Things that live in my house

"Andy"

I live with my boyf, let’s call him “Andy.”  

When we decided to move in together there was a bit of situation in that he is a human person who comes with cat allergies, and I am a human person that comes with cats, an obsessive devotion to the same, and presumably a cat-loving brain parasite that, I assume, should go on this list because all evidence suggests she lives here too.  Modern medicine can work miracles, it turns out, so the situation is resolved.  It was resolved thus: I am perfectly content surrounded by so many heartbeats I love, and he only sneezes and eye-bleeds sometimes, and takes a 24 hour pill 2x a day, and they’ve only 

Look at these precious monsters!!

destroyed some of his carpet.  So it’s all good!  Also his dog lives here, who is sweet and earnest and doesn’t understand why his whole life got turned upside down and he has to suffer through demeaning nose swats and he’s not supposed to chase anything smaller than him, but he’s trying real hard to be a Good Boy.   The cats are fine; they don’t care; they’re cats. 

This is probably real.  Source: the internet.

I also brought a love of hobbies with me, and recently those have involved bringing other things to life in the house.  Not heartbeats, but alive none the less. 

This started with kombucha.  Do you remember, Reader, that my farm-mates

Yum!!

 made kombucha, and it totally blew my mind?  I didn’t drink much of it but hey, seems fun!  If you know anything about making kombucha, you know that it requires a kombucha mother to turn boring old sweet tea into fizzy yum juice.  ("Andy": But I like sweet tea...) Theoretically these mothers can spontaneously occur—I mean, they must, right? Or how did this whole process start?—but you have to create a whole mood.  An ambiance.  An environment in which tiny random baby bacterriettes and yeastlings are more likely to stumble together into the loving arms of the luxurious pre-kombucha tea mix you have created, set up shop, and grow into a weird Symbiotic Culture Of Bacteria and Yeast that makes old tea delicious.  It’s like putting up a bat box—right box, right height, right season, then you just hope they find it. 

Except, again, the boyf lives here too and since we ostensibly share our spaces I thought setting up a enticing bacterial lounge club-slash-uterus might push the envelope a little so being a good live-in-girlfriend, I looked up other options.  They go like this:

• Buy one
• Get one from someone who has one
• Nope, we’re back to growing your own, but with a kombucha starter!

I’m too stubborn to do the first one and lack the hook up on the second one, so I went with the third.  I found some raw unfiltered kombucha and let it sit in its happy jar uterus, and fed it and loved it and sang it lullabies, and now there’s a slimy mama living under the sink in the upstairs bathroom where she’s nice and warm and “Andy” doesn’t have to look at her.

Behold the douchey-est t shirt.

Not that “Andy” doesn’t have plenty else to look at, because now I am also the proud mother of lactofermenting pickles, a kefir culture, a yogurt culture, sauerkraut, and (almost) a vinegar mother!

All of those lovely items have their own bacterial yeasty colonies, that are living and growing and making food into other, tangier food.  The difference, I have learned, between lactofermented pickles 

Fun fact:
Yeast looks like tiny kiwi fruits!

and the vinegar brined pickles of my previous life is that these suckers get yummy because they are 

(spoiler alert) fermenting.  That means there’s this whole process of life happening, where tiny bacterial locusts are swarming over all the veggies and eating the natural sugars or whatever and I don’t really understand the whole thing but it’s supposed to be healthier and also, dude, it’s alive.  In a jar, on my kitchen counter, just living its chill, smelly, pre-digestive life.  Pre-digestive both in the sense that this process pre-digests part of the food for you so you’re kiiiiiind of eating bacterial vomit, and also in the sense that this is the part of their lives before I eat them alive and digest them myself—making this their pre-digestive life.  Growing things in your kitchen is awesome.

I am most excited about the vinegar because YOU CAN JUST MAKE THAT and it blows my mind.  A couple of relevant points on this:  You can also just buy it and it cost about $0.99 a gallon and then you just take it home and use it.  Making it costs whatever apples cost, and takes like 2 months.  Plus it smells a little vomity right now.  Maybe I’m doing something wrong.  Point is, totally worth it.  When it gets going it gets a mother in it too, but it’s not the same as a kombucha mother—apparently they’re cousins or something.  Idk, google it.  I don’t have a mother yet but, Reader, you’ll be the first to know.

The kefir is new, I just got the seeds (I had to give in and order these because if I created the environment in which rotting milk becomes alive I would have to move out and I really do love “Andy”).  I don’t even know if I like Kefir, but I do know I’m about to start drinking a cup every day and I’m pretty jazzed. 

Other life in our house includes the seedlings under the grow light in the guest room/room where I hide things from  the boyf and the cats. Those are pretty contained, though, and they’ll go outside once this weather decides to quit being moody.  Also in the

One day Claire will write a memoir
about her many brushes with death
 and none of us will be heroes.

 guest room is a plant that I don’t know what she is.  She was apparently part of a Valentine’s bouquet that a friend of mine got, and when all the flowers were done and she went to throw them out, she noticed that this dramatic, vine-y thing had rooted in the water.  Far be it from her (or me) to murder something trying so hard to live—it’s in a vase in a window now, and growing leaves, and for all I know it’s invasive and poisonous but her name is Claire and I hope she lives forever.  However, if you are reading Claire, it would be helpful if you’d sprout enough for me to identify you so that I know where to put you to give you your best shot.  Reader, I am definitely the hero of this story.  

Life around-but-not-in our house includes the asshole dogs next door, the moths that swarm the back door and I occasionally feed to our cats, and the family of lizards who live under the door jamb to the patio.  They are hilarious, mostly because I swear they are chill AF as they sun themselves just outside the glass, casually shooting the bird at the cats and dog.  

(I am rooting for you, lizard friends, but the cats are rooting for you taking a left instead of a right in your door-jamb-house and them showing you a thing or two about the circle of life.)

It’s a full house over here.

I give nery one f*ck.