Cheese Curds

           I fucking love cheese curds. 

 Some of you are genuinely confused. I know I was when I first moved here and heard about them for the first time.  They are not, in fact, sopping bags of cottage cheese. This was my first thought when I first heard the term because the only cheese where I come from is kraft and velveeta. Not saying these don't have their applications but that's not cheese. When I first moved here, I actually went into overload because I had never seen so much cheese everywhere before. You can't go anywhere in Wisconsin without bumping into some kind of cheese. 

Everything you need to survive is on this shelf in a gas station: curds, cheese sticks and sausage. This same shelf is in EVERY gas station. Even the applesauce but I love it and cheese is awesome.

  Cheese curds are actually brand new cheddar cheese. Cheddar cheese doesn't form in a block or wheel, there's a whole process and it's much shorter and less climactic than you'd think.

  They take the raw milk and pasteurize it then boil it and add some enzymes to separate the curd, which will become the cheese, from the whey, which will become nutrition shakes and ricotta cheese. That's where you get "whey protein", it's the dried, leftover liquid from cheese making. I mix this into my milk and cereal in the morning to help me maintain weight. If you were to cook this liquid whey, you'd get ricotta cheese which actually means "twice cooked". 

Here, the separation has already happened and this worker is cutting up the curd while stirring it. This makes that shit easier to drain and once you separate the curd, it's edible from this moment on. See that pitchfork stick the worker has? The size of the partitions determines the size of the curd. They might even get down to using tiny squares if the curd is simply going to make block cheese.

          Hehehe, cheese packer...

 This is how you get blocked or wheeled cheddar. They put all of the drained loose curd into a mold and then stack big ass weights on top to get it to stick together. That's why, when you break a block of cheddar, it crumbles and doesn't break cleanly and you're left with an uneven block of fucking cheese that won't fit on the sandwich so you just decide to eat it like a caveman with your hands. 

 

                This shit right here

 These are bigger curds that will be sold as snack food. They're all dry and wiggly like a thousand peices of jello!! Seeing a big barrel of curds never fails to make me giggle because they're so jiggly and dumb, they need googly-eyes. These curds get bagged up as soon as they're done draining, a fresh curd is a happy curd! 

 Remember how I said they were jiggly? That's because they're kinda rubbery and when you bite into a really fresh one, they squeak! They're little teeny squeaks like tiny shoes playing a basketball game on a floor that's just been waxed in your mouth. That makes me happy. It's happy food.  

  They come in a variety of flavors, colors

 and you can eat them refrigerated or warm, depending on the age. It IS just cheese, which in theory would just age and the flavor would deepen but curds in bags like the one above are moist and are exposed to air, unlike the curds that are stored to make formed cheese and those conditions make mold. Moldy cheese is bleu cheese and not yummy curds so just refrigerate them after you buy them.

    If you touch my curds, I will bite you.

If you want to ramp it up into heart attack proportions, look no further than fried curds. These delicious nuggets have been rolled in a wet batter and briefly dipped in hot oil long enough to brown the outside. You know how there's stuffed-crust pizza and when you got it you just ate the crust? That was just me? Oh, okay. Well, that's what fried curds are like, all gooey, stringy, melty cheese on the inside.

  I had trouble imagining this when I moved here and kept getting grossed out by visions of trying to fry a spoonful of the same cottage cheese (which are curds just even earlier than the solid curds) my grandma ate peaches with. I never really liked cottage cheese before but when you have some that's made by a bunch of different tiny independent farms, you can at least respect all the different nuances. 

 I love having access to really good cheese like Muenster and Havarti as well as mild Cheddars and Gruyere. I find myself wishing it were cheaper to mail the shit across the country or a lot of people from home wouldn't have trouble finding good cheese either. I participated in an international snack food-themed anonymous gift exchange and sent cheese. The cheese curds themselves weren't expensive, even a specialty store will sell them for 5-7 dollars a bag and they usually come in pound and half pound divisions. Try eating a pound of cheese. It's great for snacking but you'll hurt your poor toilet. Please, think of your toilet when bingeing on cheese curds. Anyway, cheese is fat and fat is heavy so that crap cost me $14 to mail cross country and I didn't even get a bag of Doritos in return. Talk about disappointment. At that moment I would have been happy to even have gotten tamarind candy, which if you haven't grown up on curry powder, is NOT CANDY. That's how sad I was because it was a huge deal for me, as a lazy procrastinator, for me to take the extra 5 minutes out of my day and click to www.simonscheese.com and order the curds and select to have them shipped to my receiver's address. I even had to bend over to grab my purse and get my debit card! Tsk, some people just don't appreciate hard work, I tell ya.

Let's Talk RNG

As many of you know, I play a shooter called Destiny. It's kind of like Halo and World of Warcraft got drunk and had a baby. Space magic. There's warlocks. Anyway, it's got something that draws me in a tad more than even the cooperative play: the LOOT! Shooting any enemy in the game has a chance to drop these neat little octahedrons or engrams.

   Those shiny things! It's like Christmas!

 They don't dissapear and if you can't pick them up for some reason, they go to your "Post Box" where you can pick them up at any time.  

  When they're laying on the ground, you can't tell anything more than it's rarity. Green ones are the most common, followed by blues, then purples and finally gold ones. When you pick it up you can see what class it's going to be or what slot it's going to take up. You gotta head to one of 3 social spaces in the game where there will be an NPC who will tell you what it is aka "decoding". 

 Here's the thing. There's a little thing going on in the whole system called RNG or Random Number Generator. Any enemy could drop any engram up to gold (only dropped by boss level enemies) and there's a small chance that a blue one will actually turn out to be a purple item and a purple has a random chance to become a gold item. Then, the items themselves come with a  completely random set of perks from a skill set. It's farkin bananas, you guys. That means that you're running around killing everything on the off chance you'll get some loot and it will be awesome! 

  Some people just seem to have better luck than others.  There's a hierarchy to the guns in this game and getting some of them to 'drop' are like our white whale. Some examples being the Gjallerhorn rocket launcher, the Hopscotch Pilgrim, which is a pulse rifle, I didn't name it, yes it's a fucking stupid name, the Zen Meteor sniper rifle and and any armor from the "Desolate" set.  I might have to cross Gjallerhorn off the list because in a recent update they made it a reward for doing a campaign mission instead of a random drop but for two previous years, it was THE reward. It was like once you had it the game was on easy mode. 

Gjallerhorn, it's tracking rounds have been replaced with kittens. It is no less deadly.     (It doesn't really shoot kitty rounds but that would be amazing) 

  Some people *cough cough* husband *cough cough* who played since the beta had the chance to get this rocket launcher at the beginning of the game from a weekly-visiting vendor named Xūr who is an asshole, tentacled dick face.  Xūr shows his spurious, gold class wares for three days a week, usually they're the things that you just had found that week. If you found a SUROS Regime auto rifle, you could usually bet that trencoat wearing cock would bring it for sale that weekend. I guess I shouldn't talk badly about the mysterious douche, he does carry heavy ammo refill packs for like dirt cheap. 

 You dick-faced whoremongering bastard

 

  Xūr only takes a certain kind of currency, which, you guessed it, drops randomly. The first week of the game, Xūr sold it and nearly no one bought it because no one had played the game enough to earn enough to buy more than one item. At the time, rocket launchers were not the shit and no one really bought it. 

  We were all stupid. Very stupid because RNG made it fucking impossible to get this weapon.  Videos started to spread about how awesome it was and you could collectively hear the community bang it's head against the wall in frustration. 

A couple of us sitting around, thinking up ways to get Gjallerhorn.

  Random Number Generator rewards make for my brain's happy place. It means there's always something to work for, always a reward to get. It also makes for some hilarious videos where people found the exact loot they were hoping for.

 My husband does not have good RNG. Hasn't sacrificed enough goats or something, I don't know but he once spent two weeks trying to get a certain gun to drop with certain perks. He had to do these campaign missions called "strikes" that take about 10-15 minute to complete depending on the difficulty. They can drop engrams during the mission plus you get rewards just for completeing it. Well, he played 156 before he got what he was looking for. He could do them in his sleep! I even did a couple for him because I needed him to take a break. 

 This wouldn't have been so bad if I hadn't joined in on his first couple of strikes and gotten the exact gun he was looking for with the exact perks that he wanted too. MFW: 

  We played the day after Christmas. I had just gotten my own Playstation and had to make a new account and so I had to start two other characters (you can have three) to maximize my loot chances. Lots of people do this. Trouble was, those two new alts needed guns and armor! Well back then the RNG was stronger than today and getting purples was the best you could hope for and they didn't drop often. It always gave me a little 'yippee!' and some adrenaline when I saw one. The day after Christmas I managed to get 18 purple engram drops which mostly decoded into stuff I needed for my alt accounts, just like REAL Christmas! I got the dirtiest looks that day, I was accused several times of indecent acts with employees at Bungie in exchange for good drops. I plead the fifth on any and all accusations. 

  The day after the April 2016 update (not a paid DLC or expansion but major changes happened) there was a new gold class sniper rifle out that everyone wanted to play with because three critical shots would trigger a fourth bullet that was loaded from thin air. This magic bullet would make big boomy-boomy pow-pow if you managed to get another critical, not your average pew-pew.

 Yeah, I got it the day of the update. I legitimately felt awful. It was the first gold engram I decoded! The other half of the living room was cold. Husband keeps getting an older weapon and he is kind of pissed. You know in anime when a character is about to murder another one and the top of their face turns blue and they make this gargling noise? I heard that. 

  We went off and did some of the new activities hoping he could grab a few golds with the new system that the update introduced. We counted. Out of 12 gold engrams he got nothing he wanted. I on the other hand with 7 gold engrams had 7 copies of that shiny new sniper rifle. 

  NO I AM NOT FUCKING YOU, it looked like I was sucking RNG's dick directly.  If my husband wasn't there to utter curses of disbelief even I wouldn't have believed it happened. Then I got my 8th engram of the day. 

                     GODDAMNIT

 FUCK. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck!  I didn't play for the rest of the day. I was too worried the next time I came back to the tower I'd get another one and my husband would destroy my Playstation and bury it in the woods. He continued on, quietly raging every time he got something he didn't want. 

 Rahool is the name of the guy in the tower who decodes the engrams. The general attitude is that he takes the engrams and then gives you whatever shit is lying around his overgrown fruit stand. He's therefore a piece of shit. He knows exactly what you want and just wants to see you cry. 

  Rahool had been giving my husband the dry dick for days and just wouldn't give up the Zen for him. The atmosphere in the apartment was...uncomfortable.

  Finally he threw the controller at me and said "You do it! I'm tired of getting Hereafter!" I was in the hot seat. I could have farted diamonds. My hands got sweaty. Rahool was going to give me a stupid Patience and Time sniper rifle just to fuck with me. I was going to look like a total asshat because Rahool the tool knew I needed this.  

 I touched down and headed over. 

 I'm seriously going to suck your dick, man.

And that's how I got the nickname of "Priestess of RNG".  

The Time I Carved a Storm Trooper Pumpkin

So, a few years back, I decided I wasn't young enough on the inside and wanted to carve a pumpkin. I'd done this before, poorly. I always ended up tossing the pumpkin out of a second-story window and being satisfied that I'd done my part in contributing to Halloween Anarchy. What made this time different? I have a husband who knows how to do stuff and he gives encouragement! Hooray for positive reinforcement!  Alright, lets reminisce together and show you the time I actually successfully carved a pumpkin.

 Here's the pattern. I was supposed to print it out and tape it to the pumpkin but I'm a rebel without a printer so I just used a white piece of paper. Okay okay, I used like 8 sheets of paper before I got it right. Did I tell you that I can't draw either?

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  This pumpkin was about twice the size of my head. That's a totally accurate, scientific measurement.  I figured the paper would hold up against my caveman hands and wet, pumpkin-y insides. Yep.

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 Don't do what I did and do this in the living room on the carpet. That TV table collapsed twice and my butt fell asleep from sitting cross-legged. Oh yeah, make sure your knives are sharp or better yet, get one of those kid's pumpkin carving sets, they're cheap and you aren't going to use them for anything else.

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 This was the fun part, getting to dig around inside the squash. It was really hard to try to dig out with  just my fingernails so I ended up getting a spoon and scraping the insides out. I don't know what this could be good practice for. Taxidermy? Nevermind, that's gross. Hey look! Hockey on TV!!

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  Save these. Put'em in a colander or sieve and run them under cold water, pressing them against the side to separate all the gooey shit from the seeds. Toss the clean seeds on a baking sheet and throw that shit in the oven at 200 degrees for, I don't know, I forgot they were in there and was lucky I didn't burn the apartment down. At this time, take a short break and give your hands a rest because they are about to get fucked.

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  This part was NOT fun. Take a toothpick or something pointy with a good handle on it and prepare to make 10,000 tiny holes. That's right, you gotta poke out the pattern before you can cut it and it makes a dotted pattern on the pumpkin which allows you to tear off the paper. This part is hard to explain, but the end result is to have a copy of the design on the fruit that you can follow with a knife like a really sharp game of connect-the-dots. This part wasn't hard but my hands hurt like six bitches in a bitch boat afterward.



Seriously, I spent the last two periods of the hockey game poking holes in that pumpkin. I wanted to give up, especially because we lived on the second floor and I had a reputation to uphold but my husband told me I could do it and he's usually right so I kept going.


   NO MORE HOLES PLEASE BABY JESUS

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  Yeah, yeah I'm well aware we skipped a whole section. I can't find the pictures. Guess you're just gonna have to figure out how to stick a knife in the thing and follow the dotted pattern from youtube. As long as you aren't trying to cut large lines out quickly you'll do fine. I did. Look at that thing. It's beautiful in the way that ugly dogs are, like, "That's my thing, I made this thing and I approve, it looks mostly like what I meant it to." So I know it's a bit early for this kind of post but if stores are putting out candy I should be able to get away with a little pumpkin fun.  Sorry I didn't cut off any fingers or anything climatic but there's always next year!



  I got a little overboard with the success of the first pumpkin so I got another one. I'm glad I stopped at this one because at $12 a pop, art isn't cheap. I look back and I like them, the pictures are kind of neat but really what I remember is "I spent $24 on a carving of a storm trooper and a deer that is only going to rot away...This is nearly as bittersweet as it gets and I paid for it." The worst part was that no one really got to enjoy them but us. Kids don't even smash them like they used to. I was looking forward to coming out the morning after Halloween to find my little experiment smeared all over the parking lot. It was the first time I'd had a pumpkin worth displaying and no one even bothered to smash it!
  I'll probably do another one maybe this year and do a post on that closer to the real holiday, it was a cool thing to do even if it did take forever, hurt the hands and only last a few days. I like getting flowers, don't I?

A collection of amusing images

Want to see some stuff I found that I thought was chuckle-worthy? Okay!

Here, we see a local cereal, Jordy Flakes. This guy is Jordy Nelson, a football player for the Green Bay Packers. I thought it should be Aaron Rogers Flakes but whatever, I'm not even from here. They're better than the original, sweeter, more corny and a heavier flake than the Tiger kind.

Of course Darth would light a cigarette this way, if you owned one it would be the only way you lit anything.

 

 Here's a baby possum in an ash bucket. Fucker wouldn't move so I just assumed he had a habit, we had no argument with each other and I went back inside peacefully. 

 When a pickle in your Bloody Mary just isn't enough, I spotted this guy with an entire hamburger on his. 

Okay, I lied. This isn't amusing, it's terrifying. 

 This is a curling iron. No, it's not a pleasure wand. Really. It gets super hot, don't get it near things you love like your genitals.

That moment when the cat thinks there's something tasty in your hair and you kind of freak out. This was the dumbest cat I ever knew. One day I will tell you about him.