happy October!

Fall has, technically, been here for nearly ten days, but the weather's still too summery for me. Can't wait for the truly brisk weather.

My night in the tent went well-- perhaps too well: I went to bed around 3AM (might still be on Pacific time) and got up around 10:30. Didn't actually leave the tent until 11AM; the Korean guys were taking a smoke break when I sheepishly shuffled past them like a freshman girl doing the Walk of Shame.

Yesterday's spaghetti went beautifully. Sorry for the lack of pictures. You'll have to imagine the harmonious combination of

-olive and grapeseed oil
-5 strips of bacon, minced
-1.5 pounds of ground beef
-1 pound of sausage
-hand-crushed garlic
-half a large onion
-dried Italian herbs (but no parsley, alas)
-salt and pepper
-1 tbsp. sugar
-1 medium carrot, minced and boiled soft
-p'yogo (shiitake)
-3 green bell peppers
-1 gochu (chili pepper)
-1 jalapeno pepper
-canned tomato (2)

We did have to cheat, though: the sauce was way too watery after the addition of two cans of chopped tomatoes and no tomato paste; it was too late in the day to do a proper reduction, so we relied on two heaping teaspoonfuls of cornstarch to thicken the mix.

But the results were quite tasty, and now we've got enough sauce to last us several meals.

Today, as part of the job hunt, I'm sending a query to a place called Alexandria Translations, to see whether they could use a temp staffer. I'm not hopeful: French is, on their pay chart, a "Group A" language, i.e., one of the most common ones, which means it pays the least (too bad I'm not good enough at Korean to try my hand at that: it pays substantially more). I also couldn't help noticing that the current staff is composed almost entirely of French speakers, which makes it unlikely that they'll need more.

Still, it might be worth a try.

I'll also be helping out with tonight's dinner: chili dawgs. And no, we won't be performing one of those horrifying spaghetti-sauce-to-chili conversions; this'll be a separate sauce.

Happy October, folks.


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