enough to make my systems blow

Sadly, yesterday/today were, like yesterday, also filled the death and memories (and a tiny bit of rain). To avoid burying the lede, I shall start with it - I got a text yesterday to tell me that my friend Tammy died last week. The text was from her sister; apparently Tammy had been sick for almost a year but hadn't told most of her friends, but she wanted to make sure we knew after the fact.

So, that was a real shock. Tammy (aka Tammmmeh) was one of my freshman when I was a junior RA, and she drew into Loro my senior year, and so we lived across the hall from each other two years in a row. We had a shared love of dim sum, the Olympics, bad television, late-night trips to Peter's Cafe (where we occasionally stayed up all night so we could go straight to dim sum across the street), mafia, more Olympics, fashion, gossip, and many other tings. Sadly, I'd lost touch with her the last couple of years; she'd moved to Chicago, where I never go, and I had moved to Denver, and life happened....and now she's gone.

Needless to say, I'm still processing. I called Claudia to tell her today (not a fun conversation, but good to talk to her); Shedletsky called me this afternoon and we talked for awhile. It's all strange and surreal, and I have many thoughts....but that's where I'll leave this for now.

//

So, compared to Tammy, the fact that we're anticipating continued kitten mortality really pales in comparison. It also made the slog through family photos weirdly more bearable - it's both great to get through them, and ultimately potentially meaningless in the grand scheme of things. But we've now gone through an initial sort of all four boxes, organizing by family branch and decade. My dad joined in the fun this afternoon and was able to identify many photos that my mom and I had no idea about, which makes sense since it's his side of the family.

The whole thing is like a multidimensional puzzle / the worst game of memory you've ever played - a lot of matching photos to groups and time periods, but made much harder because the photos were tossed very haphazardly into boxes (and moved around many times), which means you might be going through a stack of photos that has my great-grandparents in 1925 next to my second-grade photo alongside my father's report cards from high school. So, remembering if you've seen something before, and then where you put it, when there are thousands of photos is a real trick. But I've gotten real good at identifying some guy named Darl (who must have been my grandma's first cousin, which makes him my first cousin three times removed, which makes him pretty irrelevant), and I think I could pick Uncle Waldo out of a line-up now even though he's been dead for over fifty years (okay, maybe I would have trouble identifying his zombie corpse).

So we're making progress, and that's great. Yesterday I also went with my mom to the next town over the buy groceries so that I could cook some tasty tings this weekend. I experimented with tater tot casserole tonight - it's something that basically required gluten in its usual incarnations because it's made with canned cream of mushroom soup and canned vegetable soup, and those have flour in them. But I found a possible recipe on a gf site, then modified it to suit my intuitions. Basically, I browned some hamburger; then cooked an onion, a carrot, some celery, and some garlic; and then added gf flour, beef stock, milk, soy sauce, worcestershire sauce, tomato paste, and paprika. Combine that all in a baking dish, line up tater tots in neat little rows on top, bake it, and you have something that's pretty good. I think it was probably better than the original, except for the fact that I got my ratios slightly off and the worcestershire sauce needed to tailor it back this summer.

And now, after having finished the fourth and final box + watching some tv with [censored], it's time for bed - goodnight!