Dear Diary

A 3649-post collection

Early Start

I began my day at half-past midnight in expectation of a stream... but Toasty isn't in the right mindset to Art, today. That's cool, though, because I finally got my keister in gear and caught up with the buffer for Inter-Mission. The downside now is that I have to find a rough half-hour in which everyone else is asleep so I can record more stories for more buffer.

Which is going to be fun because the entire house is now on Who Cares Time [What's the time? Who cares!] and doing whatever whenever.

I have no idea when I'll be able to record, but this Friday will create the need for another buffer episode. At least I'm making my derp work for me.

I actually forgot I'd begun work on the recently-finished buffer episode and thought it was already finished until I checked. The plus side of this nonsense is that I have a new piece of music for Ellipsis Addiction ready for the next episode, and the skeleton ready for the recorded stories when I have them.

It's starting to look a lot like the Masque of the Red Death out there, with all the higher-ups grabbing what they can get, getting infected, and some getting a comeuppance. Not a lot of tears are being shed for landlords complaining about rent freezes and so forth. Not a lot of sympathy for megaglobocorps getting billion-dollar bailouts whilst they fire everyone on their staff. NO sympathy at all for landlords who are expecting rent from people who no longer have work.

I can already see our government seriously considering extreme measures - shutting the entire country down for the interim. Meanwhile the US is like "How can we survive without the cogs of industry grinding the common man to powder?" and want to force people to go to work and keep spreading the disease. Like millions of people dying through administrative neglect is another form of natural selection.

It's all going to end in a garbage fire, I know it. Onwards with the daily tale!

Bread Day part 2

Wholemeal flour rises REAL slow, so I give it the maximum possible time to do stuff. I'm worried that the dough is really dry.

Probably the third iteration of bread will be much better because I won't spill water on my surface and I'll know about a proper surface to flour and all that nonsense.

This lot will be better than the last lot. The next lot will be better than this lot. That's what progress is.

Speaking of progress, my breads

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Bread Day the Second!

I got enough wholemeal flour to make a loaf and keep the starter alive, so I'm making some proper sourdough that hopefully won't go flat as a tack this time.

I also made some pancakes and I think I've perfected the recipe enough that I can put the final version up on my foodie blog.

The bread will likely appear there tomorrow. Sourdough takes time. Lots of time. Lots of time and heaps of flour.

I only realised yesterday that the reason

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FuuuuuuUUUUUUCK!

Day 4 of official home quarantine procedures. Mayhem has work, and I started my morning thinking that my cat was going to die.

Apparently, when cats taste something they don't like, they smack their chops and make a lot of spit bubbles. I learned this because I spent a panicked half hour and $100 taking Pippi to the vet to find out that she wasn't poisoned or victim to a surprise disease.

AUGH.

Lots of public places prefer to keep their distance

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Officially Day 3 of Quarantine

I've more or less been self-isolated for a majority of my time. Introverts are ahead of the learning curve on that count. It turns out my productive output lately has been tied to my emotional state. Therefore, I'm working on my mental health with my own personal regime of treatment.

  • Only viewing new news about the continuing plague crisis
  • Singing when the mood suits me no matter what the family has to say
  • Seeking out some new experiences to enrich my noggin
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Whoof...

In the annals of "that escalated quickly", we have:

  • Queensland closing its borders
  • Parents keeping their kids at home if they can
  • Schools remaining open for the parents that don't have anywhere else safe for the kids to go
  • People fistfighting THE ELDERLY for more TP than they probably need [yikes!]
  • Empty shelves... empty shelves everywhere
  • There's been mass layoffs and a subsequent mass run on firkin Centrelink
  • ...and in other news, I'm shifting where my stories go because Steem decided to
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Self Quarantine!

We're keeping Miss Chaos at home this week and next week. Beloved is staying home. I'm braving the wilds of the local shopping center to see what supplies I can acquire that we also need.

I am only sticking to what we need.

With all the best luck, we should stay plague free for the interim. I am the most at risk out of my family. Yet, I am the one taking the most risk by going out there and acquiring whatever.

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Stream Morning!

I'm functioning on a thin chain of naps and a lot of caffeine this morrow. Yeeps.

I owe a thing about my bread since both loaves came out... edible. Not perfect, but at least edible.

Perfection will take time.

Longer than I expect because everyone and their kid brother's dog has emptied the shelves of literally anything that could plausibly be long-term food.

I can only hope that sanity returns before I run out of enough flour to keep my starters alive

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Bread Fail!

People should make their instructions (a) clearer and (b) linear. If you're doing an instructional video for noobs, don't make a big deal out of the allegedly proper way and then mumble something about never doing that in person.

Share. The method. That actually. WORKS!

::Anguished ASD gargling::

So yeah. Instructional video said "use this portion" with way more importance than what the guy who made it actually did. So my dough was too moist and the loaf turned into a roofing

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Bread Day!

I made starter harvest pancakes and I have one batch of starter growing on the countertop ready to make some firkin multigrain sourdough. YEAH!

I got maybe a half hour before I need to start mixing and whatnot. I shall be measuring some of the important stuff with the house scales after I'm done with the blog.

If you're reading this, there is already bread underway.

Today's nonsense is going to include another episode of Inter-Mission and attempting to refine the backlog

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Fuuuu...

I went to the pet shop to acquire some base essentials, which included kibble, litter, and three packets of sachets.

I forgot the damn kibble.

Hence the title.

Part of today's nonsense involves finishing the podcast off, actually acquiring kibble for my poor starving felines, and rearranging my ENTIRE KITCHEN so I have the space to make bread.

I may surrender to the inertia gods and merely add a vinyl mess mat to the table IDK.

There's something about the recent insanities

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Shutting down everywhere

Beloved managed to score some limited little luxuries and, by all reports, everything be completely batshit bonkers out there. People are panic-buying ALL sorts of bullshit. I know when I went for my week's ration of ice cream, there was almost NO flour. There were three packets of wholemeal flour, of which I only took one.

I only needed one. So I got one.

Meanwhile, Beloved got SIX firkin packets of eggs. Like, each one is 18 eggs, and they got six

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Welp. It's a crisis...

I'm making a mostly-vegetarian stew because there was no beef available when Beloved went for ingredients. So far, the ingredients include an entire Wombok cabbage, 1.5 kg of "low carb" potatoes [really, love?] and a decent dollop of vegemite.

Next on the chopping block, a decent container of carrots. I'm definitely adding some celeries to offset the potatoes in there. Lots of celeries.

On today's agenda, the Patreon nonsense, blogging about bread, writing the Instant of course, and making a bloody

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Okay. Let's do this!

We have, my Beloved and I, located a one-stop shop where sourdough accessories can be acquired. The problem? Even the closest one is fuck-off far away. 46 kilometers versus 51. South versus North.

Shall consult Beloved about the routes.

Honestly, I think North might be less bother, but more fuel. Things be a little bit nonsensical around here.

On the plus side, I do have enough prepped meals to last me almost a month. If the rest of the family starts eating

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Stream morning yaaaayyyy

I set up the skeleton of ep 25 of Inter-Mission and because the stream is still going as I write, I can't edit. That might happen later today.

I gotta count my prepped meals to figure out how long it's going to be before I prep a buttload of meals again. Whether or not that's going to happen in the middle of the Covid Crisis.

Which would make everything... interesting to say the least.

Stream action's back on. Hang on.

Ah, that

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