Today’s deck is the Lieselle’s Eternal Tarot.
There’s a category of deck I’ve noticed that is “[Someone]’s Deck”. It’s not a theme and sometimes it’s not even the illustrator. No diss to the practice, mind you, just a curious thing I noticed. The deck itself is nice, I’m a sucker for cross-stitch ink illustrations. Shame about the minor arcana not having the usual illustrations, though.
Today’s reading is advising that sometimes you can’t really solve every conflict, the best thing is to move on.
I don’t feel like it’s related to anything specific going on, but I do appreciate the wisdom.
One question I always get when meeting new people here is about food, about the traditional food from Venezuela. That’s easy to answer it’s also insteresting to see the reactions… but then they ask me if I still make that sort of thing here and that’s where casual conversation can turn weird for me.
’cause I don’t. The only thing I miss from Venezuela is the people, specifically my household, my family, my pets. Especially since by the time I moved out a lot of my friends had moved away already.
All of which is to say that while I will never deny that I’m Venezuelan and I’ll make sure to give a good image of my people if possible, that’s more a recognition of “Venezuelan” as an immutable part of myself rather than any love for the country or culture specifically, because well… when I lived there I never fit anywhere, I intrinsically fit better in Japan just on personality alone than I ever did in Venezuela, and that extends to foods, it’s hard to be nostalgic when you weren’t attached back in your birthplace to begin with.
I mean, i’ts hard for me to be nostalgic in general, but still.
That said, while it’s really hard for me to have nostalgia for the traditional Venezuelan food, that is not to say I don’t basically eat what I ate when I lived there. Arepa is the big one, the people’s food, but I was the sort of weirdo that preferred bread over it, and to this day my go-to food is still bread or sandwiches and the like.
I still cook meat the way we cooked it back at my parents’ place, and one of the biggest breakthroughs I had last year was finding the same type of vinegar I bought before moving.
Sidenote, I’ve been making an active effort to not call my parents’ place “home”, not because I’m not attached to the place anymore, but because in my mind it devalues the place I’ve been living in for the last 5 years that IS my current home.
Anyway, you get the point, I have negative attachment to what’s traditional, but that’s not to say that I don’t have traditions I still adhere to. And one of those traditions I’ve been chasing is Papas Arrugadas.
The name translates roughly to “wrinkled potatoes”. It’s a recipe where potatoes are cooked in salt to the point they kinda dry a little. When just made the salt coating is an interesting texture but then after they cool they become slightly chewy in a way I enjoy.
I’ve been making attempts over my years in Japan to make them to no avail, so today I finally decided to check how the heck the recipe goes.
So long story short I was missing a step. First you cook the potatoes on roughly 1/4th the weight of the potatoes in salt, that I was already doing. The step I missed was that after draining the water I have to pour more salt WHILE THE POT IS STILL OVER FIRE, that was the step I missed.
I bought potatoes on my way back yesterday and tried it first thing after waking up. The sounds and smells were actually lining up with what I remembered… and then I got so excited I overdid it and the potatoes exploded because they were too tender, the pot was too full, and I was too unsubtle with the shaking.
On one hand the surviving potato skins were exactly as I remembered… on the other the exposed potato innards were drenched in the tons of salt with no skin to protect them.
Next time will be killer instead of killer because of sodium overdose, just you wait.
Something interesting that I learned looking up the recipe is that it’s apparently from Tenerife, the Canary Islands, which is where my grandpa’s family is from. It also had a note that ideally you should use seawater which gives a lot of cultural context to the recipe that I didn’t have before.
That aside, I had to go to the office but it was still early, and by early I mean like 3AM so I got to assembling another shelf.
After that and finding all the leftover Warhammer Books around I was almost done, but I had to catch my breath and stuff. And then by the time I was back to normal I had to go to the office so I’ll leave that for later.
I did free up around 3 or 4 containers in the process, however, which is a nice metric going on.
Anyway, onto the office. There were two main tasks today: paying taxes and waiting for a delivery. The latter came first though. And what’s the deliver you ask?
A whiteboard.
Since the office is meant to be a proper workspace, I wanted something that was less cumbersome that opening google drawings or using paper that might get lost before I can finish the idea.
I was also able to do this.
I’m an adult.
With that out of the way I went to pay the taxes and this might be the first time where my messy sleep schedule bites me in some way because the payment was due for the 20th.
I could swear it was 20th.
In fact it was 20th when I woke up but not anymore.
So here we are.
Oops.
There’ll be a penalty later (minor in the grand scheme of things but something that should be avoided) but it’s not like I sandbagged it on purpose.