My biggest transcription client is keeping me busy this week! I finally learned over the winter to take on as much as I can in such situations even if it means a week of 14+ hour days since the droughts can be quite severe. I still have another four hours to do on the current project, but it’s 9PM and the deadline is 11AM tomorrow, so I may push on for only another hour or so. I worked till 11PM Monday and 10PM yesterday, so I’m feeling a little knackered.

The thing with transcription is that you actually have to work to get paid. It’s not a job where you can stare out the window for five minutes and pad that into your invoice. You’re paid to complete so much audio regardless of how long it takes you. When you have 10 hours worth of typing to do, that’s 10 hours of sitting at your desk moving your foot and hands. You can’t do that straight, at least not for several days in a row. So the days grow quite long as the breaks increase when fatigue sets in.

I put in a good morning, then took a long break for lunch. Charles gave me the heads up yesterday that Nels is returning this weekend to haul stuff out of his yard. So I spent a half hour or so doing a final audit of all the junk and hauling a few more pallets to finish my boardwalk and to bring to Ken. If I catch sight of Nels and he appears more rational than the first time we met, I’m going to see if I can convince him to have the water and power turned on to his property, with me paying the utility bills for the rest of the summer.

Then, I packed up the dolly and tools that I borrowed from Charles and trundled over there with two empty jugs to fill with water. No one was home, so I just left the things in plain sight, filled up, and headed home to make some food.

Reading Apartment Therapy this morning, I found a recipe for onigiri, Japanese rice balls, so I had that on the brain even though I didn’t have nori (seaweed), never mind anything interesting to stuff in them. And then I remembered something my cousin gave me last summer, a sachet she’d been given by a Japanese exchange student. All the text on it is in Japanese so I had no idea what the contents were although I could read (if not comprehend) a lot of the words.

I pulled it out and realised the picture on the front was of onigiri! I was holding mix ins for them! I put some rice on to cook and opened up the sachet. WOAH! It smelled like fish food! I could identify bits of dried nori, salmon, and shrimp as well as coarse salt and sesame seeds. I figured that if it was like most Japanese food, it would be addictive despite the strange smell.
Once the rice was ready, I decided it needed a little something, so I turned it into sushi (rice seasoned with sweet rice vinegar) and then put in a little bit of the fishy stuff before making up a few balls. As I suspected, the fishy stuff was addictive! So this was a very good first introduction to onigiri and you can blame my internet connection for there not being any pictures. I am amused that lunch was made with a sachet from Tokyo given to me in Montreal, vinegar bought in Hampton Roads, and rice bought in Dallas!

I powered through a good chunk of the afternoon, then took a break to restring and clean my new clothesline and make dinner. Now, I’m getting my second wind and should be able to get a little more done tonight so I don’t have to rush in the morning.

I badly need to get some groceries, but that takes about three hours out of the day, so I’m hoping I won’t have time to get any tomorrow… I have decided to go to Willow Bunch since I need to drop some stuff off at the thrift store, so maybe that would cut the grocery run to two hours. I only realised today that prices at their Co-Op would be the same as in Assiniboia, only the selection would be even more restricted.

Back to work I go. I surely have the fittest fingers in all the land!

The weather today was YUCKY. Very cold and dark and humid and it’s now been raining for hours and hours. I just wanted to make a big pot of soup and go to sleep in it. Even though I ended up working a 14 hour day (I am so exhausted), I still had time to make a delicious pot of chicken soup by working at it during my five to ten minute breaks. Working from home is awesome!

Late morning, I started by making the stock. I used about four cups water, half of a chopped onion, one chopped carrot, and one chopped celery stalk, plus lots of salt and pepper and several cloves of garlic. And of course, the entire carcass of the roasted chicken I bought yesterday, minus the rest of the breast meat.

Once I had a bit of hot water in the pot, I added some to the chicken container to get all the tasty bits on the bottom.

I had quite a bit of breast meat left. I don’t like dark meat, so I just let that go in the stock for flavour.

Several hours of olfactory torture later, the stock was ready. It was sooooo delicious.

I strained out all the solids and then let the stock cool down a bit before transferring it to a smaller pot and putting it in the freezer to get the fat to congeal.

An hour before I wanted to eat, I took the pot out of the freezer, skimmed off the fat, and then transferred the stock back to the bigger pot. The stock was very rich and strong, so I diluted it with two cups of water, then added the rest of the onion (chopped) as well as carrots, celery, and a half cup of parboiled rice. I don’t really like pasta in soup as it gets mushy, so I’ll take chicken and rice over chicken noodle any day.

I let that start simmering while I diced up the meat and then I went back to work for about 20 minutes. I added the meat very near the end (about 10 minutes left of cooking), otherwise it would have gone all icky on me.

And here’s a bowl of the finished soup!

This stuff was GOOD. I’m not just saying that because I made it, it just was wonderful! Very savoury with a rich broth and the right ratio of liquid to ‘stuff’ that wasn’t over cooked. Yum!

Lesson learned this week; a $10 pre-roasted bird is VERY good value for me and it’s worth my buying a whole bird even though I don’t eat dark meat. I’ll get about four meals out of this one bird. Maybe five if I make biscuits to go with lunch tomorrow.