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Kyle Cousteau pouts in frustration as his adventures are halted by the raging Nanaimo River...a frothing rapid threatens to turn this journey into a wet one.
Instead of fighting the frigid waters we dove right in. We swam here (see below) and jumped off the rocks and had all sorts of splashy fun. I almost drowned trying to get back to shore, apparently I'm a pretty weak swimmer. It was bloody cold so we warmed up with man's best friend. I hit the wine. I found this fun looking bottle at some liquor depot, I think I'll keep it and put some hippy-rocks or moon-stones or something in it, something spiritual and deep looking. Like, really bohemian and hip, ya know?
I ate far too much sugar and had a difficult time sleeping, a real pounder was ravaging my mind. We heard some critters outside and everyone was up at around 2am trying to figure out what it was, likely a mouse. I probably fell asleep around 6am as my headache dissipated and my thoughts of Mag gave birth to dreams. I was awoken by the rooster-howl that is Asher, the man is a fiery display in the morning mist. I'm surprised he ever drinks coffee, you'd think he had an IV pumping it into his veins throughout the night considering his energy in the morning. Anyhow we all took a nice stroll back down to the Nanaimo river.
I'm home now, on my 3rd coffee, with a promising remainder of day...I think pizza, chips and a few movies are in order. Even Captain Cousteau had to recharge after his adventures at sea...or, tame river as the case may be.
This was my plated dessert assignment for pastry-class. There was plenty that went wrong with this dessert before I got it right...two batches of curdled pastry-cream, one batch made with baking soda instead of cornstarch, one batch of cooked juice filling with not quite cooked cornstarch, one collapsed mold, one batch of truly vile lemon-cookies, 4 rancid figs, and one sticky knapsack due to a leaky container of strawberry-kiwi juice. I'm probably forgetting some stuff too, this assignment has kept me awake in a cold-sweat for the last week, now it's done and I'm damn happy with it.
I'll have a photo of the finished product next week once the chef gets it back to me. He liked the flavour and components (once I got them right, just barely in time) but unfortunately the composition didn't completely hold together, it was slightly collapsed by the time I presented it to him. I got my end of the month mark so far, the first week I got an 88%, last week I got a 50% for missing 2 days, 20% each day, meaning I had a 90% going into it, bummer. However he told me he didn't have any criticism for me and to keep doing what I was doing. So who cares about the mark anyways?
I'm going camping tomorrow, sort of don't want to. I want a relaxing weekend and instead I get to go get drunk with a bunch of loud, snotty 17/18 year olds in the woods. They're all my friends but sometimes an old-man needs a break from rocking the cradle. I'm getting very tired of giving certain people directions and duties but today I realized not everyone has work-experience and it's not easy for everyone to look around them and see things that need to be wiped down, scrubbed, or swept up. However I also find it incredibly arrogant of some people to be able to so obviously be pretending to look busy while staring at people who actually are busy and clearly not happy about it. How is it that I can give someone a duty to do and once it's done they'll recommence their idling and actually have the gall to stare at me on my knees, scrubbing greasy equipment? I don't like being put in the role of supervisor but I refuse to be taken advantage of, it's a very very awkward situation.
Lately I lie in bed at night and consider the benefits of finishing the year at Algonquin College after my 1st semester here, but I won't. Sometimes I consider the benefits of living in a handmade shanty on Salt Spring Island and setting a honky-tonk piano loose upon the placid of the island twilight, I won't though. I consider leaving what I have now to memory and heading to San Francisco, thumb to the road, and completing my education in the back of a 45degree sweat-swamp-stink kitchen, I won't do that either. I think I've finally left my senseless spontaneity behind, maybe I used to run from time but the only way to ever get anything done is to compromise with it.
I'm super into John Wesley Harding, Nashville Skyline, and Blood On The Tracks lately. Falling off his motorcycle was the best thing that ever happened to Bob Dylan.
I feel like I should write something here but I think it's Saturday morning and I'm just bored, maybe if I fetch my coffee it'll start to flow.
Ok, inspiration. All of the roommates are in-house and settled and borrowing my stuff. I don't mind though 'cause they're definitely making contributions too. So far I've bartered a vine-ripened tomato and my glass coffee-pot is missing some...glass. It still works but there may or may not be tiny shards floating in every cup I have. This is what you get when roommates do your dishes for you. The two newer roommates are french, France-french. Really friendly guys. They drink whiskey, not wine. And they make pasta out of ketchup and milk, not snails. They don't smoke either.
I went to Victoria last Monday. I had to get some shoes and I figured I'd have better luck at one of many Victoria skate-shops than the one in Nanaimo whose stock I already have memorized in alphabetical order. It was pretty cool travelling alone again, I've always had some of that in me, that loner thing, but I haven't really done it in awhile, and as amazing as it was going cross-country with Mag it was pretty nostalgic being on a Greyhound for 4 hours and wandering the streets and alleys of Victoria alone. Plus now that the campus is overwhelmed with students I'm feeling it's stretch-marks and getting a little overwhelmed myself. I don't love Victoria but last time I was there, a friend, Emily Ashford, brought me to an amazing decrepit old beach, dead stumps and drift wood everywhere. We went with her beautiful dog Rosie, who I just recently sadly learned is gone. She was a beautiful, friendly dog. One of the most well-mannered big sucks I've ever met. There's always Fan Tan Alley too. Walking into this buttcrack of the city is pretty surreal. This is probably the closest the world will ever come to having a time-machine.
Anyways I bought some shoes and the cashier was pretty hip when I said "do you offer a student discount?" and he replied "no but 'cause you're getting cool digs, yes". Being a slave to fashion sometimes pays off.
School's cool. On Thursday we went into the hot-kitchen for the first time. Up until then every thing we'd done was preceded by a demo, and everything we did was monitored and none of it was on a deadline, I was actually typically one of the last people to present my food. We would make stuff for sale to the caf but it wasn't being rushed out to the caf for lunch. On Thursday we were herded into the main-kitchen (as opposed to the lab-kitchen) and I was instructed to make 2 loaves of bread or 1 loaf and 1 batch of buns for the cafeteria, due to be out at 11:30am. Panic mode! I went at it and in 5 hours managed to bake off 36 sundried tomato and garlic buns. It took me a long time because I wanted to get a lot done and sort of overloaded myself, while I was making those I also prepped some cinnamon rolls and this dough made with mashed potatoes...but the potatoes weren't fully cooked and didn't mash in the Hobart blender properly, long story short it resulted in me picking out huge chunks of potato from a sticky bread-dough to reboil them. It wasn't my proudest moment, days like that really mash up my ego. Not in a healthy kind of levelling way, in a destructive paranoid kinda way, makes me ask myself too many stupid questions. FORTUNATELY on Friday I was stricken with godspeed and in one short day managed to perfectly execute my cinnamon-rolls and potato-loaf that had fermented over night, prep and cook off half of a HUGE batch of whole-wheat buns (talking a 10 pound dough here), and prep this amazing pecan and oat whole wheat dough. It's a whole-wheat base with oats, honey and big chunks of pecan in it. I felt better after that, I guess those unanswered broken ego questions can be put to rest after all...until the next earth-shattering failure. I was given compliments by the teacher both days which kind of went over my head but is still nice, and I got my marks from August...91%. Pretty irrelevant and useless but still a confidence-booster.
I didn't get the job with the school so today I'm going to apply at a hotel, a conference centre, and 2 restaurants for weekend shifts or whatever's available. Probably a bad idea but I need some aid in finding my way Eastward at Christmas, and also I find the busier I am, the less I spend...plus free meals are typically included with cook's jobs.
I'm gonna make some bread and a pie today too, and skateboard obviously. My ankles and feet are ravaged from skateboarding but yesterday I went swimming in the mystical waters of Colliery Dam Park and I feel like a new youth so I'll give the skatepark another shot after a brief day long retirement.
I should get dressed. The best thing about being a cook is that it's perfectly respectable and almost expected to apply for a job in ripped jeans, a purple t-shirt, and ratty skateboard shoes, with a dusty skateboard tucked under one arm and a pile of crumpled resumes tucked under the other.
