I’m really struggling lately. We have a visitor up – Art’s old friend Wayne – from Vancouver Island. He’s a dynamic and interesting person to have around, but it ends up just feeling like more pressure to get more things done that I just don’t have the energy for.
And I feel like small things keep going wrong, and maybe each in itself is not such a big thing, but collectively they’re digging in around the edges and my quality of life feels really overwhelmingly bad lately.
The drain in the kitchen downstairs broke yesterday. I had a flood in the kitchen which was a pain to clean up, and since the hardware store is closed Sunday and Monday, I can’t even shop for replacement pieces until Tuesday morning. Meanwhile, we are carrying dishes upstairs to wash them.
Today, Wayne wanted to try smoking some salmon. I admit I probably planted the idea in his mind – but I regret it. It’s turned into an ordeal, as Art’s Traeger smoker/cooker thing turned out be in a state of barely-functional deshabille – it was filthy, full of ash and crap, and it had mold growing in it. Art’s always been the “sole person in charge” of the Traeger grill – so I’m only guilty of neglecting something that wasn’t important to me and that I just had sort of drifted to assuming we weren’t using anymore – like so many things. But anyway, I spent most of the day dinking around with it, running it “hot” to cook out the junk and mold and then repeatedly scrubbing it with a wire brush.
I’m still not wholly comfortable with the thermostat control – it feels like it’s not behaving the way I would hope, as far as running in “smoker” mode. It seems to like to suddenly “take off” and suddenly the temperature zooms up to 400-500 degrees, before it “calms down” and settles at the appropriate temperature for smoking (around 160-180).
