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.