Rosalia Rambles

Tag: spicy

  • Redundancy Review: Day 120, “Four Month Reflection”

    (for context on what this series is, please see my Day 1 post here: Redundancy Review: Day 1, “A New Beginning” – Rosalia Rambles)

    Good morning clerics and healers, welcome to Day 120 of Rosalia Rambles Redundancy Review.

    120 days since I was first made redundant. Four months worth of thinking, reflection, and trying to figure out where to do next. In terms of actual posts, this is the 92nd Redundancy Review since this all kicked off, so only off by a factor of about thirty days due to holidays, breaks, or just not feeling the flow.

    In those four months I have fought the government for what is rightfully mine, waded through job boards in the hope of finding something new, expanded my horizons beyond QA to see what I might be good at, and have now found myself back in the life of a SaaS QA tester within the greater technology industry… for better or worse.

    Part of what drove me to start writing a career retrospective at the start of this week is the fact I am growing incredibly weary with the tech industry as a whole. The start up culture, the grindset mindset, the need to build & scale fast with less… all of it has started to wear me down.

    If we include my time at Codemasters, I am coming up on having worked for half a decade in the technology industry as a QA, with some production on the side. This comes back to something I said I need to keep in mind off the back of my redundancy, that it was a traumatic event, and it is okay to let it change me. 

    And one of those things that might need to change is my career as a whole.

    I have already started to explore other options in addition to balancing my contract work… on top of balancing maintaining a good posting schedule… on top of trying to maintain an amount of social life and relaxation time…

    Being real, things feel hard for me right now. Over the last couple of days I have found myself crying at my desk more often, with even the most routine of work tasks overwhelming me. In between uploads, downloads, or waiting for processes to finish, I take moments to let out little sobs, which shows to me that it is not the challenges of the work getting to me, it is just the nature of the work itself.

    And the mental separation I try to impose on myself that this is a holdover contract role, that it will not be forever is slowly starting to break down as I realise I have fallen out of love with the greater industry as a whole, and to ensure longevity in my future; I need to make a change to one of the biggest parts of my life.

    Saying goodbye to an industry that has honed me, hardened me, and shaped me into the person I am today.

    This is not to say I am going to move away from technology as a whole, because I am perfectly willing to do a job that mostly revolves around a computer, and there is no denying I have made a good career in QA with how long I have survived in such a competitive industry, especially in the recent years of a turbulent job market.

    It is just a matter of deciding where to go, with my current avenues for exploration being in insurance, civil service, and I have also signed up for a charity jobs board – both for QA and writing roles.

    There is a part of me that thinks I am “limiting my potential” by choosing to walk away from tech, that if I committed the energy I am using to look elsewhere to doubling my effort into the tech industry, I could stand to make a lot of money by pursuing even more elite roles within the startup space.

    But the redundancy has changed me. I am distrustful of investor groups, the primary way such companies would be funded. The need to keep scaling up and making things even bigger rather than focusing on steady outcomes is incompatible with my current life philosophy.

    I need to move away from what has been a significant part of my life and enabled my growth into who I am today, to heal from the pain that growth has been accompanied by, and start a new chapter of my life.

    Ultimately, I am still quite young, having not even hit my thirties yet. In a way my professional life has only just begun, with the role I was made redundant from being only my second job ever. 

    There is so much I can do, I just need to find myself to find out what I want to do.

    In the meantime, my contract can hold me over, and whilst I do not want to maintain the grindset mindset, I am also not someone who can half-arse a job. My safety net is actually stronger than it was before my redundancy too, so I am in an extremely lucky position to not be pressed against the wall.

    Ideally I do not want to eat into the safety net and I can transition from my contract into a new role, but I am prepared for any eventuality.

    No matter what, I will continue to write. This story still has several chapters to write, and the stories inside my head still need to be told. 

    Time to get into the review, and I think it is time to introduce a somewhat new topic to the Redundancy Review: hot sauce.

    For those who have been around for the somewhat regular food reviews, you will know I am a little bit of a spicehead, and this definitely extends into my home life as I have a very decent collection of hot sauces within my fridge. Today’s hot sauce is made from one of the spiciest peppers in the world: Bhut Jolokia, more commonly known as the Ghost Pepper.

    This specific sauce is from a small UK brand called Mahi, and this was one of the three hot sauces in their “Discovery Pack”, a bundle offer for those wanting to explore more options in hot sauce outside of the main brands in the UK. 

    With it being such a spice forward sauce, there is actually a pleasing acidic bite that announces itself first before the heat ramps up, though it is actually variable how much heat will be delivered with each taste.

    Sometimes it will be a pleasant warmth that accompanies the acidity.

    And sometimes it will be a deliverance of heat worthy of the nickname my partner gave to this sauce after one accidentally trying it: “Death Sauce”.

    £7.50 plus shipping was the price for the pack of three sauces, and it came in a very attractive box which included a catalogue of Mahi’s other products, most of which I will definitely want to try in future because of how nice everything included in the box was.

    This does however include a Trinidad Scorpion sauce, which is supposedly even hotter than the Ghost Pepper…

    …oh well, as I often yell before doing anything stupid, DEATH OR GLORY!

    That should do it for today. Thank you for reading today’s edition of the Redundancy Review. Wherever you are I hope you are able to relax and that your path ahead in life is clear, if not, then there is nothing to fear. You are in good company with that, and as we all know, not all who wander are lost.

    For more information on Mahi’s products, visit their website here: https://saucymahi.co/ 

  • Redundancy Review: Day 65 & 66, “Embracing the Flip-Flop”

    Redundancy Review: Day 65 & 66, “Embracing the Flip-Flop”

    (for context on what this series is, please see my Day 1 post here: Redundancy Review: Day 1, “A New Beginning” – Rosalia’s Rambles)

    Good morning flips and flops, welcome to Day 65 & 66 of Rosalia Rambles Redundancy Review.

    Initially tried writing Day 65 yesterday as a semi-placeholder day, but I ended up being way too spaced out to finish writing anything. I am not entirely sure what was causing the space-out or the dizziness, but I can reasonably assume it is one of the bigger changes I have been working on in the background.

    Recently had a friend compliment me on how I put stuff out into the open so willingly and they like that about me, with today’s topic being no different.

    For about two weeks now, I have been weaning myself off my antidepressants.

    Disclaimer: My words are not meant to be taken as advice to either stop taking antidepressants or decide not to pursue them. If you feel your medication is helping you, then continue taking it, likewise if you feel medication is what you need to help you. Always follow the advice of your doctor when it comes to antidepressant medication and consult them before any major changes.

    Bit of context, I had been on the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) Sertraline since about November of last year, having had a mental breakdown around that time due to a large combination of factors and wanting to see how the medication would help me out.

    In short, it brought my mood into a consistent “happy medium” point as I frequently called it – and for a good amount of time I was satisfied with existing in that happy medium. But as time went on and I became redundant, that happy medium was something I no longer wanted to have as my baseline.

    With the way my brain works, combining a potent cocktail of estrogen, ADHD, and general mental fuzziness means my emotions fluctuate wildly throughout a day sometimes… actually hold on I have the perfect image to use this for:

    Yeah it looks pretty much like that for me on a given day, whereas my antidepressants would stabilise my line in the middle. For some people, that is all they would need, craving stability and a mood that does not shift throughout the day.

    For me though… it feels weird to say, but I want to try embrace all my emotions more – even the negative ones. I want to feel the highest highs and the lowest lows, not suppressing how I feel and just letting my emotions fly out.

    It has been hard for me to embrace emotional expression, and to an extent I still find a fair amount of difficulty with it. Not so long ago I would suppress any negative emotion I had because I did not know how to process it properly, which inevitably led to things boiling over in my mind and causing me to lash out anyway.

    That is not to say I am an expert at it now; because I am really not. Learning how my brain and emotions work is a long form process for me that I think will still take a significant amount of time to understand, but I want to learn about them in their purest, unrestrained form before figuring out how I want to work with them.

    Similarly, I find myself wanting to embrace the flip-flop in my career as well. Right now my contract role is sustaining me in a way that is working, but I have ambitions way outside of the tech industry that I would love to explore as well.

    As a massive VTuber fan, the idea crosses my mind of getting a model and trying to establish my own brand of content in a massively saturated market, not only for the potential niche I would love to try to fulfill, but also as a way of further introducing things that make me happy to other people.

    I aim to continue improving my baking skills, along with working towards making homemade pickles and sauces with the aim I could one day sell them at a market of sorts, and of course writing work falls into this mix as well, either as a professional copywriter somewhere or just picking up odd jobs here and there.

    My position in life right now is not entirely in danger, so for me, this is the best time to explore and try new things to see what I might want to do as a career outside of what has been familiar to me for so long.

    For now though, I shall continue on the path I am currently walking, enjoying my card games, plushies, and everything else in between. The most important thing in between being food, which is a perfect and not-at-all awkward segue into another exciting episode of…

    Rosa Eats Her Way Around Shrewsbury!

    It has been a while since I have done one of these, and this time I hit up a proper local joint called “Bird And Beer”, specialising in fried chicken and beer, in case the name did not give it away.

    This is a place my partner has been asking for me to try since he went while I was away in Scotland, and tonight we finally went out together as a treat. The menu is decently sized but offers all the favourites: strips, wings, burgers, and a good variety of sides.

    Now, I am someone who appreciates the spicier things in life, and constantly tests my limits in regards to my spice tolerance. Usually I am pretty good with whatever I decide to throw at my mouth, esophagus, or stomach, having once tackled ghost pepper chilli sauce and enjoying it with some regularity.

    With this in mind, I decided to order the spiciest sauce available on the menu to coat my chicken strips, “Cluckin’ Hot”, a concoction of fresh garlic, ginger, and Scotch Bonnet chillies, topped with jalapeno salsa, sliced red chillies, and chilli flakes in case you have not already regretted your life choice by ordering this.

    Included in my spread was a portion of “Bird Disco Fries”, skin-on fries topped with melted cheese, yet more jalapeno salsa, and the mysterious “Bird Sauce”, which I did not think to ask what it contained. A bowl of fried pickles (frickles) finished off my meal, and were incredibly lovely, especially as I struggle to find these delightful treats on menus nowadays.

    Okay, enough positivity and beating around the bush.

    The Cluckin’ Hot sauce was quite possibly a mistake. To give the lovely staff at Bird and Beer credit, it was a flavourful sauce which is something that often falls by the wayside when it comes to places devising their spiciest sauces, favouring pure heat over taste. 

    I am not sure if it is the combination of the hot sauce with the fresh chillies, or the hot sauce with the jalapeno salsa, or the fact I ordered spice on top of spice, but something about this meal absolutely demolished me, to the point I was turning red, coughing, and slamming my fist lightly on the table.

    It is hard for me to even pass a proper judgement on the quality of the chicken strips themselves because my mind has been so fixated on the absolute pain and suffering I inflicted upon myself with their spiciest sauce…

    …only to discover it is not the spiciest thing they offer, and, in fact, they offer a Challenge Sauce made from Carolina Reaper and Trinidad Scorpion peppers, complete with some stories about past contestants who attempted the challenge and rightfully regretted it. The staff said they did not have any in stock currently but if they did they would have offered me some to try.

    Not sure I would have taken it mind, considering that as I am writing this review some thirty minutes after consuming the devilish sauce I am still feeling the effects of it from my head spinning to my stomach very much not agreeing with my decision – time will tell how much I suffer later on.

    As mentioned, the staff were lovely though. The service was on time, the vibes were immaculate, and in terms of eating out in the modern day, this was a fairly cheap meal, coming in at £57 before the service charge, which included two mains, two sides, two drinks, a pot of blue cheese sauce to mitigate my terrible decision making, and a dessert for my partner.

    Which came in the form of a god damn deep fried Mars bar, a Scottish delight brought right to our doorstep.

    The little bit I tried of it was amazing, the batter was exceptionally light and the flavour of the chocolate and the caramel melted together in this unholy log of deep-fried goodness was amazing.

    I definitely will return, hopefully next time for something a little less painful and making it so I can enjoy the flavour of the chicken without re-evaluating every life choice I had made up until that point.

    Food reviews are always some of my favourite to do, especially when it comes to reviewing local joints that definitely deserve the love. Thank you for reading today’s edition of the Redundancy Review, I hope the weekend stays cool for you and you are able to relax.

    For more information on Bird and Beer, visit their website here: Bird&Beer | Fried Chicken | Craft Beer | Shrewsbury