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About Kristin

I was born and raised in a tiny town in the great blue mountains of northern California, where cattle outnumber people. My daddy was a ranch hand, as well as a mechanic for tractors and farm equipment, and most summer nights were spent staying up until two a.m. in a baler, watching him weigh the bales and scare coyote and rabbit out of the fields.

In the mornings, just before the break of dawn, my mom, my brother and I would take a quad out to the field by our house and mom would push the wheel lines back while my brother and I wrapped our arms and legs around the steel pipes and rolled with them. After school I’d sit on the hard floorboards of a swather while dad cut the alfalfa round the edge of the field.

Back then I wanted to be an artist, an old-fashioned one. One that would get commissioned to paint a portrait of some higher class subject, or spent hours sitting at a pottery wheel to create some sort of masterpiece.

I wanted to be a writer too. I wrote my first book on hexagonal-shaped pink and purple paper that my mom had bought for me, that I’d stapled together and illustrated myself.

Throughout my childhood I never stopped writing. I scribbled ideas in notebooks and finally progressed to using the old dinosaur computer we had to type out pages of fairytales.

When I was ten, my grandparents bought me a laptop to fuel more of my imagination. Then I started writing pages upon pages of failed novels.  

By the time I was twelve, my parents separated to later divorce, and I stayed with my mom, who was struggling to both raise me and live under a single income.

Shortly after, my older brother graduated high school and left to Oregon to attend Culinary school, which left me to start and finish high school and do the majority of the cooking and cleaning round the house.

(In those days we ate a lot of pizza.)

In a sink or swim way, I learned how to cook eggs, mashed potatoes, rice, etc. I even made my own barbecue sauce once, although I never wrote down the recipe.

When I was 19, a college dropout and back to living with my mom, I started my first job at a Taco Bell, where I first truly dabbled in a cooking experience, of some sort. I stayed at that job for five months, until I had enough money to comfortably buy a used car and move back to the college town I abandoned months prior.

That time I couldn’t find a job or pay my rent, so I moved back home again, and got the first job I could get my hands on – the California Conservation Corps. Working there made an adult out of me; it made me gain muscle and sweat and ache, and it hurt me in more ways than just that. It slightly crippled my knee, and that’s what woke me up and scared me into quitting. I thought my knee would never be the same because that’s what I’d been told about those kind of injuries, and for months afterwards, it wasn’t.

In February, I started talking to a guy I’d talked to off and on since I was a Junior in high school, and it took me three years to realize he was perfect for me, and he was everything I wanted all along. On his birthday, the twenty-seventh, he told me his friends were all working and he was drinking by himself, so I got in my car at 7:30 at night and drove the two hour distance between us to say ‘happy birthday’ in person, and less than an hour after I got to his house, I became his girlfriend. I’d spend the next year and a few months driving the distance on my days off to see him.

After the Conservation Corps., it was my brother that got me my next job in a new restaurant and distillery (where he worked as a pizza chef), as a hostess and later a prep cook. There, I wore the chef coat and worked in a busy kitchen with constant yells of “sharp, coming through, sharp!” or “hot, hot, right behind you!”

In that kitchen, I learned what seasonings go best with calamari (Old Bay and lemon), how to properly hold a knife, that diced potatoes will turn black if they aren’t kept in water and bacon will hold beef patties together if they are too lean. I learned how to make buttermilk pie and lemon cake, how to prepare a traditional Caesar salad, and I watched the Head Chef (at the time) fillet an Alaskan Halibut.

Shortly after I started cooking (for real), the hostess that replaced me had to quit due to unforeseen circumstances, and I resumed my position at the front counter.

Then it was April, and the burger joint in town that had been remodeling all winter re-opened and needed people to work in the kitchen, and a former coworker contacted me to see if I wanted the job. Knowing it was my only opportunity to get back into it, I accepted, put in two weeks notice and started to memorize the menu, but then the time came for me to start, and I was never told what time I needed to come in, it was continuously stalled and put off until I told them I’d find something else.

My boyfriend’s dad came to the rescue with that one, landing me a job in a department store, because he had worked with the manager there before. Little did I know, that would be the worst job I’d ever have. The amount of stress I endured made my chest hurt and left me with a tension headache everyday, up until I decided I didn’t care. It wasn’t worth sixteen hours a week at minimum wage, so for months I looked for something else, anything else, but I’d reel in my line and find moss.

For ten months, June to March, I endured it and kept going in every morning with a cheerful attitude, insisting to myself that today would be better; I wouldn’t get stressed out, I’d get everything done before we opened, there would be no problems that would set me back, I wouldn’t get any rude comments from coworkers about not doing enough or not doing it good enough and somebody would actually help me get the job done. Every day my insistence of ‘today will be better’ was always crushed.

In March a few days after my twenty-first birthday, I snapped. I missed a prep day due to snow, and I knew I’d have to do twice the work in a 1/4 of the time it would take, plus train somebody to help me do my job and deal with rejection from upper management if I tried to ask for help. That put me into a restless sleep and made me get out of bed at one a.m., three and a half hours before I would have had to leave for work, and it was then that I decided to quit, so I texted my boss and went back to bed. When I woke up it felt like a weight had been lifted, and I never felt more at peace in my entire life.

By May, I moved in to my boyfriend’s house with his parents, his younger brother, his brother’s girlfriend, the five dogs, the four cats, the five (or so) snakes, the three (or so) lizards, two tarantulas, two fish, a snail, a gecko and a coop full of hens; and I’d started a new full-time job at a senior center as – you guessed it – a solo cook for a group of sixty.

It really surprised me, how much I didn’t know.

I didn’t know safe meat temperature, how to make tiramisu, meatloaf, mousse, what ‘braised’ or ‘Julienne’ meant, I still can’t find a happy medium when it comes to cooking rice, but here I am. 

So thanks for reading my first post, I hope that you like it and will follow this amateur blog for updates on life and good food.

Short Excerpts from a Book I’m Writing

I’ve been trying to write a book since I was sixteen. My biggest inspiration was the very beginning of the Last of the Mohicans. I loved the way James Fenimore Cooper described the land:

“A wide and apparently, an impervious boundary of forests”, “struggling against the rapids of the streams, or in effecting the rugged passes of the mountains”.

It inspired me to write this:

“In a vast, docile wilderness, a wind chill whipped through an abundance of pine trees, generating a rippling effect of green from an eagle’s view and from the windows of the autumn mist. Cutting through the mountains a few hundred feet to the west, was a river of cold blue, turning itself over the rocks and rapids and housing a school of salmon which jumped from their sanctuary in smooth repetition. Bear would gather at the mouth and wait for a flash of silver to jump unknowingly into their jaws. Scattered gold light lit the passage of fox to run among the roots of the forest floor, which was littered in cones and decaying flora. Nearby a doe and her fawns would trek through, pausing for a minute to warm in the god rays.”

My favorite series, hands down is the Harry Potter series, of course. I’ve always been mesmerized by the way J. K. Rowling can tie any loose end together and make underlying connections that still have yet to be discovered by readers. I love how reading and re-reading her books always offer something new. In fact it was one of the books in the Harry Potter series that inspired my next excerpt. She mentioned Hagrid’s Patchwork quilt, and thinking about the quilt, led me to write this:

“The front door’s frosted patchwork of stained glass colored the snow where the light fell, and the merry sounds of music and laughter muffled behind it. This was it. I pulled the heavy door open with a loud rusty creak and stepped over the threshold. Every nail in the mud room was packed with traveler’s cloaks, coats, woolen sweaters, hats and scarves, hiding both of the log benches. Wet and muddy shoes and boots lined the red wool rug, soaking the floor in dirty puddles. I hung my cloak on one of the lesser burdened nails and went through to the front room, where a woman in a commoner’s clothing stood behind a wooden desk.”

Whether or not these excerpts will form to become a book is unknown. Whether I will ever write an entire novel and publish it is unknown. But for now, I know this:

I can write, my writing is good. I am talented. I can write a novel.

New Hobby

I started a new hobby about a month ago, and this is something I’ve always wanted to do besides blogging. I started thrifting clothes from thrift stores, garage sales and storage at the house and reselling them for profit.

I’ve been in the reselling business for a little while with my Etsy shop (VintageByKristinShop) now CLOSED, following the lead of one of my favorite youtubers, The Crazy Lamp Lady. I found vintage and antique dishes from Facebook Marketplace, the Salvation Army and the Goodwill in Redding.

I found things like a Currier & Ives casserole dish, milk glass, Danube teacups, an Inspirado Biscotti cookie jar, and several Starbucks mugs and tumblers.

Several months later with no bites, I started shopping off of Poshmark, and bought a few things that were name brand for a cheaper price. People were selling everything on there. So I started by listing a black and white dress with a sun, moon and star pattern on it and a couple of unopened Artisan soaps. I wasn’t really expecting any sales, and I completely forgot I had things listed until I came back from my hunting trip and found that someone had purchased my dress.

The woman, unfortunately, bought it right after I left out of service for two weeks, and cancelled the sale after I didn’t respond.

I decided to download another app to buy things from called Mercari, which incidentally turned out to be better for me because it has cheaper shipping costs than Poshmark, in most cases.

So I decided to list some old clothes from my closet that were just taking up space on Mercari, hoping I could get rid of them. My first listing was a Calvin Klein cardigan that I’ve had for awhile. I had no idea it was Calvin Klein, and when I posted it, it sold quickly, for $8 and after the fees, I took home $7.20. Then I sold a Juicy Couture three bottle travel size perfume set for $15, and after the fee of $1.50, I made $13.50. Then I sold a “random beauty bag” full of unopened makeup and beauty products I had lying around that I wasn’t going to use in an Ipsy bag that I didn’t want. That sold for $5, and because I had free shipping on it, I only took home $0.15; but that was okay with me because it was less stuff in the already compact bedroom I share with my boyfriend. Those three sold all in one day and I was amazed at my progress.

I wasn’t prepared at all. I didn’t have anything to ship them in. Dustin’s mom, however, happens to work from home as a shipper for a company her cousin owns. Thank god. I managed to fold some of the packing paper that she uses into packages and tape them up. Then I had to forward the emails I was sent by Mercari  for the postage labels to her email, so I could print them. I ended up using her postage scale and packaging tape too.

The next day I sold a yellow t-shirt for $6 with free shipping so I only made $0.15.

The day after I sold the sun, moon and stars dress for $7 with free shipping so my take home was $1.05. Then a pair of sunglasses that looked like Breakfast at Tiffany’s for $6 with a take home of $1.15.  Korean face masks for $5 and free shipping, so I took $1.51, and a brown blouse that Dustin’s mom didn’t want for $6 making $0.15 after shipping and fees.

Fast forward to today, I’ve made 39 sales, totaling $176.32. 35 of those sales were made on Mercari, 3 were made on Poshmark and 1 was Facebook Marketplace.

My biggest sale so far has been the cost of a printer – $50, which I sold on Facebook Marketplace.

I was doing very well for myself for awhile, and then I got in trouble with the post office. Apparently First Class, Priority and Flat Rate actually have meanings. I wasn’t paying attention to the boxes, because a box is a box, until the government steps in.

I was sending First Class postage in Priority boxes, and then they got sent back to my address with a very angry note attached, letting me know that I was basically an idiot because I don’t know the difference between Priority and First Class. For gods sake they’re boxes.

Thrifting clothes, which I really shouldn’t be doing at this stage, but I can’t help it – turned out to be more than I was expecting.

I have found a Banana Republic Wool Blazer, a Banana Republic knit sweater, a Banana Republic Leather Jacket, a Cashmere Charter Club Luxury sweater, a Cashmere cardigan by Valerie Stevens, a Ralph Lauren sweater (Men’s), a Calvin Klein button down (Men’s – not yet listed), a Orvis Sporting Goods Silk button down blouse, two Keurigs – one of the basic models in the color Red, and another a B60 Special Edition (which is up for sale), the Red one I’ve decided to keep to gift to my mom, which she preferred over the Special Edition.

As for other listings, I have Men’s L and XL shirts, Women’s XXS-L shirts, sweaters, jackets, coats, Women’s size S-L and Junior’s size 5-9 bottoms, I have yet to list shoes and many bags of assorted clothing.

Brands include American Eagle Outfitters, Calvin Klein, Forever 21, Hurley, Billabong, Banana Republic, GAP, Ariat, Kendall & Kylie, Fabletics, Abercrombie & Fitch, Michael Antonio, Guess, Hollister, Keurig, Ralph Lauren, Starbucks, Nike, Cosmopolitan, Roxy, etc.

Follow me, make offers, and get great deals!

Poshmark: https://poshmark.com/closet/kristinevans538

Mercari: Kristin Evans

eBay: kkse2-35

Hawes Farms

So typically around this time of year, I’ll start to see pictures on Instagram of girls in sweaters posing with pumpkins in the pumpkin patches, or pictures of Starbucks coffee dates, or twinkle lights with blankets and Netflix. I envy those girls. For one thing, my phone camera sucks, for another I don’t feel all that photogenic and my boyfriend isn’t a photographer.

From our trip to Hawes Farms, I have nothing to show. Also, because I have a tendency to live in the moment and completely forget to take pictures, completely forget to post those pictures on social media and then I beat myself up later for it because I could have documented this year’s “fall shit” in a scrapbook when I’m married with kids.

Hawes Farms is a pumpkin patch. Or it just started out that way. It’s a pumpkin patch with a corn maze, a cow train, haunted corn mazes, food, concerts, etc. I’d never been there, I didn’t even know it existed.

Dustin’s mom bought passes for us to go and kept pushing them on us on the weekends.

So we went for the night time part.

I’m not one to complain, but this place was definitely only for kids. The cow train had oil barrels that you sit in and you get taken around the length of the farm, but they were small. There was zip lining that was maybe ten feet long and not very high off the ground. There were go carts that went in a very small circle.

Instead of picking pumpkins like I was expecting there was one pallet of pumpkins with a price tag next to them. The corn maze was fun, although we never actually got very far and we were spied on by a drone.

We sat down with drinks and garlic fries and people watched for awhile. We watched while a concert started up in the back. The woman who was serving made my crown and coke at a 90:10 ratio and I had to chug it before we went into the haunted corn mazes. So I was feeling pretty good. So was Dustin, who was four or five beers deep by then.

The haunted corn mazes turned out to be not very long and full of jump scares. It wasn’t very scary, instead we found entertainment in scaring the actors. Dustin 1 – Kristin 1.

Dustin scared a “Doctor” who was performing some sort of disembowelment surgery. He was following the last group of people and Dustin walked right up behind him and he jumped when he turned around but then immediately went right back into character.

The next haunt, I sneaked up on someone who was pacing in a small storage unit, and yelled “boo!” and made him jump. We made a game out of it and came out laughing.

The last thing, one of the most exciting ones – at first, was the zombie paintball. We were herded into a storage unit, explained what to do and the safety part of it, then herded out to a tractor hauling two trailers. The paintball guns were attached to the rails of the trailer and could only move on a pivot, the “zombies” were just people in padding that looked nothing like zombies whatsoever and the area was a junkyard full of crap. We only got fifty paint balls, and maybe I was just irritated by that point but the high school kids supervising the ride were annoying.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get to shoot the pumpkin cannon, pick a pumpkin or anything like that, because that was the morning part and I forgot to bring the tickets for it.

So Dustin and I left to meet our friends at the bar. Which we ended up leaving early, because Dustin had to work the next day and the Monster Truck show was letting out so there were tons of people flooding in.

The tickets, which were supposed to be season passes ended up only being good for one use, even though they cost $300+.

The Hunt

The town defies the laws of physics with it’s street-front porches and barns that lean. It’s country dilapidated; being once a bustling source of gold and lumber in the sixties. Now, due to lack of jobs, it’s a town of biologists mainly studying salmon, or retirees that don’t mind the cold.

In the winter, the roads close, so no one goes in and no one comes out. It’s a hunker down, canned goods, generator operated, hunter and gatherer bitch of a winter, but its the kind of thing that a hearty soul like most that live there can handle. Although some still leave in travel trailers for smoother tides before the everlasting winter rears it’s ugly head.

We went straight through the town and into the mountains. Passing cars on the narrow road is a game of survival of the fittest. One side is a mountain face and the other is a three hundred foot drop to the river below.

There’s three completely different habitats there. In the shadier areas there’s a rain forest, there’s a normal forest where the sun shines, and a desert atop the peaks.

The land is ripe with grapes, blackberries and elderberries, and teeming with game like deer, bear, quail, grouse and dove, or so we thought.

On the left side of the river and across the road from camp, up a mountainside littered with half-burnt pine trees (from a wildfire a few years back), poison oak, loose rock and shale, is the spot I chose from last year. Trudging through is the hardest part because the steepness varies in grades and it only gets worse the higher you climb. Some of the time I had to run on the balls of my feet and catch a pine tree to anchor myself, with my pack and my .270.

Even though its difficult to climb, there’s worn deer trails with week old scat and tracks, and a prominent bear trail with a few days old scat. These trails criss-cross up the whole face of the mountain.

Opening Day at 7:00 AM, I was up and slipping into my Gulch Gear, of which the owner of the company happened to be a friend of Dustin’s dad and was with us on the trip. He gave me the camoflague in the Inceptor style, which has a more desert look to it, but blends well into all terrains, even though it wouldn’t seem that way. It blends into the Oak and Pine habitat surrounding us particularly well.

I went up the mountain, with Dustin, taking four or five steps up and stopping to look around and make sure we weren’t spooking anything.

Halfway up to our spot, I saw something move about a hundred yards ahead of me. It was the brown ass end of something, moving behind the trees. I stopped suddenly and watched a cinnamon colored black bear walk out into the open. There weren’t any cubs trailing it, and it was much bigger than the legal fifty pounds. My heart started pounding adrenaline through my body, and I was excited and terrified at the same time. I dropped to my knees, sliding down the mountain a little, and waited as Dustin raised his rifle, I watched him wait until the bear was in full stride for an open shot at his heart and lungs, with my ears plugged. Then he took it and silence filled the air. The bear dropped and rolled, and almost immediately, Dustin chambered another round that just so happened to jam in his gun.

Our reloads were crimped wrong, since the dies were set for the nickle plated brass ones Dustin’s dad used, and we used the same die on his brass. All of our reloads were crimped wrong, we found that out a few months back when we tested them at a hundred yards. His dad’s gun jammed, and then mine, and Dustin cut his hand opening my bolt to get the round out, and sprayed blood all over my action. We forgot about it of course, and it didn’t get cleaned again until we left for this trip.

While Dustin was struggling to open his bolt, I watched the bear get up and run.

The deal was, if anybody heard a shot they had to turn on their radios to listen to the shooter announce whether it was a miss or not. In a shaky voice, I told Dustin’s dad and brother that he shot a bear.

They came up ten minutes later to begin following the blood trail. We found the initial shot, where there was a spot of dark blood and tissue sprayed across the mountainside, and where the bullet pierced through a leaf. From there we followed the blood drops, down some deer paths, in between pine trees, oak trees, brush and rock. We followed the drops for three hours, losing them for sometimes fifteen minutes, before finding them again and continuing on the path. We followed the blood trail up three hills and down three ravines until we determined that the bear bedded itself down in the last ravine, which was full of chest high blackberry and poison oak. There was no way of getting into it. It was too thick. So we called it a loss.

Dustin’s brother later in the week, shot a bear and lost it in the same kind of situation; in a poison oak infested thicket.

Surprisingly the buck population dropped quite a bit, owing to bear, mountain lion, bobcat and probably genetics. The only buck that was seen was by Dustin was when we were riding around on quads up some back roads. It was a spike, still in velvet.

We captured pictures of doe with fawns, single doe, foxes, squirrels foraging for acorns, decent sized bucks, bobcat, big bear, mama bear with cubs (one had a blond cub), and a rare photo of two mountain lion walking close together on a camera that we’d left up across the river all year, although the camera only took pictures until March. Before leaving, they would wade across and change the SD card and batteries for the next year.

The first few days we were out there it didn’t stop raining.

Cheyenne in her dad’s Gulch Gear camouflage.
Trail to the river.

One of the most interesting places in the area is the old homestead. It was said by the locals that it burned down, but some say the government burned it down. Nobody said what happened to the grouchy old man that lived there, but its been abandoned for a long time.

  • Handmade fence
  • More fencing
  • Road with a sign
  • Road with an old shed
  • Up close of the shed
  • Where we think the house used to be
  • Dilapidated fence
  • Stone foundation of a structure
  • Ivy covered walls
  • Old plumbing
  • We think this might have been an irrigation system or a well
  • The vineyard

One of the other most interesting spots was what we called the Bullock’s camp. A group of girls made a summer camp spot down by the river with a sign that said Bullock Girls ’94.

  • The way to the Bullock camp
  • Foot bridge
  • A wind chime
  • Handmade bench
  • The camp
  • Weather stones

Lastly there was the mining camp. There were a lot of mining claims up there, but I don’t think anyone has done any digging since the sixties. We got as far as we could, past the camp of a man who’d been living there but was currently vacant, and into blackberry bushes. The blackberry bushes had overgrown the trail so much that we couldn’t get any farther to the actual mines.

  • The footbridge to the mining camp.
  • The view off the footbridge.
  • An old mining cart.
  • Old work benches.
  • Memorials.
  • Dustin leading the way.
  • The view from the farthest point we could reach, looking across the river.

More random pictures from our adventure:

  • Butterflies in the street.
  • Signs from a hiked trail.
  • A baby scorpion.
  • A private footbridge.
  • An interestingly colored leaf.
  • A geode we found in the creek bed.
  • Old Olympia can.
  • Deer Jaw.
  • Deer spine and other bones.
  • A river frog.
  • A memorial.
  • Ar private footbridge.
  • Another private footbridge.
  • The Russian wilderness.
  • Trout and Salmon.
  • Something we couldn’t identify.
  • A handmade fence for a corral.

Gluten Free Blackberry Cobbler

When life gives you lemons, you make lemonade. When life gives you blackberries, you make cobbler.

Ingredients:

Produce:

3 1/2 cups of wild Blackberries (washed)

Condiments:

2 tsp. Lemon Juice

Dairy:

1/2 cup Milk

3 tbsp. Unsalted Butter (softened)

Baking & Spices:

3/4 cup Sugar + 1/2 cup later

1/2 cup Brown Sugar

1 tbsp. Corn Starch

1 tsp. Cinnamon

1 tsp. Baking Powder

1/4 tsp. Salt

1 cup Gluten Free Flour (I use Pillsbury because it substitutes evenly)

1 tbsp. Vanilla

Water:

2/3 cups boiling

This recipe was originally from my boyfriend’s paternal grandmother, but I made some small tweaks when I did it on my own.

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees, or you can use an air fryer (I did). Set a small sauce pan with 2/3 cups of water on the stove top to boil.

The recipe calls for a 9″ x 13″ dish, but I used two square 8″ dishes and doubled my recipe. Grease it with butter. Is there anything better than butter? – Julie Powell.

Yes, butter. Julia Child was a butter lover, so is Paula Deen, who was ever a lover of nonstick spray?

Mix your blackberries in a separate bowl with a little bit of the first half (3/4 cup) of sugar and lemon juice and let the sugar dissolve in the citrus acid of the lemon. Pour into dish(es).

In a mixer mix the rest of the first bit (3/4 cup) of sugar, butter, baking powder, salt and sifted GF flour. Slowly pour in milk and vanilla. Mix well; may be slightly lumpy.

Pour over blackberry mixture.

For the topping: mix together the second half of sugar (1/2 cup), brown sugar, corn starch and cinnamon. Pour the boiling water over the top.

Bake in the oven for forty-five minutes (gluten free cooks faster, so you’ll have to keep checking on it) or in an air fryer for thirty-eight. The top should be golden brown and bubbling.

Pair with ice cream, fresh cream or whipped cream.

Enjoy!

Preparations for Hunting Season

This week we’ve started our preparations for our annual hunt trip. It became annual tradition for me only last year, so it will be exciting for me to get a second chance at a buck. The Hunt Trip is such a big deal in this household that it deserves it’s own capitals. Everything revolves around this trip; Weddings, Birthdays, Anniversaries, Pregnancies. My boyfriend’s sister had to change her entire wedding plan to accomidate. Don’t plan a wedding for September, I’ve been told, It’s hunting season.

Rifle season for our zone (B6), starts October 21, so my boyfriend’s dad planned our trip for October 18-28.

We hunt in a remote location in the mountains of Siskiyou County, outside of a small town (or village, basically), called Sawyer’s Bar. It’s about three hours from our house, or half as the crow flies; an hour and a half from my childhood home. To get there takes about two hours of Interstate travel to Yreka, where you turn left at the stoplight and pass two gas stations – one which is still under construction, four fast food joints (a Taco Bell where I started my first official job), a Starbucks, an Autozone, a strip mall containing: a Jcpenney’s (where I started my fourth job and quit in frustration with management), a lovely privately owned restaurant called Linda’s Soup Kitchen that makes amazing sandwiches (with gluten free options!), a Sally’s Beauty which I heard was going out of business or already did, a Papa Murphy’s – the only place we’d buy pizza, a Dollar Tree, the ruins of a Payless Shoe Source – where we bough our school shoes each year, a Raley’s, the DMV, a building that has never been occupied as long as I can remember, an O’Reilly’s and a Walmart Supercenter. Then there’s a second smaller mall across from it that used to have a Blockbuster that I would go to with my mom back in the day, that’s now some sort of cell phone or internet service center and an army recruiter. Once you get through the forest of coorperate America, you take Highway 3, over forest mountain, all the way to Scott Valley, my childhood home.

The first town in the valley is Fort Jones, where I grew up. You pass straight through town, past the Post Office, the Creamery, a little Boutique that went out of business that my friend used to work, a restaurant named after the Bob Marley song “three little birds”, where the Mayor works as a cook – that my brother used to work also as a cook, a doctor’s office, a dentist, what used to be a cute little florist shop now turned into some dance studio for children, the hardware store, the bank that used to be the first branch of Scott Valley Bank – the oldest independent bank in California – where my mom used to work, now turned into some bank that charges fees like taxes, the tiniest stone museum you’ll ever see in your life (that has a taxidermied two headed calf inside), a boarded up restaurant (from a water heater explosion), a restaurant and bar, a church, a laundromat, what used to be a Deli now turned into an apartment, a cafe made out of an old property management company that closed, a Ray’s (small grocery store), a restaurant called Dave’s Place, the only gas station in town, a tire store, a Napa Auto Parts, a minimall that used to be a bowling alley, pizza place and doctor’s office which has been turned into storage and offices and then a bridge over the Scott River and miles of alfalfa fields.

Onto the next town (or a village), Greenview, which has two businesses up against the highway, a feed store and a privately owned gas station, and then you pass by Kidder Creek, and down through the pine trees and fields until you come up on a church that my great-grandparents built with ten year’s worth of donations, it’s tall and proud stained glass window featuring Jesus, a work of art designed by my father.

Etna is the biggest town of the three, it’s the only town with a high school, two Breweries and a Distillery. You have to take Main Street through town to Sawyer’s Bar Road, passing a Dotty’s (a burger joint named after the original owner who served the best soft serve ice cream and burgers and owned a pet Elephant), a historical statue, a motel, a church, the Elementary school, a Ray’s, the bank, the police station, Paysteak Brewing (my favorite bar and restaurant with gluten free beer and bread!), Denny Bar Restaurant and Distillery (which used to be a drug store with an ice cream parlor where my grandma would take me after church sometimes, that my brother now works at that I worked at in the Spring as a hostess and temporarily a cook. Down the road is the cemetary, where my step-grandpa (but we don’t count half or step in our family) is buried, and recently with his brother (my great-uncle) right beside him. Then we go over Etna Summit which is one of the peaks on the PCT trail, and follow the windy road until we reach the town of Sawyer’s Bar, and then a few miles farther to the camp ground where we stay.

Up there, we’ll spend the next two days getting settled in our camp, before we venture out to hunt Mule Deer, Black Bear and Mountain Quail.

This year I only have a deer tag, but I might stop and buy a bear tag.

It’s been over a year since I pulled out my .270, which still has my boyfriend’s blood in the bolt from our fiasco with testing reloads. We bought Barnes copper bullets 150 grain (California outlawed lead for hunting, so now we have to use steel or copper), Winchester brass, Hodgdon Varget powder and primers. During the winter we reloaded our own rounds and put them to the test, some of mine jammed in my gun and it cut my boyfriend’s hand trying to get them out.

Why do we reload? Because copper rounds vary in price – mine are $35 – $40 for 50 rounds depending on where you go. California has also suspended online purchases for ammunition, and implimented a background check for every box of ammo you purchase, charging $1 per check and a check per every single box of ammo, not just a total purchase. So rather than cater to new laws, we decided to buy reloading equipment and make our own rounds so that they will be all the same, weigh the same and shoot the same. Incidentally we will also be using steel shotgun shells.

Contrary to popular belief, I am not a cold blooded killer. As a hunter I do my job to help protect the species. By hunting, we make sure that deer and bear don’t overpopulate and create a lack of food or habitat and bring on disease that might kill off the entire species. After killing the animal, you thank it for providing for your family and you wear it’s blood to honor it. That’s why hunting as a sport is regulated. In Calfornia at the very least, you must have a tag or stamp to hunt as well as a liscense.

So we’ll prep from now until the eighteenth.

Oddly enough, the cat still finds space to sleep on the bed.

Ducklings, Jet Skis & Unemployment

Firstly, I’m surprised that I haven’t posted at all in July or August. I had no idea it had been that long. I guess its hard to notice things when you have your head down.

Here’s the second truth.

After my dog passed, it changed me. A big part of me died with him. I needed something to fill the void. My boyfriend would comfort me while I cried and mourned my loss. Even months afterward, I cried. I sobbed into pillows and cried in the face of my boyfriend’s dog, Freddy, terrorizing the poor boy with exclamations of “you’re the only dog I have left”.

Then, my boyfriend decided we needed ducks.

Actually, it was more complicated than that.

I saw a picture on Facebook of baby ducklings for sale, and I said they were cute and I wanted a duck someday.

A week or maybe two weeks later, he took me to a Tractor Supply store to see if they had any ducklings for sale, without telling me until we were almost there. They didn’t have any, and at the time we both decided it was a good idea not to get them, because we lived with his parents which I was sure, wouldn’t approve.

But then we went back after awhile and found that they did have ducklings. I looked at my boyfriend and he looked at me and said “do you want one?” I was excited but I still said we shouldn’t.

But we did.

We got two. One pure black one, one yellow one with a gray bill.

After several months, my little yellow one got kind of chunky so I named it “meatball”.

Around that same time, my boyfriend bought me a vintage sit-down Wave Runner jet ski, because we’d spent most of the summer out on the lake, testing out his 90’s Kawasaki stand-up, and our friend’s stand-up.

The first few times we went out, there were problems. Either it rained too much and the lake was full of debris, or the battery died, or the gas was low. Eventually, I got to ride and even stood up for a little while my first time. The only reassurance I had was that it wouldn’t hurt when you fell off.

Being unemployed, I’ve been depressed looking for another job. I tried to get a job in road construction with a friend of ours, but after some stories, I decided I’d rather not work there. Now I’m trying for a job at the distribution center with my boyfriend, making $18/hour, working 3 – 10 hour days a week with the option of overtime days. I have a few thousand saved up, but we are trying for twenty thousand by this time next year, so we can put a down payment on a house.

I haven’t done a whole lot of cooking lately. But can you blame me?

Quitting a toxic job

I’ve been meaning to write another post for three weeks now, but several events have transpired that left me tumbling down a steep hill, and progressed to what feels like falling into a dark ravine.

So I swear to Tell the Truth, the Whole Truth and Nothing but the Truth So Help Me God.

I quit my job. I wanted to quit it as soon as I started it, actually. My first day wasn’t so bad, but I was being trained by my manager who was leaving to care for her new baby. The next day, I was “trained” by the main boss, who had as much experience with this particular kitchen and the way things were supposed to be done as I did. Then came the only coworker I had who put me on a three day training schedule. Shadow and Teach, Shadow and Help and then Do it Yourself, were my three days.

I didn’t have experience cooking for large groups of people in large quantities, especially sixty people who ate cottage cheese and tuna fish sandwiches every single day. It was like a mix of a high school cafeteria and a sit down restaurant. I would have to make large quantities of food, by myself, and serve the food in a restaurant like style – with tickets.

This particular coworker, when she was training me, was not nice. She decided she didn’t like me. She decided I was an idiot. She decided I was inferior, and would amount to nothing. She decided I was lazy. Those things she also told my new boss, whom had worked there before, with her.

My new boss was skeptical of me. She hadn’t been a manager before (I’m assuming) and had no idea how to do it. She didn’t train me. She didn’t offer solutions when I made mistakes. She didn’t buy the necessary ingredients for the menus. She didn’t print out the recipes we were supposed to follow, for me. When I had questions, I got looks. So I didn’t ask questions if I could avoid it. I didn’t ask for help either. I would rather fail and dig myself into a deeper hole than admit that I made mistakes to people who would judge them to the harshest degree.

In my first month, I burned soup on five different occasions. Each time, I beat myself down, knowing how it would turn out the next day when my coworker would ask with a smirk on her face.

I burned soup because I was cooking two entrees, a pot of soup, and two to three sides at the same time.

Five times, I wasn’t offered a solution, until a manager from a different department told me to stack soup pots with the boiling water underneath like a double boiler. After that, I never burned soup again.

The residents still complained. They complained that I made the Tilapia too spicy with too much Old Bay, they complained that my Beef and Potato Skillet tasted metallic because of the red wine it called for, they complained when there was too much seasoning or not enough, the meat was too tough, they complained about the noodles I was supposed to use, and the menus I didn’t make. Some, if not most of the comments were hurtful.

One woman in particular said she hated my style of cooking. During the waitressing part of my job for lunch, one woman discovered I was the dinner cook and glared at me and threatened to give me a lecture. A man almost completely refused to eat anything I made and instead took sandwiches when he could help it. A couple at one of the back tables, disliked my cooking so much that they made every little comment they could and sent the food back sometimes three times in a night. At one point the man came into the kitchen to look for me to curse at me for not making the bacon on his BLT crispy enough. Then, they both told several managers that I’d severed raw, uncooked food.

Testing my abilities, my boss gave me more and more complicated dishes. I started to settle into a routine.

Most things, like pastas and breaded chicken or fish, I couldn’t taste due to a gluten allergy, so I had the dishwashers or waiters taste the dishes. I explained this to my boss when she told me all of a sudden I needed a doctor’s note for my allergy.

I’d had to go to the walk-in clinic before for a physical and a Tuberculosis vaccine to get this job. I waited at the clinic for three and a half hours that time, I didn’t want to go back and waste a whole morning for them to confirm something I already knew in writing.

The next day I was presented with a write-up. The first one I’d ever gotten in my entire life. For burning soup and not tasting my food.

I’d done worse things at other jobs. I’d intentionally be rude to people who were rude to me in the drive-thru when I worked at a Taco Bell. I broke safety protocols working for the California Conservation Corps. as well as dress code violations. I watched people steal from Jcpenney’s, and just sighed and walked away because I knew the local police would do nothing and because of that my boss almost no longer cared. I did all these things and yet I never received a write-up, I never got so much as a talking to, because the good outweighed the bad.

At Taco Bell I was the most reliable employee they had, when someone called in, they called me and I’d drive twenty minutes for a bigger paycheck. I got moved into the head line cook position, since I hated working the customer service positions. One time I worked nine days in a row.

At the CCC, I started off not doing as well as I could have because I wasn’t used to manual labor, but I pushed, and I became a Sawyer.

At my restaurant job, I got moved from Hostess to Prep Cook, but I was moved back to Hostess due to an unforeseen issue, that had nothing to do with me.

At Jcpenney’s I was moved from Cashier to Pricing & Signing Captain to an Operations Supervisor.

I didn’t have a poor job performance, or so I thought. It was poorer owing to the fact that I would be put down from all directions, so it made trying seem pointless.

After I’d cried in the bathroom (and the walk-in), I decided I wanted to quit. At that time, I was still going to wait to have another job lined up.

Then later that night, at least six plates were sent back (unusually high amount), and one of my disapproving guests came in to curse at me for not making the bacon on his BLT crispy (as I’d mentioned before). Since I was already on the edge, I snapped and wrote my official two week notice on a pad of paper on the desk for my boss and my coworker to find the next day, while I’d be relaxing on my day off.

My last day was the seventeenth, and I lied about having a back-up plan, but I didn’t want more of their looks.

On a day when I had time I complained to HR about everything that bothered me.

The residents never being happy and telling the managers lies about “raw food”, my boss not training me, my boss not helping me fix problems, lack of recipes, lack of ingredients, lack of respect from my coworker, occasional lack of respect from my boss, scheduling me or not scheduling me without letting me know, complaining about taking time off when my dog died, ruthless comments from my coworker about my job performance, lack of respect from other managers, the write-up, how my boss LEFT the write-up at the front desk for the receptionist to see, etc.

When I was done, she nodded and waved all of my problems away with a “that’s just how it is” attitude. Then she told me in a threatening way, if I didn’t stay two weeks I wouldn’t get a good reference.

The job was hell at every turn, but I stayed two weeks, did my job and went home.

I didn’t say good-bye to my boss and my coworker said a lame and what seemed underlyingly sarcastic, “good luck”.

I left, officially and my boyfriend’s mom turned my work shirts into rags.

Wine Talk

Let’s talk about wine.

The first wine I ever tasted was when I was seventeen at a friend’s house, who had one of those hippie moms that was cool with drinking and smoking weed.

It was Merlot, and the most disgusting thing I’d ever tasted. It was like somebody didn’t wash their feet before stomping the grapes, and harvested the grapes after they were almost raisins. It was awful.

Skeptically, I tried Chardonnay that my boyfriend’s mom offered me at a get-together with his grandparents. Surprisingly, it was delicious. I pretended I was a pretentious thirty-year-old pencil skirt wearing woman, holding a crystal glass with an imprint of red lipstick on the rim.

Then there was a jug of Sangria that I was made to polish off, because no one else in the house would drink it, and then I understood was Blake Shelton was singing about.

That same night, I tried a homemade wine from one of the family friends, and I was warned it was “panty-dropper” wine, and “knock you on your ass” wine, but being young and dumb and already pretty tipsy, I still wanted to try it.

It was passion fruit flavored and potent. I had a glass, maybe two. Next thing I know, my boyfriend is trying to help me off the toilet, where I decided it was a good place to fall asleep. Fast forward thirty minutes, and he’s dragging me to the bathroom so I can throw up red, which scared me until I realized it was the Sangria. That hangover was one of the worst I’ve ever had. I couldn’t stand up without being nauseated. Needless to say, I didn’t drink for awhile.

After I turned twenty-one, I started my experiment. My mom told me that pink wine was good, so I bought my first bottle of Rose. It was called “Yes Way Rose”, and I bought it because not only did I think that it was cheap for a bottle of wine ($10), I liked the cute name, the white and pink ombre packaging and it was French. So I was sold.

As it turned out, I don’t like Rose, and I found that out after I tried and wasted another bottle by a different company.

Then I turned to Moscato. Pink Moscato specifically. My first bottle of Pink Moscato was bought at a gas station. I know what you’re thinking.

It was the Barefoot brand.

Barefoot had been around since the mid 60’s, and this California wine’s namesake came from the traditional stomping of grapes; but the brand didn’t really take off until the late 80’s. This was the wine the moms of our generation drank.

It felt like a right of passage, finding a wine that I liked. I liked the Barefoot Pink Moscato a lot, but I wanted to keep experimenting.

Carlo Rossi Pink Moscato Sangria and Tisdale Pink Moscato were next from my gas station stop.

Carlo Rossi has been around for forty years, and plucked their grapes from the central valley of California, they were famous for their jugs “with a ring” to loop your finger through. Carlo Rossi believed his wine shouldn’t be expensive. What intrigued me was the combination of Sangria and Pink Moscato, two wines I deeply enjoyed. It too, was amazing.

Tisdale had a pretty pink and black tree on its label, which again, I picked for the packaging. Tisdale was another California wine, with an option on its website to find where you can buy it, which I thought was cool and interesting. This wine is actually very local, and I’m unsure if they sell nationwide.

In a conversation with my friend’s mom, she told me about Barefoot Pink Moscato Champagne. I’ve had Champagne before on New Year’s but it was dry and I didn’t like it, the Pink Champagne was okay, but still not great. This Champagne was okay, I liked the Moscato, but the Champagne flavor made it dull. It was exciting when my boyfriend popped the cork out and it hit the ceiling, making his mom scream and the dogs go beserk.

Then came my favorite, Risata Moscato D’Asti. It was introduced to me by a coworker when we got into talking about good wines. She mentioned it started with a “Ris”, it was a blue bottle with a pretty blue design on the front. I found it on the Walmart Checkout app, and bought it. I thought, for $15 this better be good wine.

It was.

It was like drinking nectar of the gods. It was so smooth, you wouldn’t even know there was alcohol in it.

Risata is an Italian wine, first introduced in America in 2006, with their Moscato D’Asti being the #1 Moscato D’Asti in the country.

I had planned on this wine being a special occasion wine only – but I’ve had three bottles to myself in one month, none of the others I have purchased a second time.

Have any good wines? Comment so I can enjoy them too!

Losing my Best Friend

I had planned on making my next post about an amazing new wine I’d discovered, and I had planned on posting a few days ago but several events in my life prevented that from happening and I’m sorry to anyone who was expecting a new post sooner.

On June 13th, as I was finishing up my last bit of cleaning before leaving work for the night, my mom told me that my one-year-old puppy, Jax was sick.

She said that he was lethargic, he wouldn’t eat, he would barely move, and he was having bloody diarrhea. It was a few hours after the vet in the small town I grew up in closed, and there were no twenty-four hour vets around, so she had to wait until morning. In the meantime, she got him to drink water and eat a treat.

She told me he was having the same symptoms my old dog, Shasta did when she was a puppy, she passed of old age in September of 2017. My mom said that Shasta was foaming at the mouth too, but that was because she was poisoned, but Jax wasn’t.

He stayed outside all night and in the morning my mom took him to the vet as soon as they opened.

As soon as he looked Jax over, the Vet told her that his gums were ice cold, he was dehydrated and that he was already half-dead, but he took him in for twenty-four hour care.

I called the Vet to check in on him while I sat in my car, waiting to go to work. They told me he was still in the same condition.

My mom and my boyfriend tried to assure me that he would be okay, that it had happened to Shasta and she was in worse shape, that it could be fixed.

The whole day at work I was a sobbing mess. I don’t know how I managed to piece together a meal.

At 2:00 pm, when I took my lunch break, I called again for an update, and I was told he was doing better, his dehydration was under control but there was still blood in his stool so he wasn’t out of the woods yet, but if he made it through this, he’d be around for a long time.

Mom called again just before closing and left a message, and they didn’t get back to her until the next day.

The whole time I prayed for him to get better and I kept thinking about seeing him for the first time.

We got him on June 2, 2018. He was born April 10, 2018. I remember stopping by my mom’s friends house to find all of them sitting and talking on the patio, and my mom cradling a little black lab.

He was a mix of a Black Lab and an Australian Shepherd, we later found out, and when he got older, it was obvious. He had the body and coloring of a Black Lab and the shortness of an Australian Shepherd.

After two days of having him, I taught him how to sit. A couple more and he could lay down, and after a few weeks he knew how to jump up and fetch. It took a month for us to potty train him.

He imprinted on me because I was around a lot more because I only had a part time job. He was originally my mom’s dog, but he became mine.

My boyfriend and I lived two and a half hours away from each other, which meant I would stay with him for a few days at a time and it was hard leaving Jax for that long.

It was much worse when I moved out. I would visit as often as I could and every time he wouldn’t stop jumping up and down and wagging his whole body when he saw me.

I wanted to skip work so I could go and see him, but the Vet said that it wouldn’t be a good idea for me to get him excited and then leave.

I thought he would be okay, because that’s what everybody kept telling me. I was going to go up on Tuesday and see him.

On Saturday, June 15th, around 7:15 pm, he fell asleep and the technicians couldn’t wake him up.

As soon as I got out of the shower at 7:30, I had a missed call from my mom and a text that said “he didn’t make it”.

The shock didn’t last very long, soon I was sobbing into the pillows on our bed. I texted my boyfriend and begged him to get off work early because I couldn’t handle being in the bedroom alone.

I couldn’t believe it. I still don’t want to. Deep down I still think it was all a mistake and he will be awake and ready for me to take him home, but I know its not true.

I couldn’t stay at work on Sunday because I was a mess and I couldn’t even try to cook, today I called in because I didn’t want to try.

I feel like I lost a child, and a best friend.

Tomorrow, my boyfriend and I will drive up to the vet and pick him up, and bury him in my mom’s backyard under the lilac bushes he used to chew on.

Rest in peace my sweet baby boy, I’ll love you until the day I die. I hope you can play fetch in heaven. I’ll miss you so much, Jax.