So! I made it through my first week on evening shift, explored some new places to eat, hung out with Angela’s parents, went out with some people from lab, checked out a new church, and waged chemical warfare on all the bugs in my basement apartment (except for one spider that lives out of the way in my bathroom). I’m doing better and Tobi is too!

Something I forgot to mention last time

I think I live next door to a cult

You read that right.

My apartment is on a lot adjacent to a WMSCOG church. I hadn’t heard of it before now, but I’m kind of glad I looked them up before attending. On the church’s home page it says “We believe in God the Father and God the Mother according to the Bible.” Which was kind of a strange and incongruent belief. The only other religion that I know that claims to know a God the Mother is the LDS church (Mormons). But they aren’t Mormon either, so I had to look it up and they basically believe that this guy from South Korea was the second coming of Christ and then the appointed his wife as “God the Mother.” According to Wikipedia, the church has been denounced by various church councils for the deification of those two leaders and basically they’ve been labeled as having a lot of cult-like qualities.

Phew.

Eating

Food I made

I’ve been trying to find things that are easy to make in my somewhat-limited kitchen and I’ve got some new staples that I eat often: bacon/egg/cheese sandwich, and avocado toast. After my first pan-fry bacon preparation was kind of a disaster… well, not really a disaster, but I didn’t realize just HOW MUCH GREASE BACON HAS, but more just like something I wouldn’t want to do to every time I might consider adding bacon to a meal, my mom suggested I try doing ye olde bake-bacon-in-the-oven aka what I like to call “bake’un” where you line a baking sheet with foil and use those little wire cooling racks that you use for cookies to sit the bacon on to allow the grease to drip into a the foil for easy clean up. Then you cook all the bacon at once, and it’s easy to do once a week or so. It’s pretty easy. You start with a cold oven (no preheat), put your bacon tray in, set the temperature to 400ºF, and bake until you get your desired crispiness. I don’t like my bacon crispy, I like it soft (or as the waiter at Ye Old Waffle Shoppe on Franklin says, “limp bacon”), I set a timer for 15 minutes then add 5 minutes until I’m done (usually only once or twice). Then as they cool, I’ll flip them over to let the grease drip off the other side. Then pat dry with a paper towel and throw in a tupperware.

I also got one of those “egg rings” for making round eggs. Except it’s made of silicone which is great, but it got a little misshapen and I had some egg escape out the side. :( I just used a spatula to corral it back to the center. I cooked it a bit too long so it got a little overdone before flipping, but overall I think it was a success! I added it onto a bagel with the previously cooked bacon and some cheese to make a bacon/egg/cheese sandwich, which I loved eating a lot at the café back at NC State.

My other great love is avocado toast. [Insert millenial joke here.] I tried just slicing avocado but it tends to fall off the bread, so I mash it up with some tomato, salt, and pepper and spread it like guacamole (except it isn’t guacamole) which works a lot better, but doesn’t have as nice as a presentation. Not that this picture is really “nice presentation” though.

Food someone else made

RamenYa Thursdays

Taylor, a coworker of mine at NCSU has a “pizza Thursday” tradition with her husband. They order pizza every Thursday for dinner and eat the leftovers for lunch on Friday. Thanks for the idea, I have now designated Thursday as “ramen lunch Thursday” and went to RamenYa for lunch. The chef came out to chat as well, and told me that they have a brothless ramen that they’ll have on the menu soon as a seasonal item, so I have to go back to try it next week. Stay tuned!

Grill out at Angela’s House

Angela, the friend I went to breakfast with last week, invited me over to her house to have a grillout. Her fianceé Bellen and his parents were going to be coming up to meet her parents for the first time and I was invited to be a relaxing third party.

Well, that was the plan at least, but then their flight got canceled so it was just me. They still had a cookout though! I got to taste test all the food they were going to be making again when Bellen & family got there the next day. Her parents made these amazing beef skewers and ribs.

They also got crab, but unfortunately the timing didn’t work out because I had to go to work and wouldn’t be able to make it for dinner.

I got to take the leftovers home.

Angela’s parents and sister are super nice! When I was leaving her mom asked me to let them know if I needed anything and that they would have me over and we can eat crab next time. And then she invited me to a party at the house for July 4th. I started getting some deja vu from the last time an Asian mom invited me to her house for a party to eat crabs… XD but she assured me it was just the neighbors and some childhood friends, and that if I wasn’t working I was welcome to join. So it seems like no surprise political campaign fundraiser, but after last week one can really never be too sure anymore.

They also have a super cute dog named Darby! He likes watermelon.

Crab cake review with Akash

Akash and I went to a new place called G&M Restaurant Lounge which is located in Linthicum to try the “best crab cakes in Maryland” — a title already claimed by Pappa’s last week. The food was very good but also pretty expensive, which I felt kinda bad about. My coworker suggested it though, and I am glad we went because the food was delicious and there was a lot of it.

The seafood pasta was pretty impressive. It came with a huge variety of seafood, and some really good garlic Parmesan bread. And the crab cake was really good too! It’s hard to declare a clear winner in this race.

“The Korean place”

After an afternoon of gaming (learning how to play Monster Hunter: Rise), we decided to check out Ja Kum Sung, a Korean restaurant nearby that Sue had recommended me last week. We ordered like, SO much food. I think the lady thought we were crazy. Between this and the food from G&M, I don’t think I need to do meal prep this week… It was all so delicious though, and rather affordable, so I definitely will be back. We had to try all the staples though, so we ended up ordering a lot…

Strangely enough, I seem to only go to Korean restaurants (besides KBBQ) when I’m traveling. Remember “the Korean place” in Guinea? Yeah, same good vibes. I’m gonna sound like a broken record, but everything was actually so good. The japchae probably surprised me the most, the flavor was really well done and all the noodles soaked up the sauce really well. But of course, everything was tasty, and I can’t wait to go back.

Wine and dine

The lab had a casual get together at a winery called Cooper’s Hawk in downtown. One of my coworkers Jodie (the one from last week) has a wine membership there, I think? So a bunch of people decided to get together this weekend to go… drink? Do a wine tasting? It was all kind of said in passing by Alexis (another traveler). I’m not a big drinker, so I wasn’t sure if I should go at first, but their menu looked pretty good, and Alexis said she was getting dinner there also. I mean, we invited Iara, who is pregnant (due next week! We had a baby shower for her on my first day of work), so surely it’s okay if I don’t do a lot of (or any) drinking. Jodie already knows I am a weak drinker after I barely made a dent in the shot of wine she gave me to sip on during the fundraiser function last week, so I figured it was fine.

In the end, Iara and Jodie couldn’t make it, but it was me, Alexis, Liz, and Heidi (who has been training me).

And I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: the food was really good!

Being a winery, it was only appropriate that we got wine. They offered wine “flights” which is basically kind of like a sampling thing. More commonly used with beer, I think. When you order a beer flight, they usually give you maybe a shot glass-worth of each so you can try them all out before committing to an entire glass. Liz and Heidi ordered the Bubbles flight (all sparkling), Alexis got the Whites flight, and I got the Master’s flight (curated by the Master Sommelier, Emily Wines. What an appropriate name, right?), which happened to be all reds. What I didn’t expect is that we got four full glasses of each wine, instead of a small sampling! I definitely tasted them all, but didn’t finish any of them (probably total drank about one glass).

The flights came on these cool racks to carry all four glasses in the correct order. We all each got a card with some information about each wine we were tasting. Education! I loved that. I am not a somm, but I do like learning. And there are some subtle differences you can taste which is really cool!

The idea that you can take a wine and graph its taste is really interesting to me. I tried to look at the graphs of which ones I liked more to determine if there was any flavors or hints I preferred. My favorite of the bunch was the one on the far left, the Old Vine Zin which was a type of Zinfandel wine. Then Spice Chest was a good solid second, with the Petit Sirah and Carbernet coming in last. My initial thoughts before this was that I liked sweeter wines, but all the graphs didn’t have sweet much on there. But the ones that had more acidity I seemed to like more. The Petit and Cabernet I couldn’t really tell apart very much but I guess that makes sense since they have similar flavor profiles.

I taught my coworkers about the Asian glow. They did not know about it before, and I gave them an educational lesson in the science behind it and a real-life demonstration of it in action!

Chemical warfare

Trigger warning: pictures of bugs.

I live in a basement unit, so bugs are to be expected. I am usually pretty “”””okay”””” with bugs. I don’t like them, but if they’re not bothering me or in my face, I won’t bother them.

But if you’re a deadly spider making a web on my steps, you’ve gotta go. Make that elsewhere, or suffer the consequences.

A black widow made her home on my entry steps and I ran into her on Monday night as I came home from evening shift. Nope nope nope. I asked my host to get me some pesticide spray to take care of her because I really didn’t feel comfortable with her being so close to my door.

I drowned her, literally, in the pesticide stuff. They got me a can of raid, and one of those water-gun type things where there’s some tubing coming from the jug of chemicals. I then left her body there overnight just to be sure she was dead, then used some paper to toss her corpse over to some gravel where I buried her. I’m sorta sorry, because she was just living her life, but no. Sorry.

Ever since then and every morning after I’ve discovered a growing pile of bug corpses on my stairs due to the insane amount of pesticide I sprayed on the stairs. I’ve since resprayed after an additional spider was discovered in the same area as the previous black widow, alive. That one suffered the same fate.

I took a photo of the brown spider because I wanted to make sure it wasn’t something even more dangerous (how terrible would that be) like a Brown Recluse. Luckily based on images on the internet, it doesn’t seem to be one. It kinda looks like a tiny tarantula. Brown, a little bit hairy. But it still violated the treaty, so it died.

I bought a corn broom at Walmart to sweep the corpses to the side and get rid of some webs in the corners. That broom stays outside. Did you know Dollar General doesn’t sell brooms and dustpans? I had to go to Walmart for that. What an unusual discovery.

Meet Stuart

Alright, there’s one bug that has gained immunity from the chemical warfare outside my entrance; so long as he maintains his side of the truce, I will allow him to coexist in my space (mostly because he exists out of reach and I don’t feel so strongly that I need to go out of my way to exterminate him). There is a tiny spindly spider that lives above the door frame in my bathroom that I have named Stuart. I noticed him when I first moved in, and he just hung out above the door frame all the time. He’s always there when I used the bathroom. He never gets close to my area and I leave him alone. If he ever comes down to my living area though, he will die. So far he’s stayed out of the way. Many of his companions have not, though. I’ve made lessons out of them. Maybe he’s smart enough to know what will happen to him if he comes down.

I think if I ever went into the bathroom and Stuart was not at his usual post above the door frame I might panic a little because that means he MIGHT BE WHERE I AM AHHHHH but so far so good, for two weeks. Is he even alive? I don’t actually know, to be completely honest with you. I feel like he still sorta moves a teeny bit every time, but dead spiders curl up their legs and he’s not like that, you know? But me intentionally putting effort to find out the answer would be a breach in the truce and I might force his hand where he runs and then I have to kill him because he’s in my space, so I’m okay not knowing 100% and maintaining the status quo for now.

Church

I checked out a church this week as well (not the cult one next door). I attended Glen Burnie Baptist Church which is a pretty short 10 minute drive from my apartment. The main pastor was away at the Southern Baptist Convention this week, so there was a guest speaker who preached on Isaiah 59. The message was about how sin is rampant but we are blessed to have God to intervene.

As you can see, the church building can accommodate quite a few people, but there’s a lot less who attend the in-person service. They have an online stream for people that they set up since the beginning of the pandemic. Everyone was super welcoming and friendly, and I think I’ll definitely be making an effort to go back each week. They have bible study at 9:30am, which is a bit early for me, with the worship service at 11:00am, which is what I attended this week. They told me that they have homemade muffins and coffee at 10:30am, so maybe I’ll try to get up a little bit earlier next week to give it a try!

They also have some cool ministries and outreach stuff. This church (and it seems like a lot of other churches in the area) has a food pantry that they operate to help those that are in need in the community. They are open for about an hour or two a week where people can come by to get food, clothing, and other donated goods to help them get by, as well as get prayers and other spiritual and emotional support while they’re at it.

How is work?

There are two types of people in the lab.

Evenings is fine. The shift is a lot quieter, which I kinda like. Day shift is a bit more chaotic, although my first shift on evenings (Monday evening) was a bit hairy because it was just me and my trainer, Heidi. We were woefully understaffed and we kept having positive blood cultures pop up and interrupt things. We got through it, though but we both stayed pretty late. The rest of the week has been pretty chill, though. I’ve met a few more people and it’s been going well. I’m mostly working independently, which is good! No major issues with my work; I’ve been told I’m a delight to work with and I know my stuff and they’re ready to chain me to a desk and have me live there and read plates 24/7. Everyone seems happy with my progress through training, and I work this upcoming weekend to see what the weekends are like. After that, I think I’m off of weekends for a while, then I’ll be working a weird schedule, where I’m off two weekends, then I work a Sunday only, then I work the full weekend. So it’s a four-week schedule with a few more weekend days than usual. But Sundays I anticipate would be pretty quiet, so we’ll see how that goes. I’m off on Thursday next week, so I might try to go visit Annapolis downtown since everyone’s been really pushing how great it is.

One of our night shift people resigned this week, though. So more and more people are unsure of where the lab is going to be in terms of staffing. Their schedule is all over the place, and people work all sorts of random off hours than their usual “assigned” shift, so I can see how it becomes difficult to manage if you have to work late one day then be in super early the next. If they ask me to work overnights, that’s a big ABSOLUTELY NOT from me.

Luckily, since I’m an expensive traveler, I don’t actually have to work the holidays, because they would have to pay me extra to staff a holiday. Which is good! But also a bit surprising. I mean, I like not having to work a holiday, but it feels kinda bad the whole reason they hired me was because they need people to help with staffing and what better way to alleviate your permanent staff by having the traveler work a holiday? You won’t hear me complaining, though. I understand the money thing.

How is Tobi?

He’s doing a lot better, thanks for asking!! He’s sleeping with me at night and not crying as much. I think he’s a lot more used to the routine now and is settled in “our space.” He doesn’t spend his time hiding as much, he likes sleeping out in the open a little bit more now, so I’m really relieved to know he’s feeling more comfortable. He has fallen in love with the pickle toy and still uses the sushi house to “hide” but keep an eye on things (like when Akash was over for gaming).

Good boy.

Well that’s it for this week! I can’t believe another week has already gone by. Soon, I’ll be done with this contract and looking to the next big thing to come. Overall this week I’m ending with a lot of feelings of gratefulness. When I struck out here at the beginning of last week I was feeling really unsure of how this would go, and whether I would be able to settle in and have a good time and get to know the area or if I would kind of become more recluse and shut in because meeting new people is scary! I’ve been truly blessed with a lot of people who have reached out to make me feel welcome, whether friends I already knew, or my coworkers, or the new church community I met today. It has made a lot of that insecurity wash away and I like to think I’m doing pretty well balancing my introvert time and my “meet people so I don’t become a hermit” time. I want to make the best of these short few months here while also making a good effort to witness to those around me. The lab understandably has a lot of dissatisfaction–whether between shifts, between coworkers, or directed at the policies that they have to follow, and more. I try to not feed into it but come with a positive attitude and try to come up with ways to alleviate some of that dissatisfaction.

Jasmin