food plans

[tielan]

beef soup: roast bones + carrot + onion + celery
(crisp up egg shells after)
- stew bone mixture after for most of the day

salmon steaks
chicken breast (frozen)
bacon rashers (frozen)
whole chicken
goat roast rump
pork neck (?) roast
whole fish
beef steaks
pork belly (plan was originally to make sticky rice parcels with it)

One of the goals is to eat as much of this as possible in the next while avoiding buying anything new.

Just gotta remember that I have all this protein in the freezer and I don't need to purchase more.

--

It's only just starting to hit me that I'm going away in less than three weeks. THREE WEEKS OMG.

After not travelling internationally for two and a half years it's a little daunting to be going back overseas, even though I've seen plenty of people who've gone overseas and had great times. Also, it's been six years since I did a round-the-world trip, going through Europe and America; the last six years have been largely confined to Asia - visiting my dad in Vietnam, and once going to Indonesia.

The world - in particularly the US and Europe - has changed a lot in six years.

--

We're still struggling a bit with what's going to happen when I go on holidays and it's just the chooks and the cats with the neighbours to look after them... I wanted to get someone to stay over but B1 kept on insisting she could do both houses (hah) because I think she doesn't want someone in our space. Also, I must admit that the house is not a particularly nice place to stay (in the midst of everyone's mess) and although I've inflicted that on people before, it's not particularly host-y. So we're just going to ask the neighbours to drop in and feed and pet the cats during the week and hope that they don't get too lonely.

I have a friend up in the blue mountains who I could have asked; she has health issues and is pretty much a shut-in, and she's living in a hole of a place which she doesn't quite think she deserves, but she thinks that "well, there are other people worse off, I can't complain" which is one of those things that DRIVES ME UTTERLY BATTY because, yes, there are other people worse off but you totally can and should expect and hope for better for yourself. *sigh*

But no. B1 is not onboard.

--

Another cleaner has ghosted us.

This one is scared of birds and the chickens roaming the yards freaked her out when she arrived. And then she didn't do the job (the vacuum cleaner wasn't working and I didn't have time to fix it at the time), and so she left and said she'd be back the next day. I messaged her the next day and got silence, so I guess I've been ghosted.

That makes three cleaners (1 cleaning company, 2 individual cleaners) who haven't stuck the dismount. To be fair to the cleaning company, they did have someone who did the cleaning for us for a couple of years, and then things got sketchy during COVID and then the cleaner stopped working for them...

*sigh* It's mostly just having someone else to deal with the dust and fluff and give the floor a mop so we're not walking on caked food or shit all the time.

Comments

[eggsbenedict]

Yay for travelling real soon! D'oh for pet-sitting woes. Mad Paws lets you search for someone who can visit your house on a schedule, in case you haven't tried that yet.

It's so hard to find a reliable cleaner, but the cleaning companies are having staff shortages like everyone else. :( Otherwise... robot vacuum? That helped us stay on top of things for years, but it carked it a while ago. Now we're using an industrial vacuum cleaner (surprisingly cheap and effective) with a very long extension cord so we don't have to keep unplugging it between rooms, it's weird what a difference that makes.

[tielan]

Yes, plenty of staff shortages - that's why we're hunting for a new cleaner, because the cleaning company we were using lost the woman who did our cleaning and hasn't been able to fill the space since.

[wpadmirer]

I've never been able to afford a cleaner, and I wonder what it would be like. I think Pat would not like having someone else in the house. He's probably like B1 about that.

I, on the other hand, would gladly pay someone to clean my bathroom and mop and clean the floors. Those are things I hate doing.

[tielan]

It bothers B1 more about the fur and dust than it does me - although I am wary of exactly what we tread around the house coming in. Still, when we moved in, I said that I didn't want to be spending a day of my free time looking after the house, that we could afford to pay someone. But apart from finding someone regular, the problem is that B1 feels that a cleaner should clean the house to her own standards, which are both very exacting and 'her own house' standards.

She still thinks I'd pay her to clean the house, but the downside of her doing the work is that she has even less energy for doing things and more exhaustion and I have to live with that, too.

It's a conundrum and a tiring one at that.

[wpadmirer]

Oh, that's a real problem.

Yeah, I think the only way to put it to her is that you want to protect her health.

I'm fortunate in that none of my relatives is close by.