August Down

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.