ingredients:
1 large white onion
5-6 large cloves of garlic
T olive oil
1 large chicken breast
Oregano
1 bay leaf
2-3 smaller guajillo chiles
2 cans chicken broth
1 can garbanzos, drained and rinsed (bite me, I don’t care. They work.)
Salt and pepper to taste
While chopping the onion, bring a large, heavy skillet to medium heat. Add the olive oil and sautee the onion for 5 minutes or so. Meanwhile, mince the garlic and cut the chicken breast into 1/2 inch or so pieces. Once the onion begins to brown, add the garlic, stirring frequently for about one more minute. Then add the chicken and stir.
Put the whole dried chiles in a toaster oven for about 4 minutes, until they smell smokey but are not blackened. Remove with tongs and let them cool while you add the broth and garbanzos to the chicken and bring to a boil. This is a great time to add a bay leaf and some oregano.
Holding the chile with tongs to avoid getting burned, cut the stem end off and shake the seeds out. Or leave them in and live dangerously. Drop the chiles in a blender, pour about a cup of boiling water over them, cover, and blend until smooth. You will have a rich, dark reddish-brown sauce. Resist the urge to take the lid off and stick your nose in. It might hurt.
Transfer the hot chicken/broth/onion/garbanzo mixture to a crock pot, and pour in the guajillo sauce. Add some salt and pepper, cover, and leave on low for a few hours while you try to nap and instead blow your nose every ten minutes. Taste and adjust salt and other seasonings as necessary. If it’s too spicy for your taste, add another can of chicken broth. It’s food, not rocket science.
Serve hot with finely shredded green cabbage, thinly sliced radishes, cilantro, lime wedges, and tostada shells.
Maybe I’ll post a photo later if I remember to take one.
I ordered a credit report today, and was pretty pleased to find out that my score is now 769. This doesn’t mean that I am going to rush out and use up the remaining 96% of the credit available to me on beer and salt and vinegar potato chips. That’s not just because that would be more of those commodities than I could possibly store, regardless of how awesome they are. I have been on a get-out-of debt mission since college ended in 2005, and the end is finally in sight. Why would I mess that up?
So, here’s a little history of Christine’s debt.
The under $12/hour nonprofit job I got when I was first out of college was too close to the poverty line to help me make much progress on a couple of key problem areas: credit card debt and student loans, both unfortunately due to medical expenses incurred in college that were not covered by health insurance. I had no car payment at the time, which really helped keep me afloat. (Thanks, mom and dad!) A pretty great promotion was quickly balanced out by increased housing costs due to a move, and then buying a new car a few months later, which meant $20,000 or so in new debt.
I have since played around with different ratios of saving and paying down debt, trying to find a way to both increase my financial cushion and also avoid directing so much money to credit cards that I had to then use them to tide me over to the next paycheck. So far, what has worked best for me is to save at a rate of 8% of net and to direct 10-12% of every paycheck to credit card debt.
This theoretically would have me out of debt and rolling in savings in no time, except for the fact that I am allergic to taking money out of savings for occasional expenses. So, a couple months of being a good girl are repeatedly undone by, you know, using a credit card rather than savings to pay for a family member to come up from Mexico, or gifts, or those random crazy shopping excursions.
Regardless, I have been fantastically good for the last several months (thanks, I’m sure, to being crippled and thus way less likely to buy the entire inventory of a store, and to the lack of holidays/birthdays). I got the credit card debt down to a place where it suddenly made sense to me to wipe out a big chunk of it with some savings. So I did that, then scheduled all the necessary remaining payments to pay off the last, and oldest, credit card debt. What that means is that, barring some huge change, I’ll be done with this albatross by mid-summer…and that without really killing myself and feeling deprived. AND despite the generous pay cut we all took at work, which is a topic of some bitterness.
The remaining debt I will have after that is my car loan and my student loans. I consider that latter one good debt, but I’ll still probably double my very manageable monthly payments on them after the credit card stuff is done. The former, the car loan, has a pretty large monthly payment, but it’s worth more than I owe because of how large those payments are. To me, these are simply expenses for stuff I use all the time in the pursuit of regular income: my car and my education.
It’s pretty exciting to see the credit card debt wrapping up. I’m also thinking about how to avoid getting there again, and as hard as it is for me to do, I think changing the way I use savings is going to be pretty key. Knowing I am going to have to transfer money out of savings is a real disincentive for me to spend money on something I don’t really need. And getting back into credit card debt after trying for so long to get out of it seems even less desirable.
So anyway, all that AND I have a pretty awesome credit score? That makes for a happy Friday!
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