Remodel day… 4? I think?
I think this counts as day 4 (the “catastrophe” post having covered day 3). Things are going smoothly. In particular, some stuff finally arrived and things are moving floor-ward! I mean, forward.
Can this be the catastrophe?
So, almost every single home renovation project I’ve ever had has had something go very wrong.
In this one, everything’s been going quite smoothly, except:
- The flooring was supposed to arrive on Thursday, then it got delayed to today, now it’s delayed to tomorrow, and the contractors can’t move forward until the flooring is in hand (and they’re getting restless) EDIT: Oh right they did get some painting done (specifically applying a primer coat everywhere)
- On Friday I tripped over some of my stored clutter and injured myself worse than I’d realized at first (although not nearly as badly as it could have been!), so now I have impaired mobility and also a rather nasty scrape on my left shin which seems to be slightly infected (which is painful but doesn’t seem like it needs direct medical attention just yet)
Basically, if this can be the worst that happens on this project, I’ll be pretty happy. Thankfully it doesn’t seem like much else can go wrong, unless there’s some awful secret lurking in the laundry room (which is quite possible).
Twitter extrication
Today was my last day using Twitter, unless something changes entirely. I have done the following, and suggest others do the same:
- Went through all of my connected applications to make sure that everything that I was using Twitter to log into now has a username/password login; the only two things I couldn’t fix on my own were Webtoon (which I don’t care about) and Imgur (which I hardly ever use), so hopefully I can get their respective support folks to help me out
- Disabled my ifttt Twitter autopost stuff, so this blog entry will not show up there
- Disabled my Mastodon-Twitter Crossposter connection
- Folded my indieweb.social account into my actual Mastodon account, since there were a bunch of people following me on one but not the other, and the only reason I had the indieweb.social one was for Twitter-crossposting purposes
- Discovered I had literally hundreds of pending follow requests from mastodon.social, mostly spammers or thrown-away “just checking out Mastodon” posts from a year or two ago, gah
- Posted a transitional post to my #novembeat thread which moves my remaining posts over there; however I’m not sure if this will actually work, because of how Mastodon threads work, and I might have to just start a new thread or something
I spoke too soon
Well, okay, my MSG tolerance is higher than it used to be but I still have a limit, as it turns out.
At least this reaction isn’t nearly as bad as they used to be. But yeah I’m not gonna start monching down on Doritos habitually or anything.
My kitchen before this mess
Oh yeah, I neglected to actually take photos of my kitchen in operation before I’d cleared everything out on day 0 (where it didn’t look so bad), but I did just go back through my photos to find some examples of what the kitchen was like under normal circumstances.
MSG observation
So, in the past, the “Simply Cheetos” brand of Cheetos didn’t use monosodium glutamate in it, so it was a safe thing for me to eat.
Today when buying lunch at the grocery store, I saw that they had the Flamin' Hot Simply Cheetos, so I bought a bag, and did a cursory glance of the ingredients list and didn’t see MSG on them. Then I had a bunch with dinner, and noticed a rather strong umami flavor (but not the same one that I normally associate with MSG), and paid it no mind.
Later in the evening I started having a really bad bowel reaction to something and started looking at the ingredients listings of everything I ate today to see what it could be, and that’s when I noticed MSG on the Cheetos label.
However, I don’t think it was the Cheetos' MSG that did this! In fact I think I might actually no longer be MSG-sensitive. And looking back, I don’t think I’ve had an MSG reaction ever since I did the ketamine treatments in March (even though I’ve knowingly had MSG a few times since then). There have been a whole lot of unexpected neurological changes that did happen from the ketamine infusions; in particular, ever since those treatments, caffeine doesn’t give me a massive panic attack when I have as little as half of an espresso (I can now tolerate a large Mountain Dew with just a slightly elevated heart rate!), and sucralose doesn’t give me a headache anymore either, and alcohol doesn’t make my pain flare up either.
All of those food sensitivities are highly co-occurrent with people with fibromyalgia, which was the main thing I was trying to treat with ketamine. While the chronic pain and fatigue symptoms haven’t gone away (and those were the main things I was trying to treat!) it’s possible that ketamine at least did have some beneficial effect.
I’m still not going to rush out and like. Consume all the MSG, just as I don’t rush out and consume all the sucralose/Stevia/etc. either and still prefer decaffeinated beverages for a bunch of reasons (although it’s nice being able to self-medicate my ADHD again!) and still limit my alcohol consumption, but maybe I don’t need to worry about those causing unexpected problems anymore.
Anyway. All this is to say that I still absolutely believe that MSG sensitivity is a thing (based on my prior experiences) but also it might be possible to get away from it! I’m not sure undergoing expensive ketamine treatments is worth it for this effect alone, but it might be a nice side-effect for folks who are seeking it for other reasons.
Remodel, day 2
It’s day 2 of actual work on the kitchen. Whee.
Kitchen Remodel II, day 1
I’m not sure why I’m calling this “Remodel II” because this is neither the second kitchen remodel I’ve gone through (it’s the fourth) nor the second I’ve had in this house. But it is the second one on this incarnation of my blog, so that’s probably it.
Anyway, today was demolition day.
Kitchen Remodel II, day 0
Today I finished clearing out my kitchen getting ready for tomorrow’s demolition. Thankfully I actually had a few days to get it done this time, unlike last time when the contractor only let me know the demolition was going to happen at 5 PM the day before.
Because I had time to prepare it meant I could also actually do it in a semi-organized way. Which is good, because I have way less space for “staging” stuff in this house than I did in my last place.
Bracing for impact
My kitchen renovation starts on Wednesday. Thankfully I have plenty of advance warning this time and have started to pack up the stuff in my kitchen; I need to spend a lot more time finishing that up tomorrow, though. I’ve only put a dent in things.
I hope that the end result of this is I’ll finally get rid of a lot of stuff I’m not using actively, or at least figure out a better way of storing the stuff I rarely use.
The new kitchen design is going to be the same basic layout, but there’s a few nice changes that are going to happen. The lower cabinet next to the refrigerator is going to be replaced with a drawer unit, which will be much more useful for me (I’ll probably move my pots and pans in there, and the rarely-used stuff that currently lives in there goes into the sideboard where those were kept). The weird, awkward storage cabinets that flank the stove will become less-weird storage cabinets, with a utility drawer on top (but still a door down below).