I was dishing up a bowl of pork-and-broccoli-and-carrot stir-fry for my supper, but instead of putting soy sauce on it . . .
. . . I poured in a dollop of white wine*.
* It was Château Thames Embankment 2007, in case you were wondering. Appellation un-contrôlée.
Can haz lots thundr. And wind. And rayn. I has a rayn.
when, for two weeks, I can get that wondrous substance called roasted Hatch chile pesto at Central Market. They only make it during their Hatch chile festival, in the last half of August. I have a hard time describing just how wonderful it tastes; the chiles, olive oil, and cheese combine into a transcendent sauce for pasta, for dipping, just by itself. If you live anyplace near a Central Market, go there and get some for yourself right away, before it goes again for another year.
(L’s gone down to San Marcos to spend the night with her bf, which is how come I’m still up at this rather unearthly-for-me hour.)
Yesterday I entered the last of L’s needlework and craft books into LibraryThing, which leaves only the bookcase in M’s room and one smallish trunk of books from L’s father to enter, and our library will be catalogued. Completely. After that, I can go back and begin cleaning up, adding changes and improvements made along the way to the earliest entries that lack them.
Right now, I’m guessing at a final count around 2,200 books in the house. That’s a lotta books—not as many as some I’ve seen on LT, which can get into five figures, but still, two thousand books in one house is a lot.
The medium is just a brand new mailing tube game. Fnord.
I’m sitting/lying in a chair at the blood bank, hooked to an apheresis machine. I’ve been a semi-regular whole-blood donor for years, but earlier this year I started doing apheresis, which is a centrifuged platelet donation, when I found I could donate every ten days, as opposed to whole-blood donation, which I can only do once every eight weeks. And since platelet units count the same as whole blood, I build up credits much faster. Ten days isn’t a very convenient interval, though, so I arrange to come in every other Saturday morning.
Apheresis used to be a Big-Deal donation, requiring needles in both arms: one for pulling out the whole blood to be centrifuged, and the other for returning the “used” blood. The donor was crucified on the couch, both arms immobile for the hour or so it took to do the procedure. It was, frankly, a big nuisance to sit through. That changed in the 1990s, when a single-needle pheresis machine was developed, with draw and return pipes coming through a manifold to the needle. That change is what lets me sit here typing while the pheresis machine works, and makes it little more complex for me than a whole-blood donation, except for taking longer to do.
The most annoying effect is that the anti-coagulant used in the return solution binds to calcium in the blood, which causes minor neurological effects in tissue with lots of nerve endings—in short, my lips tingle and I get a strange metallic taste in my mouth. Sucking on antacids like Rolaids or Tums helps, and the effects go away as soon as I’m disconnected.
. . . and . . .
. . . . how is it that Gillian Welch can always make me cry?
I have a fondness for old technologies. I like having old Things that still do the job they were meant to do, even though they’re thirty or fifty or a hundred and fifty years old.
Piroshki understands this, and paid attention the other month when I was grumbling about how I wished I still had an old-style rotary phone. She remembered it when, some weeks ago, she came across a working rotary phone in an estate sale, and she latched onto it with the intention of sending to me so I would have a rotary phone.
And yesterday it arrived. It’s a Western Electric Model 500 desk set, built under licence by ITT-Kellogg, chocolate brown and probably late-Sixties, since it has a round wall cord with a modern RJ-11 connector on it, but the handset cord isn’t modular (that innovation came in the Seventies). I plugged it into the wall, and got a dial tone right off. I used my cell phone to call it, and it rang exactly as it should and sounded exactly as it should—loud and authoritative. I used it to call my mother, who is quite deaf and has trouble hearing phonecons, and she heard everything I said without any trouble, and I could hear her just as clearly.
Piroshki, I can’t tell you how delighted I am to have this. It’s exactly what I wanted, and I hope and expect I’ll get another fifty years of service out of it, seeing that Western Electric phones were made to be almost maintenance-free. Thank you again.
Yesterday, while talking with a co-worker about problems with a new model of system that’s wildly back-ordered due to an engineering FUBAR, and about customers who are demanding their new systems RIGHT NOW regardless, I advised him “you’ll just have to tell them to ‘take an ole cold ’tater and wait.’”
Back in my bbs days during the ’80s, I hung out a lot in the cooking newsgroups, as did a lot of other people. Many of us talked about how, someday, we would have a special computer in the kitchen, where we could have all our recipes stored on disk and pull them up to read and use without ever having to print out anything. (Remember, this was in the days when laptops didn’t exist as such, only Major Wireheads had their own home networks, and NObody had wireless networking at all.)
Fast forward to today. I wanted to cook stuffed pork chops but didn’t really want to improvise. I’d poked around in Meal-Master until I found a recipe I liked and that seemed possible, given what I had on hand. But instead of cranking up the printer and making a hard copy to work from, I grabbed Pitr and hauled him into the kitchen with me. I called up the recipe I wanted on his screen, and referred to it as I cooked. (For those who might worry, I should say that Pitr sat on a counter several feet from the stove, and out of the path of splatters. I don’t have keyboard or screen condoms for him, and don’t particularly want them either.)
Working from the recipe on screen, I got the pork chops prepared and in the oven just as fast as if I’d had a cookbook or a printout at hand, and when I was done I just washed my hands, picked up Pitr, and left the chops to bake. It took twenty years, but the future we talked about has come to pass.
Here is presenting to you Pandigital Kitchen Technology Center which has solution to your problem. Fnord.
Remoting in to your workstation at the Empire at 0745 hours on Saturday, which is supposed to be your one day off in the week, and putting in five and a half hours’ work over a laggy connection so you don’t have to use any more of your dwindling store of personal-leave hours.
That’s No Fun.
I joined eleven separate denominations, joined eleven separate trade unions. Fnord.
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