Making It Up As I Go Along #328

MONDAY...
— Work mostly day (9:30 to 5:30). It goes alright but I’m sick of these fly bites on my legs. They are sort of welts now and when I walk with my pants on, it itches the legs. I decide to remove the pants at work... nobody notices.
— Some lies told above.
— Softball is frustrating. I don’t play (resting the hamstring one more week) and the team loses in a close game.

TUESDAY...
— Physio before work. Hamstring is good to the point that we switch to a look at my shoulder. And part of my rotator cuff is weakened. Been this way for years too. So I have a set of exercises to work that out. Maybe the looseness up there can be tightened up and I can throw pain free again... maybe.

WEDNESDAY...
— A stop at Farm Boy before work gets me much goodness to snack on... and Greek Pasta salad for supper. Not much more exciting than that... what a thrilling day.
— Went for a run/walk tonight. Just under an hour for a route that normally takes an hour and fifteen to straight out walk. So I ran off about twenty minutes of time. Almost coughed up a lung but the hamstring didn’t mind it one bit. I’ll see what the morning brings. If it’s still not crying in pain, it’ll be a major hurtle crossed.

THURSDAY...
— Pretty quiet day. Not much out of the ordinary.

FRIDAY...
— Do a walk around the pond before work... with some sprints involved. That’s good.
— Spill Greek food on me at work today. Open the bag of it and the salad dumps out all over me. Not happy with the take out place for their packaging. And not sure if that stain will come out.
— Work is frustrating. The computers are acting up and we spend about an hour trying to figure why problems are happening.

SATURDAY...
— Work day. Doing some time now to put towards the time off next week. So I hang around the house in the morning and go work from 2:30 to 9:30. Gym for 20 minutes after that and home I go.


Betrayal of Greece
Greek food elicits more emotions from me than any other food I know. Thanks to the last few days, not all those emotions are positive ones.

Normally, Greek food puts me in a good mood. I normally get it delivered at work with several others in on the order. Melissa is my main partner in the ordering and it usually makes for a pleasant time looking through the menu to see what appeals on this given day. We pan through, comment how a particular dish is looking particularly good today, and then eye brows are raised with smiles as we make comment on how the other is leaving their norm this week.

I have actually lost some of the excitement for the local Greek food. When I first moved to Ottawa, we’d order Greek and several of us would carry on like ravenous dogs as we drooled over the menu. We knew the dishes on there but still needed to stare at each picture and read ingredients in each dish. Even the colours of the menu would seem to shine happiness to me. The olive yellowness making us Pavlov dogs as his whistle did so many years ago. I’d see the yellowy tones and have to swallow the spit that went into overdrive within my mouth.

This all changed after, ironically enough, my trip to Greece. Real Greek food made the Canadian take out version seem ordinary.

Food in Greece just tastes better. Yogurt bursts with flavor. Honey so sweet you go blind... temporarily. And oranges that you could pluck right off the tree as you walk down the street. They make Tropicana seem sour as grapefruit.

Today I have come to re-appreciate the Canadian Greek food. I just no longer drool like the dog hearing the whistle. But I eat Greek food here and think back to my time in Greece. Greek salads in Greece came with Feta cheese just as they do here. But in Greece, you’d receive a giant slab of Feta on top of the rest of the food. You could break off as much as you want with each fork full of salad. And what Feta it was. Knees go weak with each bite.

That trip to Greece has made me love Feta. And I’ve gotten quite partial to olives as well. I remember being high up on a mountain in a small Greek town. We sat on the edge of a stone wall and could look down into the valley below us. Some thousand feet down, you could see the olive orchard. Each bite of an olive, from that time on, brings me back to that stone wall, in that small mountain village, looking down into the valley at rows of olive trees.

So over the years since the Greek trip, I’ve usually ordered my take out with a Greek side salad to go with it. And most times, I’d have to jam the last third of that salad down into me as I would just be too full to eat it comfortably.

Then, a few weeks ago, I noticed something on that olive yellow menu. Instead of getting the full Greek salad, with cucumber and peppers and heaps of lettuce included, I could just order a dish known as... feta and olives. Intrigued, I ordered it in place of my side salad. Melissa gleamed with excitement as she had to figure out which menu number corresponded with this new order. We had never called in a number 35 before... it was daring... and filled the pre-supper air with electricity the likes I hadn’t felt since flying across the Atlantic and into the heart of the Mediterranean.

When the order came, lettuce was included with the feta and olives. I suppose one can’t title any dish with lettuce written there. Nobody pays delivery charges for lettuce. It’s the geeky cousin food that’s allowed to tag along with the cool ones. They snicker behind it’s back and we eat it just so it doesn’t feel bad. Poor lettuce.

So even with a helping of lettuce included, my number 35 was heavenly. Olives cleaned from the pit within my mouth with the precession of a baseball player chewing tobacco. The bare pit spit out with a “ping” as it hits the side bowl. And feta. Feta that forces a pause with each bite as the tanginess overwhelms the senses.

Four a month now, the number 35 has become a regular staple of my Greek ordered meal. It will be many a year before I tire of it. But this week, it nearly made me cry.

Opening the bag of food, I prepare to divide up the packages. But with the tear of the bag, horror. My feta and olives come crashing down, avalanching from their perch on top of the other containers. The plastic lid popping open as it comes and food spills out down my shirt, over my pants, all over the filing cabinet and down to the floor. I stand stunned looking at the mound of lettuce remaining on top of the cabinet with a few peaks of white feta hiding behind the greenery.

Olive oil drips down the cabinet and clings to my shirt. Someone jokes that the floor was recently cleaned and I should salvage what’s down there. I consider the idea for a few seconds, but realize this action, even if leaving me unharmed physically, would ruin my reputation in the office. People would toss all sorts of food onto the floor daring me to eat it.

But with a frantic mind, I decide that the food that stopped at the top of the cabinet, rather than plummeted to the floor, remained edible... and within the bounds of good eating etiquette. Much of the feta and olives were gone, but enough remained to satisfy most of my hunger.

I went through the rest of the shift looking like a streel. Oily stains on my shirt and pants leave me feeling dirty and out of sync. I didn’t even finish the food but still, I carefully reseal the container and put it in the fridge to take home when work ends.

Once work ends, I carefully lay the container in my bag (along with my gym shorts and some other odds and ends) and I venture home holding the bag gingerly, as not to knock things about.

I followed Melissa’s advice, and soaked the clothes as soon as I got home. In the laundry after that and, when going from washer to dryer, it looked as though I got the stain out.

It wasn’t until the drying was over that I saw dried in olive oil mocking me in my good shirt. How could olives betray me this way?

Even that resealed container opened in the bag! I inspect the contents and it seems nothing leaked out.

Twenty-four hours later, I’m at the gym, pulling my shorts out of that very gym bag. On the butt I see a great stain of olive oil! A second betrayal. How much of my clothes will this demon elixir claim? I angrily throw the shorts back in the bag, putting on my day shorts once again for the workout.

On the way home, I stop to buy some Lestoil. It would be my only hope of saving the clothes, and forgiving the olives.

And with the dryer just going off as I write, I can share with you the conclusion of this trauma. If olive oil were a demon elixir, than Lestoil is holy water of cleaners. My shirt and shorts are spotless once again. And my love of Greek food has been saved. We may have had a rough last few days scrapping with each other, but all is forgiven. And I can start dreaming, once again, of those orchards on the valley floor... as I sit on the stone wall in a mountain village... in Greece.