For comparison's sake

This is yesterday morning's breakfast: a (several) day old bagel from the venerable Moe's Broadway Bagel, with earth balance, onion, sauerkraut, and Indonesian sambal.

Labyrinth

Boulder Community Hospital has gorgeous grounds and fantastic outdoor spaces. It's so very nice to be able to walk out of the building and just be outside. And breathe. I'm doing a lot of conscious breathing these days.

This is a beautiful labyrinth in the main courtyard. It takes almost exactly five minutes to walk at an intentional pace.

I do love this state

Even under challenging circumstances...

Today is day 13 of the ICU (I've been here for eight.)

Looks can be deceiving

It may not look it, but this is the tastiest breakfast I've had in a week. It's the leftover half of my vegan buffalo wing wrap from the iconic City O' City in Denver, where I had a lovely dinner with my good friend H last night.

Also from Day 9

This is an odd, beautiful rock cairn sculpture on the multi-use path that runs behind the hospital.

Day 9 lunch

We're onto Day 10 in the ICU, but ya know, sometimes your don't find time to blog right away.

This is my lunch yesterday at Native Foods in Boulder. It's the Portobello (Sausage) Burger. The taste was solid, though the seitan "burger" patty was kinda skimpy.

The View From Here: Boulder, Colorado

At least the views from the hospital windows are pretty. (I'm fine, here for family.)

More adventures in sink biogoo

I just can't resist unfucking other people's sinks. Sometimes I even do it in hotel rooms. See my home renovation label for past entries.

This one is in the lovely apartment in Cambridge where we're pet-sitting and house-sitting. It was a little tricky, since the P-trap is soldered copper pipe.

This is certainly not the nastiest one I've ever pulled out, but one of the more satisfying. The sink was taking about a full minute to drain after brushing teeth or washing hands, and now is draining like a champ! Just for funsies I did the baking soda and boiling vinegar trick after pulling out all of the biogoo hair with chopsticks. 

Letting go

Another installment in the "I really don't need to be dragging these back and forth across the continent for another twenty years" series.

These are my high school sports letters, JV and varsity, earned for soccer and swimming. They come from what was once the second oldest high school west of the Mississippi River, which a certain alum and mid-quality NBA point guard bought as a vanity project to help launch his mayoral career and turned into a charter school. Oh, and some really old teabags. 

Still more food porn

This was the first dinner I cooked upon our return to the Boston area (we're actually pet-sitting and house-sitting in Cambridge, having moved out of our Roxbury apartment at 3am on the morning we flew to Nevada for Burning Man. An excellent decision to move out, though given the opportunity I might do the timing a little different.)

Delightfully, the friends we are sitting for have a nice garden in the back and are gone for a month, so they implored us to harvest and eat their garden veggies.

From top left, that's ONIONS!, kale (from the garden), eggplant (from the garden), garlic, hot red peppers (from the garden), lime, and green bell peppers (from the garden.) Unfortunately I don't have any photos after I oven roasted them. While they're more delicious after roasting, they look better raw. 

Travelin' hippie slop!

This was our back to Default dinner in hotel room in Reno after Burning Man. Greasy, delicious, hot, didn't come from a vacuum sealed bag, had tons of vegan protein, and someone else cooked it. CHECK!

These are from Golden Flower Vietnamese Restaurant in Reno, which we could see from our hotel room window. It's a big open room that was populated with a bunch of just-post-grimy Burners, so takeout was a nice option.

After an eleven hour Exodus from the playa, and sleeping sitting up in the compact car on the side of Highway 447 from 2am to 6am, and then running all over Reno finishing up Burning Man returns and errands, this was a lovely dinner. Also breakfast before flying out the next morning.

Refrigeration, reschmidgeration! It's amazing how Burning Man can lower your food safety standards. (Another reason I'm glad I'm vegan.)

Time to get rid of more shit.

This may or may not be the first in a series of posts of stuff I'm getting rid of. After a hectic couple of months (years?), I finally have time and incentive to sit down and go through some more boxes.

There is a part of me that enjoys the memories that some of this stuff stirs up, and there is a much larger part of me that cannot believe I've been dragging this crap around the continent. In this case, since 1987 (okay, my long suffering mother held onto these for a while. THX, MOM!)

These are first place ribbons from a single season of swim team, 1987. For the record and posterity, there are:
5: backstroke (this was my best stroke)
3: freestyle
1: breaststroke (I'm honestly baffled by this one)
3: freestyle relay
3: medley relay

And one from 1986:
1: freestyle, heat winner at championships.
This was after another swimmer's parents told me to breathe less, and I learned to do the 25 yard freestyle at a sprint without breathing.