By Lucy

I’ve been working on a longer post for my workweek. I don’t want to devote too many posts to scaffolding, but I did want to do something sort of in-depth while I’m waist-deep in it. I’ve been weighing up different things to include, so here’s a small update.

I didn’t do much during the week but work.

Saturday, I woke up at the usual time (this being 6AM) and decided I aught to do laundry. Pushing it every two weeks won’t work – I don’t have enough work clothes, and I am not sashaying in to the mill in my painted-on jeans. I get hit on enough as it is. When I got back, my landlord asked me if I would prefer a rolling desk chair instead of the then-current dinner table chair.

All the f*cks yes!

So now I have a proper rolley chair. Score one!

The landlord was also doing his monthly check of all the fire alarms, which means he was coming into my room. So after laundry was put away, I quickly vacuumed and shoved everything into drawers. I also unplugged my PC – the fan glows even when it’s off, but I wouldn’t expect him to understand that.

At noon I had a shift with the Soroptimists at the Home and Garden show. We were selling raffle tickets, and tickets for the two-bit auction (May 9th at the CLE Heritage building). I was partnered with Kim.

I half-expected a bunch of guys to come over and try to flirt with me. Hilariously, every single man saw “organization for women” and hightailed it out of there. Most of our tickets were sold to older ladies with cash burning a hole in their pockets. It took me about 20 minutes to get my spiel nailed down, along with the correct amount of eye contact to draw someone over. I also noticed, if you speak loudly enough to catch their attention but not so loudly they can hear all the words, they’ll come over just so they can hear you better, and then you give them the hard sell. I sold all the tickets that were left before 2PM.

One story still makes me laugh. A young couple wandered over and the female asked what a Soroptimist is. As I gave her the spiel, her boyfriend broke into guffaws. “Organization for women? Where’s the one for men?” (It’s called patriarchy, you cretin) Luckily, before I could come up with some biting wit that could cost me the sale, she slammed her purse into his open arms. “Shut up and hold my purse!” She bought 4 tickets.

After 2PM, I wandered off to the hostel to hang out with Hanuman.

I had no particular plans beyond I wanted to hang out with him. I felt pretty good, but I knew a proper hike was probably a bad idea. This weekend is Shrove for me. The shut-down starts in earnest on Monday and it will be overtime and probably working through next weekend.

So we wandered. He wanted to go to the Bay Village coffeehouse, but they are closed on the weekend for some reason. We rambled up the road to Hillcrest Park and I was showing him the bits in the hillside from the meteor that hit near Sudbury. He showed me this abandoned park in the shadow of the new park. At some point when they were tearing down the park, someone decided to stick all the old slides together into one big slide that doesn’t work very well. But it was fun to joke around on.

I also discovered that Memorial Ave is called that in memorial of the first World War, on a plaque tucked away from the main park.

We kept walking for a bit until we reached an A&W, at which point we decided to get a bite to eat before walking back. Hanuman stopped at a grocery store on the way to grab some dad cookies.

We were out walking around for a couple of hours. The hostel was quiet when we got back, just one guest, so we sat in the kitchen and made tea and Hanuman enjoyed his oatmeal and raisin cookies like the crazy person that he is. Occasionally Holly drifted through only to regret it, because me and Hanuman reach peak bad puns when we spend too much time together. Eventually one of us checked a clock and realized we had somehow spent 5 hours talking and I should head home and sort dinner. I was also way past when I should have taken Metamucil.

See that’s why I call it medicine, I should carry it with me because I need to take it at certain times. I’m debating leaving a bottle in the car, but I’m not sure what that will do to it, especially in the heat of the summer.

At one point K texted me to let me know he had picked up fresh fruit, which made me stand up and shriek “what?!”. See, I had this silly plan to make these meme pancake fruit burgers. Ever since we started talking in October, he’s been telling me how him and his friends get together on weekend mornings to make pancakes and play board games, and I was so jealous! In Barrie, if I was lucky I could persuade some of my friends to meet me at Stacked by noon, and then play Mario Cart. So I sent him the fruit meme and told him we should do it sometime, and he didn’t seem very interested, but now we had breakfast plans!

So I slept in a bit and had a smaller breakfast than usual. He was up by 8:30 and I was over there by 9. He left me to cook the pancakes while he cut up the fruit and made the whipped cream. It’s not like the picture, but it was so, so good!

After we consumed breakfast, he informed me he had purchased a chicken. For rappie pie.

You what?

I’ve been rambling about rappie pie a lot. I miss it, and I knew it wasn’t going to be something I could make where I live currently. I wasn’t even sure if I could get rapure up here, cuz the guy who usually delivers it to me lives in Barrie. So K sat down and researched how to make it and bought the ingredients.

And I laughed and laughed.

I gave him a few opportunities to back out. He was adamant.

Rappie pie doesn’t look like much in a picture. It’s basically just a potato pie. But there’s something so deeply soul-satisfying about it, I haven’t ever made it for someone and not had them become addicted to it. It scratches the same deep carb itch as things like hashed browns, fries or latkes.

It’s Acadian, to start, like me. If you do it from scratch, you have to grate and dehydrate the potatoes and it is a bitch and a half. I did it by hand once and always bought the pre-dehydrated potatoes henceforth. You rehydrate them with chicken stock, preferably homemade. You already need cooked chicken to throw in the pie so you might as well boil them for stock. The chicken stock reconstitutes the potato into this mixture and then it’s baked in the oven for a couple of hours, my family throws bacon on the top. It’s a whole day process.

Well, foolish K had decided he wanted to try and keep me the whole day, so that’s what he would get. We put the chicken stock on (I admonished him for deciding to surprise me with it, because we could have started the stock simmering before the pancakes and be half-done already) and set about grating the potatoes. We did not get far before he realized peeling, grating and squeezing the water out of ten pounds of potatoes with cheesecloth is not a small task! Nonetheless, he persevered. We watched John Pinette while we worked. When we finally had it together, the fact that he had picked red potatoes meant the table looked like a murder scene.

Then we went for a walk.

He decided to take us to Centennial Park. This decision also wasn’t winning any awards, because we had both presumed the path was paved and it very much was not. We slogged through mud and puddles for about half an hour before giving up and going home.

When the rappie pie was finally done, it turned out that we had miscalculated the amount of time it should have spent in the oven, and the top layer was very dried out and crunchy. K didn’t mind, it reminded him of latkes, but I picked it off of mine. Then I went home because it was past 6PM and somehow I went all weekend without playing any video games!