Participant #1:
Hello, cupcake, it's Me, a podcast with your host, Michael Peterson.

Participant #1:
Hey, all. Michael here with hello, cupcake, it's Me, a podcast. Today is July 21, eight, 2022. And how are you? If you haven't done so already, please hit like and subscribe. Go check out the blog, hello, cupcake, it's Me. And head on over to the YouTube channel Youtube.com. Hello, cupcake, it's me. So, man, Tuesday night trivia night is on fire yet once again in more than one way. So this last Tuesday, it was a battle royale where we just had like a free for all, basically. And next week I believe we start our new season and we're going up against a couple of new bars and we're still stuck in fucking in the bronze division. And I completely 100% attribute it to the fact that we've been down two or three players, like religiously the last couple of weeks. So hopefully we can get that back up and going. But god damn, this week it was so freaking hot. It was like 97 deg outside, which here in the Pacific Northwest, it's never been that hot. Over the last couple of years, it's gotten steadily hotter and hotter. And the bar has no air conditioning or any kind of air movement in there. Just the two doors open. And at one point the bartender almost passed out and she's from Arizona. It was like, just unnecessary. And I told the manager, I'm like, dude, you need to go across the street to the store and pick up a couple of fans. And he's like, oh, well, we just don't have the budget for that right now. I was like, well then fucking make the budget. Like, take it out of your paycheck. Do something. Make it happen. This is bullshit. Your customers shouldn't be in here sweltering. And your weight staff and bartenders definitely don't need to be working in these kind of conditions. I was like, if I came into work and it was this hot, I would not be working here until you guys got something figured out. He's like, yeah, well, then we would just fire you. I'm like, that's fine. You could fire me all you need to. I'll take your ass to unemployment in LNI and be like, these are unsuitable working conditions, man. It was disgusting. But I had the foresight to bring a portable fan with me. So I was a bougie bitch. I don't give a damn. I was in there with my little portable fan hooked up. Everyone was laughing at me. I was like, yeah, you can laugh at me all you need to, but I'm going to sit here, I'm going to play my trivia, and I'm going to have this little fan on me. And whenever the bartender would walk over, just kind of like, check things out for a few minutes, I would turn the fan on her so she could cool down a little bit. But yeah, this hot weather is getting out of control. This is, like, starting to become, like, California hot weather. And part of the reason I left California and moved to the Pacific Northwest was to get away from the soaring temperatures and the fact that, like, several times a season, southern California turns into an ashtray and everything catches on fire. But thankfully, I have a portable air conditioner in my bedroom, and I've been able to keep my room fairly cool. My living room and the rest of the house, not so much. And trying to get my cat to understand that he can be in the cool bedroom and not out here where it's swell trained. Like, he came in one day to the bedroom, and he was hot to the touch. I was like, Dude, if I have to, I'm going to lock your fluffy ass in this bedroom. My cat, Bella, before I got the air conditioner, we would both just be dying. But I used to put her in the shower with me and get her all watered down, and she would look like a drenched wrap. But I felt like that was a better choice than letting her have a heat stroke or whatever. And there was a couple of times where I had almost shaved her, because that just seemed more humane than letting her sit there and pant and have a hard time breathing. I've been putting ice cubes in the cat's water, but they melt faster than they do anything good for him. So I don't know. I'm just trying my best to get through the summer, and I can't even imagine having to go back to a time when I didn't have my little air conditioner. I'm a big dude and being big and fluffy and sweating all the time, yeah, I would just get into the shower as cold as I could possibly stand it fully closed, and then just lay in bed. And when I dry it off and started getting warm again, I would do the same exact thing. There was one night that I even got a towel wet, and I slept with that as a blanket. You just got to do what you got to do to stay cool. But something else I've been doing lately, or at least the last couple of weeks, is I've had to go to the food bank. And I usually don't like going to the food bank and places like that unless I absolutely have to. But I started getting really low on some of my canned foods and some of my staples and what have you, and I now have two air fryers, technically three, but I don't have the basket for the third one, so I've never used it. So I need to get myself some kind of a basket or silicone mat or something that I could put in there so I can start using that one. But they give you a ton of vegetables, and a lot of times it's shit that you would never eat. Well, at least that I would never eat, like Swiss chard and mustard greens and stuff like that. So what I've been doing is I've started gardening and I made planters out of cardboard boxes. And it sounds wanky as hell, but there's actually a huge movement in the gardening community where they're using cardboard to actually plant into, especially in suburban areas where you may not have the ability to have a full fledged garden. So I have Brussels sprouts. I have two different types of parsley. I have some leeks going. I'm soon to have some carrots and some celery going. And I have lemon balm. I have three pepper plants. And I have some cat nip for my cat. And yeah, just like every week, it seems like going to the food bank, I get some new plants. And I just ordered these really cool fabric planters off of Amazon for like $4. And there's two or seven gallon I can't remember which right now, but they're for planting potatoes or root vegetables. And the side of it lifts up. So you have like a little window and you can pull your vegetables out from that. So I'm really excited about that. It should be here Monday. I would hope that it would get here sooner, but it says Monday and yeah, and I'm really pissed off that Amazon doesn't do their next day delivery. Like, they used to do prepandemic. Now everything is like a week or two later. My sister brought that up to me. She's all, Why are we paying 100? And like almost what was it? We paid $120 this year? She thought, Why are we paying that when we're not getting things? We're not getting the shipping or whatever, like we should. I said, well, we're still getting free shipping on no matter what we order. It's just coming a little bit later. I said, so in the shipping alone, we're saving money. But yeah, I agree. Why are we paying this money for a service that we're not getting? So this coming year, I think it's in February, they're going to be raising the prices to $140. And my sister said that she's not sure if she's going to keep Amazon or not. And I just got an Amazon Fire stick and I love the damn thing. And I'm not about ready to lose my service because she doesn't want to pay the $140 a year. So I might have to try to figure out how to fanugle that. So, yeah, with the vegetables and stuff at the food bank that I've been getting, if it's stuff that I don't eat, like cilantro I absolutely fucking hate cilantro. But it's so healthy and beneficial for you. I've just started taking the vegetables and I dehydrate them in my air fryer, and it's actually really stinking. Simple to do. You just cut it up really nice and fine. So, like, for the cilantro and the kale and the Swiss chard, I cut it up kind of fine. Swiss chart and the kale I do kind of a rough cut on, but on the cilantro, I just cut it off where the leaves stop and discard the stems and stick it in the air fryer at 240 degrees for about 15 minutes. And every so often I will open it up and stir everything around and just pick it up and move it kind of like you would a mulch pile. And by the end of everything, it's usually really good and ready to go. And then I just stick it in a Ziploc baggie and call it good. Same thing with carrots and bell pepper and everything else. Carrots, cut them up into small little medallions, stick them in there, and I'll put them on for 240 for about 30 minutes at a time. And like I said, every so often, just go through and stir it all back up and check on it and call it good. So I'm building emergency supplies as well as utilizing everything that I'm getting from the food bank, and I feel pretty good about it. I have two heads of cabbage, a cauliflower that I still got to do something with, and I don't know if I want to just cook up the cabbage and eat it or if I want to dehydrate it. And the cauliflower with it being so blasted hot. I hate turning on my stove and especially turning on my oven. That's a no go most days if I can get away with it. But yeah, thank God it's already August because our cooler weather starts coming back around September, October. And even though I'm not really looking forward to the winter just because my depression seems to be at its worst during that time, I actually have a little bit of a plan of action this year that I want to try to implement and actually see if it takes hold. I want to try micro dosing and see if that helps, and if it does, then I think that's going to be what I do during the winter months to kind of combat my depression because it's getting worse every year. It gets worse and worse and harder and harder to break away from. And so I just wanted to try something new. And when I was at my doctor's appointment yesterday, I forgot to even talk to him about this. And I know that most primary care physicians won't even talk to you about stuff like that, but there was a bunch of other stuff that I forgot to talk to my doctor about. Honestly, I talked to them about some of the new aches and pains and some of the new concerns that I have or whatever. But why is it that you always get amnesia whenever you go to your doctor's appointment, like the whole couple of days prior to it, you're like, yeah, I'm going to talk to them about this. I'm going to talk to them about that. I want to address this issue and that issue and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then you get in there and you're just like, I don't know what I want. So, yeah, feeling kind of dumb, but I have another appointment coming up with him in October, and then I have an appointment with my diabetic doctor so I can put those concerns into his ear and have him relay that over to my primary or whatever. So, yeah, that's kind of what's been going on this week and not much else. Anyways, if you guys have any questions, comments, concerns, please let me know. Use the voicemail feature to leave me questions or whatever here on Anchor FM and go check out the blog and that's Hello Cupcake, it's Me.com and go check out the YouTube channel and join over there because there's stuff that I talk about over there that I don't really talk about anywhere else. And I'm trying really hard to kind of keep the podcast and the YouTube channel separate. There is some overlapping content, but for the most part, it is pretty separate. So that's YouTube. Comhellowupcake it's me. And if you do join over there, please let me know that you are there from the podcast and I hope to talk to you all real soon. Thank you so much for tuning in. You have been listening to Hello Cupcake, it's Me, a podcast with your host, Michael Peterson. Please make sure to check back often as new episodes are released by weekly. If you have any questions, comments or concerns, please feel free to send a message to Hello Cupcake, it's Me@gmail.com, and until next time, stay happy, safe, and keep doing the best you can with what you have been given. Bye.