i wouldn't normally make pizza. i like pizza, certainly, but pizza is junk food and something i will order and have made for me. i'm the same way with hamburgers. i will make myself lots of things, but i will order pizza.

however, they gave me a small stack of tomato sauce when i was at the food bank last fall because it was piling up. nobody wanted it. so i grabbed it, and i'm going to make "pizza" with it.

my dad used to make these cheeseless mini pizzas on english muffins that were extremely italian - they had no cheese on top, but were rather loaded with basil and oregano on top of the sauce, and something on them like olives or tomatoes and often chopped ham. they were really english muffins baked with tomato sauce and topped with pesto. this is something approaching traditional italian pizza rather than the franco-american pizza we eat today in north america. his third wife had an aversion to cheese and would get upset even watching somebody else eat it, so there was no cheese on anything he made (these mini pizzas, spaghetti, penne, whatever), unless i put it on when i ate the leftovers. all leftovers went to me, because she wouldn't eat leftovers, either; she insisted on only eating prepared food, and would just throw out whatever wasn't eaten, if nobody would stop her. dad would shrug off the cheese, but he couldn't accept the food waste, and i was happy to eat the leftovers as it gave me the ability to schedule eating when i wanted to - after school, in the morning or, sometimes, at 3:00, when i came in from somewhere, and was watching rereuns of star trek. her aversion to leftovers meant there was always something in there to microwave when i came home, even if i didn't come home for supper that night, or even if they brought something back from a restaurant, and that was actually very helpful to me, as a young person. you would need at least four, sometimes eight, of these mini pesto pizzas on english muffins to fill you up, as a meal. he'd make like 50 at a time and leave what was left in the fridge for me, and sometimes i'd eat them for a week at a time. 

so, this is an idea i'm familiar with and have eaten a lot of. however, it's because of that that i'm going to address some of the defects with these mini pizzas i grew up on. 

i did not know until recently that the words pita and pizza are actually the same word. so, i'm going to one up him a little on making this out of thick greek pitas, like this, and not out of english muffins:

the major difference between the greek pitas and the probably more well known arab pita is that the greek pitas do not have pockets and are not meant to cram stuff in. you would be more aware of this if you've had a gyro or a souvlaki; you roll them up like a thick tortilla, or you just put stuff on it and eat it like a canadian beavertail, which is essentially a fancy desert souvlaki.

but what i see is a small premade pizza dough, and that makes sense, because pizza and pita are the same word, and that is exactly what it is. 

i am going to go through one can of sauce per meal and we'll see how many that is but i imagine it will be two or three. i bought a stack of them pre-made in the bread section at walmart and it should be enough to get through the sauce, i think.

when i buy a pizza, i don't order it with pesto and tomatoes, although i do like the ham and olives. depending on how much i want to spend and what i feel like, and what's on sale (2 or 3 toppings), my usual pizza toppings are, in hierarchy:

core, always:

- bacon

- olives

first add:

- pineapple

second add:

- extra cheese (but it usually doesn't count)

third add:

green peppers

i will put hot sauce on the pizza when available and, if i take it home, will prefer to make my own dipping sauce out of frank's + caesar.

i have all of these ingredients and will be using all of them, along with the following toppings on the cheese:

- avocado

- garlic

- oregano, thyme, basil

- nutritional yeast

i think we know how to make pizza, it's the ingredients here that are unusual:

- make the bacon first (don't fully cook)

- slice fresh pineapple,  green peppers

- grate cheese

- start with the greek pitas

- put the sauce down, add hot sauce to tomato sauce

- rub some of the bacon grease around the edges of the pitas

- add green olives, bacon, pineapple, green peppers and anything else (grilled chicken, perhaps, but i'm not adding that ingredient)

- add cheese

- bake

- chop avocados, garlic while baking

- add avocadoes, garlic, spices, nutritional yeast, hot sauce to top of pitas when they come out

- slice them in four

there won't be crusts here, but if i want a dipping sauce, i'll mix frank's and caesar dressing together to make it.

i don't know what i'm sick with, but i am sick.

there are rats in the ceiling. i do not believe they're down here. at all. i've seen no sign of them down here. no droppings. nothing chewed through. no food missing. there are clear entry points, and i'm working to identify and block them, but they don't seem to be coming down here. i think it's a combination of the facts that (1) i leave the lights on at night, (2) i'm usually awake at night, (3) my food is very well stored and (4) the main floor tenants turn the lights off at night, sleep all night and leave their food out. maybe they'd come down here if there wasn't so much easily accessible food upstairs. so, the rats are nesting in the ceiling and eating out of the upstairs kitchen, which is on top of my bathroom. i can hear them up there every night.

while i don't think they're down here, they are clearly directly above me, and they are urinating and defecating in the ceiling, and i can smell it. i've had stains coming down from the ceiling, and both food and droppings coming from holes or gaps in the ceiling, which i'm trying to find and cover up.

i'm consequently a little concerned about leptospirosis. about 95% of people survive leptospirosis. roughly. however, unlike covid, it doesn't target the elderly. being young and healthy is not going to help you against this one. it's a gamble with no clear way to predict the outcome. i would generally avoid anything with a 5% likelihood of death. that's too risky for me.

what i have is an upper respiratory infection, and it's pretty brutal, but i don't have signs of leptospirosis, yet. no blood shot eyes. no bleeding. no gastrointestinal concerns, besides a little heartburn. no jaundice. i have sore sinuses, but no headache, exactly. i want to keep an eye on this but i just don't have symptoms, or at least not yet. 

right now, it looks like i must have picked up a flu or covid on wednesday when i went to an appointment. i woke up with a sore throat on thursday and started getting a runny nose on friday. i blew a lot of virus out of my nose over the weekend, but it's actually running clear tonight. 

i am noticing that gurgling with high flouride toothpaste is helping with my throat, which is concerning as it suggests i'm killing bacteria in there. it's also one of those bugs where you feel better when you go to sleep and worse again when you wake up. viruses generally work the other way around. so this is making me a little concerned.

i know the symptoms to look for. the best thing i can do is keep an eye on it and call my doctor if i think i'm showing signs of more severe disease. i would want to get an anti-biotic to kill the bacteria. right now, if it is a bacteria from the rats, it's manifesting as a flu. and i was in a doctor's office with sick people the day before i got sick, albeit briefly.

i was never vaccinated for covid. i had some technical concerns with the type of vaccination being used, and i calculated that i just didn't need it. i am in a demographic with a 99.99% survival rate. i figured my immune system could handle the challenge. i don't know how true it really is, but i imagine our immune symptoms are stronger when they get more practice. i would have gotten vaccinated for something more scary, but i just was not afraid of covid, and i don't think the data suggests i should have been. further, i actually think i got covid before the pandemic started, at a plaid concert in detroit in late 2019. i may have carried it from detroit to toronto, when i went to file court documents there. i was never tested for antibodies. i did test clear of covid in 2021 when i went to get my orchiectomy, also in toronto. if that was the case, i had an early strain, and it may have been a little different than the pandemic strain, but i did not get substantively sick during the pandemic at all, and i may have never come across it. it's likely i'd get sick if i caught a recent strain. 

but i can smell fine. 

so i'm going to hope it's a flu and not a bacteria from the rats. 

i'll also keep an eye out for bubos and you can be sure i'll be at the er if i see any swelling at all.. right now, i'm not swollen, at all. bubonic plague is actually easily treatable if you catch it early, but they might have to burn the city block down if they find it here.

i made a choice on thursday that i felt shitty enough to sleep it off before i focused on the court documents. i had to make that choice - i could try chugging coffee and hope it wakes me up and struggle through it, or try to sleep it off and get to work on it after, with the hope i'm more productive if i do. i decided to try to sleep it off. i consequently lost thursday, friday and saturday.

i was feeling good enough to get to work on saturday night, but right when i was about to start, my air purifier fell off my box spring, landed on my chromebook (it's ok), bounced off of it and knocked over a giant glass beer mug *full* of coffee. the mug is ok. by the time i got a towel, the coffee had created a mess on my mattress and box spring that had to be addressed by cleaning it.

i haven't set up my bedroom yet. the kitchen, bathroom and laundry are each mostly set up, but everything is still in boxes in the living space, the in-unit garage is empty and the other areas are full of storage items. i'm waiting on the weather, i'm waiting on the drug dealers to get evicted and i'm waiting on finishing the court documents. my mattress is on the floor. it's fine for now, but the spill required me to move some things, and it made sense to clean the floors and set a few things up, given i'm sick. 

 

- i got a lot of dust off the floor. no signs of rodents in here.

- i also blocked off two obvious rodent holes, which i don't think have been used in here recently.

- i also sealed all the baseboards with caulking, which was to block off a draft

- i was able to glue the bottom leg on one of my tables, which had broken off in the previous move. it's fine.

it's ridiculously cold out and the caulking instantly helped. i hadn't initially noticed the draft in the floor. i was focused on the draft around the windows and actually surprised by the lack of one but couldn't figure out why the temperature in here dropped so fast without constant heat. that seems to be it.

unfortunately, the box spring took the brunt of the spill and absorbed enough of it that i was going to have to let to dry. i think i can get most of the discolouration out with dish soap, but i just wasn't getting anywhere, until the moisture evaporated. so i stopped early in the morning to eat my last caesar salad (for now, i'm out of kale) before switching to mini pizzas for the next week to eat up the tomato sauce i got from the food bank last fall, i feel asleep mid morning, got up to finish my salad and fell back asleep. i woke up without a sore throat today, but with a sore upper nose (nasal cavity). i've been sneezing a lot, but it's been clear snot since i cleared the last bit of yellow when i first woke up. that's a definite change from the gobs of yellow yesterday.

i still have to clean my box spring and set my bed up before i can get back to work, but it's time to eat again, so i'm going to make some of these pizzas. this is a new recipe so i'll go to a new post.