TCC for 2/9/08

The Caretaker's Concern 2/9/08
Ghetto temp. 44 F. and rising.
Island tmp. 31 F. Yesterday's L/H: 23/29 F.
Current conditions: mild breeze from the South 5 to 10 mph, light sleet.

Colder temperatures of late have iced over much of the open water. Hopefully the trend will continue. For the first half of the day the Caretaker spent his time organizing and cleaning things up outside. For the later half of the day he spent his time cooking. One of the things he did was to do some cleaning out of the refrigerator. He came across a tub of crumbled blue cheese. The Caretaker rarely if ever eats real blue cheese by choice, big fan of the dressing with hot foods, etc. but the real deal? Eh. Soooo, obviously this blue cheese is left over from some time in the Summer, chances are the "freshest" it could be is from late September. The Caretaker's first thought was to just throw it out, he wouldn't be too inclined to eat "fresh" blue cheese, even less inclined to eat "aged" blue cheese. Then a question came to him, does blue cheese go bad? or does it just get "bluer"? Doesn't blue cheese start out "bad"? So this blue cheese, at least 5 months old is actually better? The Caretaker has yet to come up with an answer to this, and so he has decided to keep the blue cheese. He doesn't anticipate getting a hankering for blue cheese anytime soon, however, if it does prove to be safe to eat, and should things here on the Island get dire, the blue cheese might not be such a bad thing after all. It could prove to be quite handy for flavoring rice.

"When things GET dire?" you ask. No running water, marginal heat, sequestered on an Island during ice-in, when do things GET dire? When the Caretaker, in desperate need of something for dessert, and nothing else is left but cool-aid and rice, cooks some rice in cool-aid and eats it as dessert, which would probably follow a meal of rice cooked with "aged" blue cheese. However, the Caretaker is a long way off from being that desperate. In fact, just today the Caretaker cooked up a big batch of potato, corn chowder. Well, he was only mildly desperate today, not for having to make chowder from corn and potatoes, in fact it was a soup base that his step-mother was kind enough to give him, thank you, rather he was mildly desperate because one of the ingredients needed for the chowder was milk. The Caretaker has no milk on the Island, so in it's place the Caretaker whipped up some rice milk from scratch and used that instead. Certainly not as creamy as dairy milk, but the rice milk certainly worked well enough. If he wanted something creamier, he could have made soy milk from scratch, if he had planned ahead, but he didn't, and he didn't want to wait the 8 hours it takes to soak the soybeans before the soy milk can be made. So, he made rice milk and made the chowder with that, the Caretaker will be enjoying this chowder for the next few days, it should keep him from having to try the blue cheese.

So after the Caretaker finished cleaning up from his cooking and mealing, mealing? Why not? "Eating" is so... the last some odd thousand years or so. Now a days, those who really enjoyed their food: "mealed"

For example, the phone rings:
"Hi, I'm calling from the United Divided Workers for the Gainfully Unemployed, are you familiar with our cause?"
"Can you call back at another time? I'm mealing."
"Oh, sorry to interrupt, please enjoy your meal. I'll call at another time. Good-bye."

Or:

"So, how was dinner at your in-laws?"
"Good."
"Good? How good?"
"It was mealy."

Anyway, you get the point, not sure if the Caretaker does, but that's for another time. So the Caretaker finished with the dishes, was he dishing? Meh. Right. After cleaning up the Caretaker replenished his kitchen water supply, then got rid of the waste water. While out for the water it had begun to snow. There was little to no wind and it was a light to moderate snow, what the Caretaker would call a pleasant snow. It almost seems to give off a warmth.
A maker of quiet moments,
Beautiful white, blankets the ground.
This most pleasant downfall
Wonderfully surrounds.

--The Caretaker