Good morning, there, fair friend. How ya doin? It’s Monday, ready to star the week? I feel okay about this week. It’s Jane’s birthday in two days, that is exciting. She will be four. She says she’s going to start using the potty when she is four. Please please, let’s start using the potty. That would be lovely. We are going to have a cake, maybe two, not because she needs two cakes, but because cake is delicious and who doesn’t love cake. I got her a present or two, Emma got her a few. Should be really nice. Emma toyed a bit with trying to have a person or two over for a mini birthday party, but I don’t think any of that worked out. She had a pretty big party for two, but obviously last year was pretty subdued. That’s probably great. Maybe we can keep this habit through her teens.
It was my dad’s birthday yesterday. I talked to my mom, but we did not talk about it. Our family was not really raised in a tradition of marking birthdays, I’m really bad at it (have you noticed, friend? I am sorry. Happy belated birthday). I think of my dad almost every day, I don’t need a birthday to remind me. But it does always remind me that it is United Nations day. My dad liked that his birthday was on United Nations day. He liked the UN. Crazy thing for a Republican, liking the UN. RINO and proud of it.
Anyway, pretty good weekend over here. I did not spend the whole weekend playing No Man’s Sky. I mean, don’t get me wrong I still played like four hours of that game, but I did a lot of other things too. Like on Friday I got up at 7:15 AM and did things until I was done with Jane’s bedtime at 8:30. A thirteen hour day of chores and puttering. It was a lot.
Most impressively, I figured out how to move my Birdies bed, digging around the sides and prying it up until it came up with a crowbar. I filmed the whole thing for a sure-to-be-viral YouTube video, but I’ve not edited it yet. Oh and I also built two more Birdies beds, so now I have four. One is still growing peppers, but the other three are empty, placed in approximate locations. The next step is Emma places them in exact locations, because she is better at arranging things and leveling things than I am, and has opinions about layout and, you know, parallel lines. I built one Birdies bed by myself, in the grass. I did that on Friday. On Saturday I was like “okay, I need to build the other one of these, but doing it on the grass was a mistake,” so I did the final one in the garage, using my little rolling work stool, which rules. But the best part was that Jane joined me. There are 100 nuts and bolts in a Birdies bed. So Jane learned how to put nuts on bots and turn them clockwise. She learned “clockwise” and “counter clockwise.” Once we found a groove, it was so fun. She said “It’s fun to make things. I like making things with Daddy.” And I felt awesome. It was great.
Unfortunately, she eventually got bored, and then proceeded to be a complete pill the rest of the day.
She was great yesterday though.
Wins and losses.
I also did a bunch of other gardening, harvested a ton of peppers, worked on the compost, trellised the snow peas for the winter. All very productive. And then on Sunday I did a bunch of moving and organizing things to set up a winter basil growing station inside. Last year, I had my winter growing station in the garage, but Basil does not like cold, so I had to keep a space heater on them for the coldest months. Just this little desktop model, but my god, that thing nearly doubled our electric bill: made worse since the winter months are the least solar-producing months. So this year, we both agreed the basil growing station needed to be inside the house. Right now it’s in my office. It’s a pretty invonvenient location for, like, cooking, but I kind of like it? It makes my office seem sunnier and more fresh. Except this one type of basil, it was so pungent that I couldn’t handle it. Not sure what to do about that one. Right now I have Asian basil (tulsi kapur), Geneovese and holy basil in here. Might bring in a purple opal. The Thai Basil is my favorite for cooking, but I just… MAN that stuff is pungent.
I did a lot of kitchen stuff too. Cleaned the stove, that was much needed. Emma and I have a great system going. I probably clean the stove 5-7 times a year, she probably cleans it 1-2, but her single cleaning is a deeper cleaning, probably more of a cleaning than five of mine combined. Mine is a cosmetic cleaning, keeps the thing from looking dirty. Hers actually gets it clean. When she cleans it, she also does the ventilation hood and the grease trap. I have to help with that part. So, you know, teamwork all around. It’s good to remind yourself, in a couple situation, when the two of you have gotten down part some household chore situation and not just focus on the edge cases where you’re both still grumbling about how no one is doing this or that.
I also chopped up a new month’s supply of ginger and shallots for my stir fries. The shallots get stored in vegetable oil but, interestingly, the ginger gets stored in vodka. This is because like three or four years ago I found this very helpful article on the internet from some highly dedicated researcher who tested several different liquids for storing chopped ginger, and vodka came away the clear winner. The whole time I’ve been doing this, I’ve had this desire to eventually re-use the vodka, after ginger storage, as a ginger-infused vodka. Except the problem is I kept using the same spoon to spoon in all my ingredients into the wok in the morning, and you have to make sure the ginger is spooned in first every single time, otherwise the oil on the spoon gets into the vodka and messes up the whole batch. It took a few years to incorporate the consideration into my stir fry routine and get really good at that, but I’ve been doing great for over a year now (thank you pandemic). So I had, like, six jars of ginger-infused vodka piling up in the fridge. So this week, when I cut up the new batch of ginger, and poured the vodka into the pyrex bowl, I used up the big gallon jug of Stoli and I finally had an empty vodka bottle to use as the bottle for my ginger-infused vodka. I filtered all the vodka a third time, using my finest-screen strainer, as I poured it back into the bottle, and it mostly filled up the bottle. Took a swig. It is delicious. Man that whole thing was a multi-year saga of habit-development. Happy I have succeeded. Now watch me immediately mess up the next batch of ginger and put an oily spoon in it.
Let’s see.. I also made waffles for the week, washed the kitchen compost bucket, washed all the ginger jars (lotta dishes this weekend), made Jane breakfast every day, made a nice fresh tomato salad with (probably) the last tomatoes from the garden, put away the gardening seeds until next spring, actually I put a ton of shit away, little piles everywhere (coming soon from HBO). Piles of stuff that needed to be put away. I packed up the cable modem to send back to AT&T but they didn’t include a label and want me to drive it to a Fedex Kinkos to have them pack up and I hate that shit so much. There are way, way more drop-off locations than actual offices, and out here in the boonies it’s a major difference. God knows when I’ll get around to doing that. Gotta go to Schwab too. Ugh. I sense a day of errands in my future.
Did a nice Zoom with some friends on Saturday. It was like old times. Except everyone has forgotten how to Zoom, which is funny. And it’s funny too, because back when we talked every week we had plenty to say but now that months have passed, and we all have news and life events, it was much harder to be chatty. Zoom really is a specific art. And social Zoom is different than work Zoom. Oh actually, god, I did two Zooms this weekend. The other was a surprise Zoom bomb during the toasts component of a wedding, and that was really nice. We all just popped in and said hi. Not a lot of talking, but, then, you know, these are two people getting married, in the middle of a dinner with some physical-world friends and family. Still, it was nice to see their shining faces, and the faces of some old friends I hadn’t seen in years. Man. Two Zoom weekend. It’s like 2020 up in here.
I also had the revelation that I should be using chopsticks in my hair again instead of elastics. I forgot the joy of tying a bun in your hair with a stick. I was a big fan last time I did this stupid long hair thing, like five years ago. But on Friday I remembered “oh yeah, chopsticks.” And it is so much better. You don’t get your hair all tangled around the tie. It’s way easier to remove. Sure it looks weird but whatever, who sees me these days (except for all these Zooms I guess). It’s harder to take your shirt on and off with the chopstick, but it is a small price to pay.
Mix time. Live mix. Mostly cheesy AF. I am feeling old school. Nostalgic. Winter is coming. Something’s gotten over me. I even kinda like U2 again this week (sorry, Andy). It’s probably because I am slowly working my way through Todd Haines’ Velvet Underground documentary.
Well I hope your weekend was lovely. I hope the lack of sunlight isn’t bumming you out too much. I hope you’re excited about Halloween. I hope you have a favorite noodle shape that brings you joy. And a least favorite Cure song. What is your least favorite Cure song? I think mine has to still be “Friday I’m in Love.” Right? Am I wrong?
I'm not as knowledgeable about The Cure as I'd like but I'd say my favorite is Plainsong or Push.
i'm impressed by both your ginger vodka experiment and jane's VERY GOOD kittycat drawing (the eyes, the stripes)!