tastes like dehydrated victory

Remember my experiment on Sunday with dried marinated tofu? I'm happy to report that it keeps at room temperature for at least three days without going sour or mushy as fresh tofu would. I must say "at least", though, because it was so yummy that I ate the last of what I made last night.

Deets? The marinade was soy sauce with a few (too many) drops of sesame oil, and I marinated the tofu for an hour while my kale chips dried. I dried the tofu for two and a half hours at 135°F (58 C). The only reason I didn't do it longer was that I had to leave for Kirkland and I didn't want to leave it unsupervised for two or three more hours. It probably would have benefitted from at least another half hour. The linear dimensions of the tofu shrank by half, meaning that (firm!) fresh tofu is at least 80% water. My dehydrator could, in theory, handle four pounds fresh at a time, as surely it shall.

Between dried tofu, hard boiled eggs, and Clif bars, my protein needs for Burning Man should be taken care of. I wonder if strangers would like that better than dried fish. Dried fish are less delicate, but they're not good for your breath.

My son strives to fail.

[This post is not locked. Deal.]

I spent yesterday evening in Kirkland at the old place as usual, eating dinner & walking the dog with my son. After moving a few things in preparation for showing the house next week*, we sat on the couch and talked about the Wendling.

He's dropped a second of his three classes for the quarter, and he tried to do so without his mother finding out. It turns out that he never changed his password, so my ex saw the correspondence between him and his prof. He now admits at least to his mother that he's not ready for college, so she's told him he needs to work 20 hours a week either at PCC or volunteering.

Trouble is, PCC has cut his hours, saying that the don't want to schedule him during the day because his "bagging proficiency" isn't what it would need to be, i.e. he moves like a sloth. I'd noticed early on and I always wondered how they put up with that; I guess the answer is that they don't, entirely.

And why is my son moving like a sloth, failing out of school, and generally being a shiftless punk? Because he's been blowing off his ADD meds. He doesn't like the way they make him feel, and they make him want to skip meals, which freaks out his Aspie sense of eating properly.

First, the solution to these problems with the meds is to either change the dose or the med, not to just quietly stop. He clearly cannot adult without them, and that's a goddamn problem. If a transphobic asshole shivs me this morning while I'm waiting for the E line, he's fucked, and he will have fucked himself.

Second, if a med switch doesn't help and it's a choice between eating unlike other people and being a functioning adult, you do the latter. Just make sure you get enough to eat.

I have never been more disappointed in my son, and that's saying quite a bit.

My ex has asked me to watch him on Saturday when he takes his meds - 80 mg of Vyvance. She says his brain works real good on 100 mg, but if he takes that dose too many times in a row he'll get paranoid hallucinations. Christ on a pogo stick.



*She asked me to come Tuesday, but then bailed at the last minute because arthritis, thereby wrecking my social plans. I have informed her that she needs to not do that again, especially when what she wants me to do takes a tall, healthy woman all of 15 minutes.