WTF-Beta

The crocus and daffodils are coming out here, and it was so warm that I really enjoyed running several errands on foot yesterday.

We are in the last few months of our first year in this house, so we're getting the last garden surprises. I didn't know we had crocus until a patch of purple showed up in our back yard. (Unfortunately, we also have deer or rabbits or something, because something ate them.)

I'm not familiar with pieris, so I was pleasantly surprised to see it blooming in our front yard. And the rhododendron has great big buds, so I'm excited to see it come into bloom.

I'm going to be too busy with the new book to do any vegetable gardening this year, but I've got four tabletop aeroponics systems in my office that are doing great. I've been getting red cherry tomatoes, jalapeño peppers, and lettuce for a while, and I picked my first cucumbers this week. The yellow cherry tomato is covered with blossoms, and the Fairy Tale eggplants have buds. The LED grow lamps on those things keep an upstairs window lit up for part of the night, so I think our neighbors think I'm growing pot up there.

Style

The low number of trans competitors is the reason I thought some objective measure like weight might be a good proxy for gender, which isn't a perfect metric for separating athletes into groups designed for fair competition. Trans women and men would be sorted into competitive groups that were arranged roughly by size.

After all, no such metric is completely even-handed. The most muscular women have more muscle mass than the least muscular men. There is even more overlap in height, I would guess; men are simply taller on average.

@Nina
I have An Invitation to Indian Cooking, and everything I've made from it has been delicious.

The recipes tend to have a million ingredients, but most of them are spices. If you don't have a solid spice collection, that can be pricey, but if you already have a bunch of spices and dried beans, you can cook a lot of the dishes by buying the meat of chioce, some yogurt, and some cilantry.

@CHAS said in Some good news:

I don't know the answer, but it is not hate. More categories?

That makes sense to me, although negotiating the definition of those categories will be holy heck and I don't expect it to happen.

We already have weight categories for sports like boxing, wrestling, weightlifting, horse jockeying, etc., etc. It is certainly possible to come up with something similar that isn't defined by gender, being either based just on weight or perhaps also on height or muscle mass.

Yes, the result will be imperfect, as compromises are, but not necessarily any more imperfect that putting a 250-pound wrestler in a tougher competitive category than a 249-pound wrestler.

We all have different athletic abilities across a plethora of subcategories like speed, strength, and aerobic capacity. Athletes who excel are the ones who won the genetic lottery, but also who have been able to maximize their strengths and minimize their weaknesses. Isn't that maximization part of the point of sportsball?

I have The Joy of Cooking, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Diet for a Small Planet, and An Invitation to Indian Cooking. I've always intended to get a copy of the Moosewood Cookbook.

I love my cookbooks, despite the fact that I usually only ever cook a handful of recipes out of any given book. Sometimes I just sit and read them like novels. An Invitation to Indian Cooking is especially good for that, since her essays about life in mid-twentieth-century India are fascinating.

So many thoughts...

A lot of times when I see something really overdone like this, I think of the old rule to get dressed and then remove one piece of jewelry. So I tried to picture this house decorated the same way, but less...and it was still awful. I truly don't want anything these people own. It's like a fractal pattern of bad decorating. You can keep looking closer, but it's still the same.

Also, imagine moving to Arizona and not liking sunshine, because so many of the rooms are so very dark. (Can you imagine how much it costs to air condition this thing?)

Speaking of Arizona, the pool area is much more appealing than the house, but it calls my attention to the five acres of green grass. (Minus the footprint of that gargantuan house, so maybe just one, but still.) How expensive and irresponsible is it to maintain that much grass in the desert?

The closet is nice, but I don't need all my clothes behind glass. But maybe they do? I wonder if this is a part-time home and the closet is intended to keep dust off the designer clothes that don't get a lot of wear.

Weren't boycotts effective during the civil rights movement?

We are participating. Money will eventually change hands to pay for the colonoscopy I had this morning, but I think that's outside the scope of this effort.

Since we moved to a place with a functional downtown consisting of 100% (I think) local businesses plus a year-round farmer's market, I have made a concerted effort to patronize them. That kind of long-term change in spending behavior seems more likely to drive change, but the one-day event has the advantage of being something you can point to. If businesses can look at their financials and see a visible change on February 28, then a message has been sent. Whether it's a message that will drive action is another story.

We had a capon for Christmas. It was my first time eating or cooking one. There were seven of us at the table and I think we were all capon virgins. It was DELICIOUS. When I have the option, I will always choose a capon over a turkey from here on out.

A local farmer had them at the farmer's market. She said that a lot of people around here cook them for holiday meals. There's a significant Italian-American population here, so maybe that's why?

There's also a significant Central American population, so we can get most or all of the things you posted at the grocery store that's about two blocks from our back door. I've been planning to just google "Honduran recipes" and start trying out those interesting ingredients. Unfortunately, I hear they're in financial trouble, so I better hurry up.

Does the article say why we are still raising so many of them if we don't need the wool? For meat, milk, and cheese?

I got the measles vaccine, and either it was already the combined MMR, or I got the rubella vaccine separately, because I never had either. By the time I was pregnant with my first, my immunity had waned, according to a routine rubella immunity test. It was too late to get revaccinated for that pregnancy, so I did that later. Then, to be admitted to grad school in 2012, I had to redo several of my shots and get some that hadn't been available to me as a kid.

I wonder if some portion of the collective memory that measles weren't such a big deal is that people are confusing actual measles, which our parents' generation called "red measles" with rubella, which they called "German measles."

I did have chicken pox and mumps. My older two got chicken pox just before the vaccine was available. Muffin never had them. None of them had mumps.

I know I'm not alone here in being so grateful that vaccines were available and we got them and were able to get them for our children. I feel so bad for the children who are suffering.

I love the cast iron magpie!!!!

When I've got one of those dutch ovens loaded up with food and I have to get it into the oven, I really struggle. I have to drop into a wide-based squat to manage it. I'm sure it's good for my glutes.

I'm of two minds about cookware. Expensive stuff that's heavy and pretty attracts me like a magpie, but it's very hard on my arthritic hands. Quirt had so much cookware that I haven't bought any in years, but when I did, I avoided the heavy stuff.

@dolmansaxlil I've had a Le Creuset casserole chip, too. They may--or may not, I don't know--use a heavier or more durable enamel, but it has its limits.

Muffin's Sister went to a Le Creuset event in Phoenix that apparently travels from city to city. It was held in a warehouse in a part of town where she was a little nervous to go, but she and a friend went together for solidarity and personal protection. When they got there, they found tons of bougie people like themselves.

They both got mystery boxes. (I'm not sure if they also offered regular sales where you got to pick what you were buying.) She said the boxes were curated pretty well, with each one including some staples like frying pans or dutch ovens, plus some more unusual pieces. Everything in each box wasn't the same color, but the colors were chosen to coordinate. She said there was a bustling black market in the parking lot where people were trading what they got in the mystery boxes for the pieces and colors they wanted, which sounds like a whole lot of fun. We have more kitchen gear than two humans could possibly need, and that makes me a little sad, because I would totally enjoy the Le Creuset black market.

We gave some off-brand enameled ironware that we got from Costco--a large- and a medium-sized dutch oven. I've had a couple of pieces of Le Creuset in the past, and I can't tell that these cook any differently. We've only had them for a few months, but I have no complaints. They're a beautiful blue that's as pretty as the Le Creuset colors, and the price difference was breathtaking.

Our splurges are all related to moving. We left our frayed living room furniture behind and bought a leather couch and chair-that-reclines-but-doesn't-look-like-it. (Much classier than the big ole comfy 60s-style recliners. )

The movers broke our adustable bed, so we got a new one.

Ooh--this is a big one. The house didn't have a primary bath, so we added one with some spa-style amenities--a huge whirlpool tub with physical therapy-level jets all the way down the reclined back and a bidet with a heated seat.

I like light roast, and dark roast was in vogue for so long that its nice to have the option. I didn't know there were places that had stopped offering dark roast, though.

We have a variety of coffee preparation devices, and we use them depending on our moods--a Keurig, a Nespresso, a pourover that Muffin got me for Christmas and that I have learned to use. We have a nice frother/heater thingie, and frothed milk is all I need if the coffee isn't too bitter.

I literally saw some bit of heinous news last night and thought, "I need to post a 'Hey, Cindy, what's going on at work?" thread. Thanks for the update, dispiriting as it is.

Tell us about the triplets!

@Jodi Yes, that's the way I remember the day, too.

Kathy was just like she was on the board, very friendly and sweet. You and your mother played beautifully. It was a lovely time.

I'm so sorry, Mark.