Toot Toot! All Aboard the Tofu Express!

Making hippie slop for wraps for tomorrow (and potentially the next day).

Nom nom nom!

Sittin' On Darwin's Theory

With a tip of the hat to the Indigo Girls...

(Bartholomew is all, "Seriously?!? I got that all figured out in undergrad.")

Banana banana banana!

Bartholomew is King of the Bananas.

Sammich!

Having a little open faced sandwich for lunch. Tofu, zucchini, spinach, hummus, sourdough, a pickle, and ONIONS!

Avocado Toast

Confidential to W: I think your overall assessment is jaded, BUT: there IS avocado toast in Anchoragua!

Finished product

Reasonably strong lines, right?

Part II

The collards (with garlic and soy sauce) and avocado. Yum!

Cooking up a storm

In anticipation of a dear friend's visit. Onions, sauteed collards with garlic, and do on.

Goodbye to another old thing

Well, buddy, this is farewell. You've been reasonably faithful over the years, and I kept you around long after one of your front wheels broke off.

Perhaps your finest moment was carrying a laser printer (and a whole pile of other heavy crap) to and from Puerto Rico.

You flew to and from at least a dozen states, and drove through at least a dozen more. You got to live in four different time zones!

But when your side handle broke off, you got really hard to manage, and I always had to find a wall or pole to lean you up against due to your missing wheel, and one of your best features, spinning, wasn't there anymore.

I know that (literally) curbing you isn't the most dignified exit, but I just can't see the thrift store accepting you in your current condition, and don't want for that kind of sadness to be your end.

You lasted much longer than your 22" sibling, whose telescoping handle got unfixably stuck halfway up, and also got bashed to hell and had to be repeatedly repaired by duct tape.

(Anyone remember when Samsonite used to be really fancy luggage?)

Travel well to that great baggage claim in the sky!

UPDATE: As I tried to pull your telescoping handle up to move you out of my very cramped room, it's also not working. Is this in solidarity with 22", or are you just sad? 

My tum tum, and hallucinations

I'm not normally one to blog with status updates, but this one has a couple interesting twists.

I have a moderately bad stomach bug of some kind. Not too hard to believe, since I spent three days in court with all sorts of people, visited a museum, saw a movie, and the lovely household that was hosting me included someone who had just gotten over a bad stomach bug. I projectile vomited yesterday evening, and have had diarrhea x36 hours. Cold sweats all night, aches, low grade fever, the usual.

So I'm hydrating, only consuming water, tea, broth, and electrolytes; might introduce bananas or applesauce tonight or tomorrow, depending on how I'm feeling (right now that sounds unpleasant.) I'm also tracking all of my input and output (which might make for a really disgusting blog post soon. We'll see.)

That's the boring stuff.

The much more interesting stuff to me:

1) the human body is a pretty amazing thing. I had a seven hour Amtrak trip home yesterday. While I didn't feel great, it wasn't horrible. But then within about two minutes of being home, as I was beginning to unpack, my body immediately told me it was time to vomit. I literally ran to the bathroom, and did so rather explosively. It pretty amazing that the body and brain can communicate in this way.

Confidential to my body: THX THX THX for not making me worship the porcelain steel god on a long distance Amtrak train! 

2) even more interesting, both last night, and this morning, my sense of hearing, and sight, are both significantly more intense than usual. I mean, I live in a big old 120 year old house, so there are always house sounds. But I mostly tune them out. I heard creaks and stuff so much more last night, to the point it was a little scary. Saw stuff that is always there, but it was so much more vivid. Last night it was to the point where I was beginning to wonder if I was having auditory and visual hallucinations. I thought I heard music playing, though the only other person in the house who could have been playing it, I've never once heard music from that room (it's down the stairs and behind two doors.)

There is one shower that I use almost daily, and there is a particular shampoo bottle in it that makes a single, slight popping noise every morning when it warms up from the warm water. This morning it was a sharp crack, to the point where it actually startled me a little bit.

Folding my laundry last night actually winded me a little bit. So I'm taking today very easy, which is a good excuse to listen to podcasts and catch up on sewing projects and the like.

Needed apps

I want an app that warns me against parking next to Pokemon Go spots when I want to sit in the car in the dark and listen to podcasts.

movies

Okay, so I have officially drank the Movie Pass Flavor Aid. At $10 per month, for as many as a movie per day, it's a screaming deal. Their revenue model is highly doubtful, but whatever: not my circus, not my monkeys.

It came yesterday, and I immediately went to see a movie with it. Justice League. Then today I went to see Wonder.

Justice League: I was (literally) the only person in the theater. It was atrocious. Loud, stupid, badly done, silly, and minimally entertaining. So fucking loud at so many points that I literally had to stuff my fingers in my ears. I kept looking at my watch to see how much longer I had to endure.

Wonder: I was, again, (literally) the only person in the theater. It was: pretty kinda okay. Overwrought and overdone, often trite and predictable, but cute in places, and definitely a tear jerker.

Renwick

Bartholomew receiving light therapy at the Smithsonian Renwick Gallery.

This year's version!

I like to think that mine stands up pretty well:

Oh for fucks sake: emoji war

Who cares??

Onions!

Y'all should let me know if you do Creepy Uncle Zuckerberg, since it's getting a lot of my social media attention these days.

But to keep the hometown team happy, here is some food porn, and some ONIONS!

some days are just like that

In bigger Top Super Secret News, there absolutely may or may not be a new podcast on the horizon. Stay tuned!

And now, my day today

Another tantalizing photo that sorta shows how my day went:

It was mostly uneventful. Just lots of driving, and dealing with various hardware stores and stuff.

Saturday is "build some raised beds" day.

My day today

Which was no doubt more fun than actually getting the lumber will be.

After thirteen years

I finally had to suck it up and get the book of faces, for work reasons. It was a good run!

No, it's not my birth name, and no, you won't be able to easily guess it. Unless you're inside my brain. Which would be even creepier than the BoF already is.

So if you know me and want to be my "friend" message me in any of the various ways you have! (I seriously doubt I'll be very active on it, but it would be nice to see your posts.)

Breakfast Sammie!

With artistic background and slightly diffused morning light.

That's sourdough, green onions, sauteed mushrooms and garlic, and vegan cream cheeze.

Plenty of fuel to go run a farmers market!

Onions.b

The. End.

Wednesday

Here is how my day is going: 

Sometimes it's like being back in law school. Except slightly more fun. And much less expensive. 

$10?

There are so many important things to be donating to right now, if you are able. It's a tough time in many places in the world. I'd ask you to consider one more, that might be a little off of the mainstream radar, in West Virginia.

Especially if you know me personally, I'd ask you to (once again) consider donating $10 to this really outstanding cause, and sharing / spreading it to your friends to encourage them to do the same:

https://razo.io/iUS2r8 

The concept is for you to donate $10, and encourage nine others to do the same, to end up with a cool $100. If you donate and let me know, I'll personally match $10 for everyone who does. And if you can give more, well... of course!

The Alderson Hospitality House is very near and dear to my heart. We do really important work here, providing literally thousands of room nights, and thousands of meals annually, to families visiting women incarcerated at the nearby federal women's prison. We also provide hospitality for women who are self-surrendering to the prison, as well as families coming to pick them up when their time is done.

The Hospitality House receives zero funding from any government, and runs entirely on donations. There is no expectation of any payment or donation from our guests, and for many the travel expenses, time off of work, etc., are enough of a financial stress.

Our guests come from all over the place: we have a map with pins stuck in it representing 49 US states. (I like to challenge guests who are looking at the map to find the one state without a pin. It's not necessarily what you'd guess: both Alaska and Hawaii have pins! Kathleen likes to claim that the remaining state use to have a pin in it.)

And, related/unrelated: please be good to the people in your life. Call them. Email them. Visit them. Hold space for them. Support them. Love them.

Plane food!

Okay, since 100% of responses (N = 1) want me to keep this blog going, I guess I will. You're welcome, W!

Farmers Market breakfast sammich!

With a Lunchbox Pepper where I know the farmer and bought it from him, and green onions where I know the farmer and bought them from her.

Now if only there was a local bagel shop so I didn't have to have it on a supermarket bagel. Ah well, still pretty!

drafting

How I spent my last hour.

What I did with about three hours of my day

Yes. Really. This took me about that long.

I reminisced back to the 10th grade, when I had a drafting table to use, rather than just a picnic table. It would've cut at least an hour off of the project.

This is a piece of sign metal I trashpicked. I still need a yellow permanent marker to fill in the arrow on the bottom (which will be covered on one side so that it's not just a tease.)

One of the things that I learned (remembered) is that I should always letter right to left.

It's been a moment

Oh my gosh, it has been, hasn't it?

I'm considering taking this blog down, and starting another one. Those of you who know who I am, pretty please: I'd love to hear your thoughts on that. If you know me, you know how to contact me. If you don't (all 0-3 of you) you can leave a comment (I moderate comments, so it won't be posted.)

Okay, with that:

This one will probably only be even vaguely interesting to the Burners among us. This is how I set up my Lip Goo so it dangles nicely off of my playa pack, reminding me to use it. I'm more than happy to give specifics if anyone would like.

And this is a project I spent about an hour on last night:

It's a short but very boring story. Super short version: I fixed the door of a laundry dryer.

I had a mostly great, minimally terrible, time in DC this most recent weekend. Ask for details if you want them.

Okay. Get in touch soon if you'd like to know the next blog adventures. Semi-spoiler: Bartholomew will be the lead on the project!

Breakfast!

Okay, maybe not the prettiest plating, but it has ONIONS, so whaddya want?

At that, fresh spring onions that I know the person who grew and harvested then yesterday, and brought them to the farmers market.

Nom nom nom.

Make Your Own Pizza Night!

At the "Little House". After a full day of work, and then a community meeting about riverfront improvements.

Onion, vegan sausage, daiya, and avocado (not pictured). On K's homemade pizza dough.

Yum.

Fancy sammich!

Today's fancypants sandwich (before it got sandwiched to take to work): 

vegan turky slices, just mayo and Dijon mustard on sourdough, ONIONS, kale, tomatoes, and kosher dill pickles. 

I just ate breakfast, and blogging this makes me hungry for lunch. 

Hiking food porn!

Okay, granted, this is a hotel room edition.

The mere 6.3 miles of hiking I did today was some of the most challenging I've ever done.

Time to eat!

Cambridge food porn!

Hopefully speaks for itself.

New to us!

After a couple months of flooring repair, and then a ridiculous run-around to get the carpet installed, RP is finally fully open again!

breakfast? Yep!

Nothing wrong with a fancypants vegan grilled cheeze and trkey sandwich for breakfast. Hey, look: I'm a grown-ass adult! (Not that I wouldn't feed a kid this for breakfast...)

Guest room reboot!

Here's what I did with my afternoon, with before and after pics:

Finished the hardwood flooring repair, built a couple of beds, put down a couple area rugs, while we're waiting (2+ months now) for the carpet installation.

It's a little rustic, but we have another guest room back on line!

Broccoli!

Well, and: onions!

This was a side dish I made last night for about 19 for dinner. It's shown before roasting, because I thought it'd make for a prettier picture.

And now:

A return to your regularly scheduled programming. I can't blog that serious heavy shit too often. Gets me really riled up.

So here's some food porn: deluxe vegan grilled cheeze sandwich, with spinach and onions! It quickly became closed face, but open face made the prettier picture.

Food Pantry: a rant

This is most definitely not food porn. 

Trigger warnings: poverty, systemic oppression, capitalism, sadness, anger.

This is what 120 bags of groceries look like, packed today, for distribution at the Food Pantry tomorrow morning. It's basically one each of: small can of green beans, small can of kidney beans, small can of string beans, small can of beef ravioli, a 6 pack of ramen noodles, a box of corn flakes, a concentrate of cranberry juice, some sugary granola bars. The big "treat" is that we have real, brand-name Pop Tarts to give out tomorrow. We don't have a lot, and they'll go quickly.

When I get there at 8:00am to set up, there will already be a line for the 9:00am distribution.

Also tomorrow, currently in the the freezers, there will be (one per bag) bread, and (one per bag) desserts, from the Kroger Manager's Special "Woohoo" (closeout/expired) department, and cheap meat. People are already excited that some of it is, unusually, frozen chicken breasts. Until they run out, then it's the usual of (one per bag) eight-pack of shitty hot dogs. Yeah: Woohoo.

In order to qualify for one bag of this, you have to prove that your household GROSS monthly income for a household of one is $1,276 or less. For a family of four, $2,628 or less, then you can have two bags. And so on. Add $345 for each additional person after eight.


It's fucking heartbreaking. 


This isn't meant, in any way, to cheapen the heartfelt commitment and love of the people who packed these bags, many of whom I'll be distributing them with tomorrow morning. They're kind, beautiful people.

Rather:

WHO THE FUCK ARE WE? 

WHAT IN THE FUCK IS GOING ON HERE? 

How the fuck are we spending untold billions on foreign wars? How is the West Virginia legislature spending approximately $35,000 per day in extended session having stupid ideologue arguments about the budget, while people are barely getting by?

Remember the concept of the War on Poverty? To paraphrase a song / story lyric from (fantastic, amazing band) Dry Branch Fire Squad, his grandmother had been fighting the War on Poverty so long, she went down to the courthouse and offered to surrender.

Well, here in rural West Virginia, many are still fighting the War on Poverty. They're not surrendering. But they're most certainly on the losing side.

Today I helped pack a lot of food, half of it junk, none of it enough to meaningfully sustain a household of even one for even a week. Tomorrow I'll help give it away, and load it in people's cars, helping many people who can barely walk, much less carry a bag of groceries.

And these people will all struggle through another month.

And we'll do it all again next month.

While the West Virginia Legislature increases regressive sales taxes, and lowers income taxes.

And don't be confused: this isn't just a West Virginia story.

Look around. See if your city/town/community has a food bank, a food pantry, a soup kitchen, a homeless shelter, human beings living in cardboard boxes under freeway overpasses, in doorways. Living in the woods close enough to walk in to do day labor, if they're lucky enough to get a backbreaking job for a few hours, with no benefits, no work comp, no day to day reliability, because they're an "independent contractor". Being arrested for the crime of being poor, and homeless.

I assure you, you do. Look around.

This is ALL of us. Many of us are lucky enough that we don't have to live it daily. Think on that for a minute. Or sixty.

Pickle in a Blanket!

You probably can hardly tell under all that goodness, but that's a pretty classic PIAB.

Gonna go build some ramps so I can get the riding mower into the park now. Long story.

Today's installment

in the Breakfast Sandwich Chronicles.

Half Strong Lines(tm) isn't bad, right? I mean, if you hit .500 in baseball you're a legend for the ages!

Perhaps the best breakfast sandwich ever?

Even if not the prettiest plating.

But: Strong Lines(tm)!

Hello, My Name Is:

Maybe my new official title should be:

Mid Level Manager,
Ministry of Unpopular Opinions and Inconvenient Truths

(the backstory is complicated. Some of you know some of it. It rhymes with build.)

GARLIC.

Why not add an entire head of rough chopped garlic to those onions?

ONIONS.

Obligatory shot of a whole bunch of onions, in a super fancy cutting board (a torn up pizza box.)

blood and gore

I don't recall if, in over 1,300 posts, I've ever posted a yucky picture of a body part. (I happily specialize in beautiful food and bicycles.) Well, why not? First time for everything, right?

Here is what I had done yesterday:

The technical name, like many things in medicine, makes it sound abstract (or at least not so yucky): ablation. The reality is that the doctor (in this case, my wonderful smalltown family practice doc) cuts out half (or sometimes all) of your toenail to fix a constantly ingrown toenail.

I first had this done on the other big toe when I was 19, and it took three months to get an appointment with a podiatrist at Kaiser, and hurt like hell. A week ago when I went in for a tetanus shot (gored my leg on rusty barb wire while hiking in the West Virginia woods) my doctor was like "yeah, sure, I can do that. Do you want a full ablation or just half?" The procedure yesterday didn't hurt at all.

So anyway, this is what it looks like when you get half of your big toenail cut out.

/EOF

Bleh: Hillbilly Elegy, by J.D. Vance

I recently read Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance. I wanted to stop about a quarter of the way through, because simply put, it's just not a good book. It's a good memoir: but as a purported sociological study, it's terrible.

A big part of what never sat right is that while J.D. Vance can certainly self-identify as a "hillbilly" if he wants, it consistently rings untrue.

He writes at length about Jackson, Kentucky, but throughout the book really only goes there for funerals. He grew up in Middletown, Ohio, and while Butler County and Warren County, Ohio, are most certainly the Rust Belt, they aren't Appalachia. Vance himself acknowledges this late in the book when he talks about going to "Appalachian Ohio" to visit a lovely state park.

Despite the conservative heart warming nature of his National Review-worthy bootstrap pulling rise from working class poverty, Vance started writing the book while a third year at Yale Law. He continued writing it while an associate at Sidley Austin, ranked #7 in the AmLaw 100.

J.D. Vance is a tool.

One among many things that made the bile rise in this supposedly dirt poor hillbilly memoir was that in his senior year of high school, he had been taking golf lessons from a "former golf pro" for a year.

I'm not a "hillbilly". I do live in southern West Virginia right now, but I didn't grow up here. I'm not an Appalachian, or a "hillbilly". Not by a longshot. But neither is J.D. Vance. Not by a longshot.

Butt typing

Well, really, pocket typing. Here is what happens when your phone stays on in your pocket:

pmlpmlpmlpmlpmlpmlpmlpmlpmlpmlpmlpmlpmlpmlpmlpmlpmlpmlpmlpmlpmlp pompompmkomkomkomkomkpmkpmkpmlpmkpmkpmkpmlplpmlpmlpmlpmlpmllmllmpoll's llamo

Giraffe

I'm not usually one for cute animal photos on the interwebz, but, c'mon: have you ever in your life seen such an adorable plate?

My favorite pack decoration

I waxed nostalgic about my old Camelbak and its replacement in this post.

Now, confidential for F, here is the decoration that makes me happy every time I see it.

It's got a little playa, a little hiking, and a lot of love.

another "Bike as Multipurpose Cargo Vehicle" from the archives

This actually inspired me to go back through the archives and add a new label of "cargo bikes".

If it's insufficiently impressive that this photo was taken on November 29, 2015 (the internetz tells me it was a high of 44 that day); I was just starting to ride about 3.5 miles through Boston city streets. (Watertown, Brighton, and Allston for those who know the city.)

dusk moon

With absolutely no regularity whatsoever, google photos occasionally sends me "hey, these are the photos you took on this day last year!" reminders. 

Here is a photo I made on March 18, 2016, in Cambridge, MA, of a gorgeous waxing 3/4 moon bright in a dusk sky. I was wandering around geocaching while waiting to join F for a gallery showing of "Not Art". 

This wasn't in a gallery, or tagged on a bus stop shelter, but it was certainly nature's art. I barely did it justice by photographing it with my phone. Kind of makes me want to get back to photography in a serious way. 

Ohhhh, yeah. Fancypants vegan grilled cheeze.

This is my (truly super delicious) vegan grilled cheeze:

In absolutely no order at all, since I just want to keep eating it: tofu, grilled onions and green bell peppers, cilantro, daiya "cheddar", and the weirdest looking, biggest Claussen dill "half" pickle in the jar.

This is so damn delicious.