None of this is good

My cousin's wife (my parents' age) died of pancreatic cancer yesterday and another cousin's brother in law (who was also my calculus teacher in h.s. and father of a friend of my brother) also died this week. Both were ill so it wasn't a surprise but sad none the less.

I came home to still no phone but it no longer said 'check teleline' so I assumed progress was being made. It finally came back imperfectly at 630.

I think I mentioned I plan to try to make recipes specifically from areas of Italy that my family is from (I should try the same with the croatian side) so I started with sauce. It's interesting because all the English version are straight vegetarian (the Abruzzo region is huge on meat so I was happy to find one that wasn't literally 3-4 meats in a pot) but the Italian language ones all include guanciale basically pork cheek. I didn't because it's hard to find. The one English one said 'i use the food processor to get the celery/carrots/onions fine.

I always do the recipe step by step the first time. So I did that...and yeah it ended up tasting a little like a bloody mary and that also gave the sauce a weird chew because of the strings in the celery. Next time I'll leave that more whole. Right now the sauce is in the fridge. I'll finish it with the sauteed veggies and serve tomorrow.

Tomorrow mid term grades are due in. I will now see half my class drop out even ones that shouldn't.