#also no shot it was that full because tons of dishes are really only generated in the morning

[iicraft505]

someone kill me, just straight up put me down. my annoying former coworker returned as a volunteer and he annoys me under the best of circumstances but. literally I just said that I don't do dishes that often (meaning not often enough for it to have fucked up my name tag), and he was like "I think it's weird that you would admit to not doing your job" like bitch that's not what I fucking said but okay. And then I was like well I do them sometimes when it's needed and he was like "um..." in that "no you don't way" and said "there were a ton of dishes in the sink when I got here" yeah because I was fucking taking care of birds all day, dipshit! I was feeding our incubator birds every 30 minutes, I did literally all of our outdoor dishes (there was a mountain when I got in today!), I helped catch two very full adult bird outdoor flight cages for weighing and release, I went to release some hatchling turtles, and did all the other miscellaneous cleaning tasks that pile up when feeding hummingbirds. Sorry I didn't have a spare second to do the fucking inside dishes!

[hatterstan-shameblog]

Nobody asked for this but I'm gonna do it anyways...

🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸

Fluff Alphabet: Takeru/Aguni Edition

🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸

A = Attractive what do they find attractive about the other?

Takeru: only reason he let Aguni wear regular clothes and not swimwear is because he saw ARM in that tank top and was like "oh damn okay 😳." So, y'know, that. (And he'll never admit it but he kinda likes how Aguni is a little bit taller than he is....) Also likes that Aguni has a really dry, deadpan sense of humor—he ways finds a way to make Takeru laugh, even when he's not really trying.

Aguni: I think the physical aspect of things wasn't really a make-or-break for him at first—like, yeah, Takeru's a good-looking guy, but that's secondary. He liked how Takeru is such a live-wire, very loud and colorful and seemingly fearless, no matter what kind of trouble they got into. (But also...he likes the hair. That's a thing for him.)

B = Baby do they want a family? why/why not?

Takeru: If they end up with one somehow, then, sure. But, like. He's not going out of his was to make it a thing. (But also, he has his cat, Ziggy, who he calls his baby, so...)

Aguni: Would secretly love to be a dad but is too worried he might mess the kid up or something. Is more than happy to be 'unofficial parent' to the neighborhood kids, though. Handing out ice pops to the kids that show up at the shop, keeping an eye out and telling them to get home before dark, maybe even showing one or two of them how to throw a better curveball...you know. Real Hallmark channel shit. (And yes, for those who were wondering: Ziggy the cat loves him and often curls up on his lap while he watches TV)

C = Cuddle how do they cuddle?

They don't really "cuddle" outside of bed. Just kinda sit next to each other, shoulder to shoulder, no big deal. But in bed, Aguni lies on his back with his arm sorta outstretched while Takeru...well, my man is worm on a string but OFF the string, he just flops all sorts of ways and a lot of them don't look comfortable but he falls asleep in minutes so whatever.

D = Dates what are dates with them like?

I don't think they do "dates"—they've got a long-term thing going on, so they often end up on the couch eating takeout and watching movies. I think they'd go to the movie theater sometimes (and talk shit for the entire film lol) and every once in a while grab dinner somewhere nice...but, usually because they have some cool limited-time-only dessert item that Takeru insists they try. (And Aguni pretends to be upset about having to get dressed up and go out, but is actually rather pleased to have a little romance...and get something to satisfy his sweet tooth.)

E = Everything you are my ____ (e.g my life, my world…)

Aguni: Emergency Medical Contact

Takeru: Co-Signer On The Apartment Lease

F = Feelings when did they know they were falling in love?

Takeru: About a week after Aguni (drunkenly) confessed his crush. Literally spent a whole week like, "Wow, it's a shame I don't love him back. He's so kind and handsome and smart and funny...too bad, I guess..." until one night he sat up straight in bed and said "Hold up." He then immediately called Aguni and began demanding why Aguni didn't tell him he was in love with him this whole time.

Aguni: They had been friends since they were kids, so it's hard to say when his feelings went from "you're my best friend" to something different. But, once he figured it out, he swore never to mention it because that could complicate their friendship.

G = Gentle are they gentle? If so, how?

Takeru: Yes and no. He's got a bad case of "grabby hands" and often yanks Aguni to and fro to look at something or whatever. Just zero respect for the man's personal space. But otherwise...I imagine he's not particularly rough or gentle, just kind of normal. EXCEPT when it comes to the emotional stuff—like, the real heavy things. I think he's very gentle with that, not asking too many questions and just sort of taking care of him where he can.

Aguni: Generally gentle—physically, emotionally, whatever. But I do think that he's confrontational, like when there's an issue, he comes straight out and asks Takeru what's going on. Even corners him, sometimes. He seems like a "no bullshit" guy, and since Takeru is "Mr. 99% Bullshit" he's gotta deal with it as best he can.

H = Hand/Hold how do they like to hold hands?

The only time they "hold hands" is when Takeru is grabbing Aguni's wrist to drag him somewhere (or run away lol) and when Aguni is pulling Takeru's hand back to stop him from touching something...

I = Impression first impression/s

I headcanon that they met very young, like grade school age. After school, in the park, where Takeru was chilling in a tree and Aguni walked by and he was like "Hey, there's a spider up here, wanna see?" and Aguni is like "Not really, I don't like bugs..." Now, Takeru, being "weird bug kid extraordinaire" can't believe his strange little ears and hops down from the tree and starts explaining why bugs are so cool and that Aguni is wrong...and Aguni listens as this funky, tiny firecracker just talks his damn ear off. Aguni liked how excited Takeru got about things, and Takeru liked how Aguni actually listened to him. And they were fast friends after that!

J = Joker are they into pulling pranks?

Takeru fucks around all the time...and doesn't often find out, because Aguni tolerates all his antics. (To a certain point, but still.) Every once in a while, Aguni will tell some harmless little lie just to watch Takeru freak out—he told him once that Lady Gaga was leaving the music scene forever, and Takeru screamed so loud the neighbors filed a noise complaint.

K = Kisses how do they kiss?

I think they most often do quick pecks—at the breakfast table, when they get home from work. You know. Domestic stuff. But when it's not like that...I think 9/10 times it's Takeru initiating, and Aguni reciprocates by wrapping his arms around him in a big hug (because he likes it but also to keep that skinny little weirdo from wiggling so damn much, he's always moving, he can't just be still—)

L = Love who says I love you first?

Neither! I don't think they really say it at all! Why say something that doesn't need to be said? (At least, that's how they see it...)

M = Memory their favorite moment together

Aguni: It's not really a memory, but...just how they have breakfast together some mornings. Sipping coffee, discussing whatever's going on in the world, the general "togetherness" that comes with it is one of his favorite feelings.

Takeru: The time they spent a full 24 hours in a karaoke booth singing 80's hits and knocking back tequila shots and ordering way too much food.

N = Nickel do they spoil? do they buy the person they love everything?

Takeru: Absolutely buys stuff for Aguni all the time. Mostly random snacks, or little knick-knacks that catch his eye. And also clothes, but...Aguni doesn't always approve.

Aguni: Doesn't buy Takeru stuff BUT leaves vases of flowers he grew on the table for Takeru to find.

O = Orange what color reminds them of their other half

Anything bright and obnoxious reminds Aguni of Takeru—red in particular, which also happens to be Takeru's favorite. And Takeru thinks Aguni has calm and soothing blue-green vibes. Like the ocean, beautiful and serene, but also dark and capable of incredible destruction.

P = Petnames what pet names do they use?

Takeru: All of them. Darling, babe, sweetheart (but he calls everyone those lol). Aguni-specific ones are always over-the-top and ridiculous like "brightest star in all of the heavens..." and he always gets an eye-roll for his efforts.

Aguni: Absolutely does not use pet names. Just says "hey you" or something. Once called Takeru "babe" and Takeru had to stop washing dishes and sit down because he was laughing so hard.

Q = Quaint what is their favorite non-modern thing?

Takeru: I feel like he would collect a ton of vintage stuff—clothes, records, just random little bits and bobs he comes across. But his favorite is definitely his record player—it belonged to his dad, and he keeps it in a place of honor in the hat shop.

Aguni: A set of very old and well-cared-for gardening tools. Takeru got them for him for his birthday, and he legit treasures them.

R = Rainy Day what do they like to do on a rainy day?

Lay on the couch and do literally nothing. Takeru gets the left end, Aguni takes the right, and they binge trash TV shows all day. (And also they make box-mix brownies and eat them straight out of the pan. It's "their thing.")

S = Sad how do they cheer themselves/each other up

Takeru: Aside from all his self-destrictive behaviors (binge-drinking, dangerous situations, etc.) he just really needs a good laugh. And Aguni somehow always manages to make him laugh with an unexpected, deadpan comment. Also, he makes Takeru actually talk through his problems instead of ignoring them...

Aguni: if he's in a bad mood, you just need to let him work through it on his own. He hates being "talked down to" and feels that most attempts at cheering up are cheap, so most people don't attempt. Buf...Takeru is not "most people" and breaks out his most ridiculous jokes to try to get Aguni to crack a smile.

T = Talking what do they love to talk about?

Other people! You know Takeru is the "XOXO Gossip Girl" of the neighborhood, but Aguni...he's like a little old church lady and ADORES hearing all the latest drama.

U = Unencumbered What helps them relax?

Both of them have the same method of relaxation and it's...bubble baths! Aguni does a basic, skin soothing soak and just hangs out in the warm water with a book or maybe just his thoughts to keep him company. But Takeru? He's got some fancy bath soaps, and he takes in a glass of wine and lights a few candles and does a face mask and it's a whole EVENT.

V - Very thoughts about each other

Takeru: Thinks Aguni needs to loosen up and take more risks...but also just loves the guy to pieces.

Aguni: Kinda wishes Takeru would calm tf down sometimes...but also knows that it's just how the guy is and wouldn't dare change him.

W = Wedding when, how, where do they propose?

They're not really the marrying type! They just have a mutual understanding of commitment and that's that.

(But if they did have a wedding... I think it would be a relatively small affair with all their closest friends and family. Like a dinner party, but somewhere extra nice and with lots of good food and alcohol. Intimate and meaningful, with just enough "extra" to satisfy Takeru.)

X = Xylophone What’s their song?

"Total Eclipse of the Heart" because they hid out in a karaoke booth (different from the 24-hour event that Takeru cherishes so much) to es ape the Yakuza and Takeru sang it over and over to pass the time.

Y = You the ___ to my ___ (e.g the cookies to my milk, the macaroni to my cheese)

"Breaking" to my "Entering." The "Assault" to my "Battery." (They both hate this sort of thing and try to come up with the worst answers possible lol)

Z = Zebra if they wanted a pet, what pet would they get?

They already have the cat, Ziggy, who is their perfect little angel.

[bikeforlife]

Bike Tour Blog

I honestly can’t believe I made it from the Pacific to Atlantic.   This morning I woke up in my own bed for the first time since early February.  Oh my god it felt so good.  If a mattress maker wanted a testimonial, today would definitely be the day to get one from me.   After 45 days straight of being on a bike it feels really good to be home. 

On the first week we made from San Diego to Tucson Arizona.  This section had some significant climbs through places like Alpine CA  and  Pine Valley CA and lots of desert riding in eastern tip of California and the state of Arizona.  We camped in San Dunes CA where ATV’s are very popular and in places like desert view towers that had insane views of the Ko-Pah mountains.   We also slept in a town park in small town in Arizona called Welton.  I did snap my chain in Pine Valley but Tone was right there to help out.  It was also the first time I rode my bike on the interstate and the first time I ever had rode a bike 10 miles straight downhill from the Ko Pah Mountains to Ocatillo California. 

The next few week would take us through New Mexico and the beginning of Texas.  The highlight of this section was the climb through the Gila National Forest on our way to Emory Pass.  This section had absolutely breathtaking views and an abundance of nature.  We climbed to over 8200 feet of elevation at the peak and went through awesome towns like Silver City NM and Hillsboro, NM.  A couple days later we crossed the border into Texas at El Paso. This mammoth state would be approximately 1/3rd of the total miles we would cover.  Many parts of the Us but especially Texas  had recently experience significant weather event with snow, freezing conditions, and a failure of the local power grid.  Fortunately we got to the state about a week after the weather had passed.   

In Eastern Texas a significant portion of our miles would be on US highway 90.  This would feature some awesome small towns like Marathon and Sierra Blanca Texas. The route also had remote areas  of riding where there wouldn’t even be a gas station for 80+ miles.  I found myself having more to think and unwind than at any part of my adult life.   It was also during this stretch that we stayed at some great state parks.  Seminole Canyon State Park and Lost Maples State Park in particular stood out to me.    There is something magical about looking at the stars on a clear night without light pollution.  

Eventually we went through Austin, Texas and I got to reconnect with my friends Jason and Max. After so much time pedaling through remote areas it feels really good to see friends and be in a city.   Austin as a city has grown so much since I was there last.  I ate great food during our off day and found an amazing bike mechanic that help me resolve a derailleur issue that had been lingering since San Diego.  

We would hit a few more state parks on the eastern half of Texas and eventually crossed into Louisiana.  After being in a very dry part of Texas the swamps of Louisiana offered a very different riding experience.  For the most part the terrain was flat and the roads were in good condition.  This part of the tour was special to me because of the amazing friends we made.  During one week we stayed with Mandy in Deritter, LA and Perry in Jackson, LA.  These amazing people took us into their homes and did everything they could to be helpful and make us feel at home.  We were able to take a day off in New Orleans which was awesome.  My friend Chris and his friend Bobby came down from from Jackson Miss and we all got a chance to hang.   It was great to see Chris again after almost a decade of not seeing him.  Hopefully I’ll make it to Mississippi at some point 

The final stretch would have us riding through Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and Florida.   During this time we met even more incredible hosts.   Kellie/Mason in Bay Saint Louis and Dave/Stacy in Bagdad, Fl were both incredibly kind and generous.  Thank you for everything.  The ride took us through places like Dalphin Island, Alabama.  I never knew there were islands in Alabama . They are absolutely gorgeous.  

We stayed in a couple more awesome state parks in this stretch.   In Bainbridge Georgia we stayed in the east bank campground operated by the army core of engineers.  They gave us a site right by the water and it was a pretty magical experience.  The final section of the tour featured a massive uptick in the number of bugs in these parks.   I found that during camping were almost always under attack from mosquitoes or being visited by either argentine ants, caterpillars , or bees.  Bug spray can help but sometimes you just have to cover every single bit of skin on your body. 

During the final day push to the ocean Tone and I split up.  The original route that we were using had us going through Jacksonville to Saint Augustine Florida. He wanted to stick to the route while  I made a decision to go directly to Jacksonville which was more direct to the Atlantic Ocean.  For me the final day was filled with a range of emotions and thoughts.  Admittedly even 10 years later I still have some anxiety of my past medical condition.  As i’m riding i’m feeling a huge sense of accomplishment and simultaneous release of anxiety/stress. To be able to survive a full coast to coast tour of the United States on a bike is the kind of proof that the only limitations are the ones I place on myself.  I think about my life with Riana over the past 10 years and how fortunate we’ve been to be able to experience living in larger cities, traveling abroad, and getting to start our own business.  

I think about how grateful I am to Tony for doing this tour with me.  I’ve known him for 15 years and he’s always pushed me to do things outside my comfort zone.  From helping me get first passport stamp, to hosting great events, to now riding through the US on a bike.  Particularly on this tour he went above and beyond.  He help me with mechanical issues which i’m not particularly good at, he lead our route navigation almost every day, he found places for us to stay, and helped lead us through all kinds of unique day to day challenges.  

My tour came to a strange end.  I was on my way to stay at my friends Stephanie’s house in jacksonville when I stopped at a convenience store.  When I came out my bike and all of my gear was stolen.  This included my passport, clothes, tent, sleeping bag, paneers, bike tools, food, journal, and more.  I tried my best to look through the neighborhood and called the police but no luck in recovering any of it.  As unfortunate as this situation is, I'm grateful it happened on the final day of the tour just a couple of miles from my friends house.  I won’t let that person take away my memories and diminish the experience.   They are worth infinitely more than the material value of the bike and my belongings.  

As i’ve had a couple of days to relax before going back to work  i’ve been reflecting on the experience more.  I absolutely would recommend doing something like this to anyone I know for a few reasons.   It’s a great way to decompress.  You have time to actively think and it helps your focus significantly.  The riding is tough but manageable.  I only rode my bike on a couple training rides beforehand.  I was also asked a ton of questions from people about my experience. So I wanted to answer them one by one below.  

What did you eat?  

Being a vegan on a bike tour has its challenges.  I ate a lot of clif bars, peanut butter banana burritos, trail mix, , Fritos chips, subway Veggie Delights without cheese and Impossible burgers from Burger Kings.   Honestly a lot of days on tour it was challenging to find vegan friendly dishes.  Thankfully our hosts made some really nice home cooked vegan meals and every large city we visited had great vegan options.  

Where did you sleep?  

It was a mix of hotels, backyards , rv parks, state parks, town parks , and then random wild camping.   On nights where it was too cold to camp we opted for hotel most of the time.  

What gear did you have?    This was my packing list before the bike was stolen. 

Tools Bag

Park tool Allen key Hand pump Kevlar spoke Back up derailleur  Baby wipes Chain scrubber Degreaser Spare tube x2 3 tire lever adjustable wrench Poncho Hand warmer Head lamp

Food Bag Varies but generally 3 portable camp meals  Clif bars 

Back paneer 1

Extra water plastic jug - Nalgene Sleeping bag (40 degrees) Sleeping bag liner. (10-15 degree etc) Micro fiber Towel Waterproof socks Large winter gloves Small gloves Zip ties

Back paneer 2 Short tech shirts (red and green) Socks (long wool, short cotton Medium wool Blue t shirt

-Toiletries bag

Deodorant dr Bonner liquid and bar soap, bug spray toothbrush toothpaste back up Masks Hand sanitizer

Electronics bag Solar charger Headphone and charger Cell charger Extra water container - 3 liter emergency

Duffle Sleeping pad Wind pants Under armour Long sleeve shirts (grey , black , blue yellow winter Jacket

What was the hardest part?    I suspect every single rider will have a different answer to this .  For me there were two things that probably equally as challenging.  First and foremost there are large portions where people are not wearing masks.  It was very demoralizing to be in situations constantly where people have made a conscious decision to disregard the health of others.  Since the services were so spread out I found myself having to get food from places that have anti mask propaganda on their front door.  

Secondly this tour really taught me that I am more comfortable in cities and around people.  It was charming to spend  days riding our bikes through  farm country in remote roads but eventually it began to wear on me and I found myself crave cities.  Also in cities the percentage of people wearing masks shot up significantly.  

What was your favorite small town?  

I really enjoyed Silver City New Mexico.   It was a quirky mountain with good architecture and really nice people.  There was also a very helpful bike shop, great co-op,  nice motel, and the town was filled with cool art.    

What was the weather like?  

For the most part we had good weather.   I would say were typically 50-60’s during the day on the first half but colder at night.   We were able to avoid some of the extreme weather that hit Texas but still found ourselves that was a little too cold to camp in.    Most of the biggest issue that would we would face would be consistent headwinds.  After a first week full of tailwinds the rest of the tour would almost always deal us 10-25 mph headwinds.   

How many issues did you have with your bike?  

There are always some day to day issues but the most common were flat tires ( I think i had 5 throughout the trip), My front derailleur was a consistent issue.   The fenders on the bike were kind of a pain.   However for an old 80’s bike with an older drive train it held up pretty well.   I would recommend to anyone thinking about touring to consider customizing their bike to their own needs as opposed to buying a brand new touring bike.   There will always be maintenance.    

 How did your body hold up?   

For the most part I wasn’t in a lot of pain on this tour.   Everyone’s body is different.  I found that if I got a majority of my miles during the morning I would do much better.   However on days where we were riding until close to sun down i found myself in a lot of pain near the end of the day.   Most commonly knees, butt, lower back, quads.   Occasionally my hands would be numb on long riding days.   

How long did it take?  

45 days coast to coast.   During that period we took 3 full days off and had a number of short days (30-40 miles).    I’m told that this was a very quick trip as many folks take between 60-70 days to complete this route.  

What would you recommend to someone doing this?  

There are a million things but i’ll try to summarize here.  

If you’re touring with other people try to have honest conversations in advance about things like how many miles you want to shoot for a day.   How early in the morning do you want to start pedaling.   Where you are you comfortable staying.  What kind of timeline you’re under with work?    What food you’re comfortable sharing.   If you’re comfortable deviating off the route to save miles/time.       Ultimately the more you and your riding partners discuss this in advance the less confusion you’ll have day to day.  

With your work I would communicate to co-workers honestly how involved you want to be while away.   Some have traditional jobs that allow them to totally leave work and decompress.  In my case as an entrepreneur I found myself involved on almost daily basis with work.   For me that was comfortable but for others it might take away from their experience.   

I would also make sure that you have a good instinct for eating food even when you’re not hungry.  I had to learn this throughout the tour as my food options were limited with a vegan diet.  

I would recommend that you try to do some level of training in advance.  On my first bike tour I did almost no training and I was in pain almost right away.  On this one I did some cross training and some scheduled rides.  It made all of the difference in the world as far as my day pain levels.   

Would you do it again? 

I don’t personally know if I would do a tour of this length again.   While I enjoyed the experience and the bucket list aspect of it I found myself going through the motions on a lot of days.    I think I would enjoy much more doing a tour of a 7-14 days.   Possibly if I’m ever retired I may feel differently but the looming pressure of my career was a bit hard to get through mentally.   

[myhauntedsalem]

The 76 House  New York

This building is one of the most influential buildings of The Revolutionary War. The place that is now a tavern, and still serves plenty of customers, was once a meeting space for patriots. The house itself served as a safe space when the air was full of shots being fired, but the tavern itself was actually a prison space for the notorious spy, Major John Andre. The space itself was not a prison, but it did ensure that this man would be a place where this man would not be able to pass any information on. This was the only prisoner that was held in the space, but it was not the only important figure that spent some time at the Old 76 House. The tavern was also used to accommodate many great generals, one of the more well known being General George Washington.

Life in this town was really centered around the tavern, and that made it one of the spaces that deserved some restoration. Being the space that a good amount of weddings, gatherings, celebrations, meetings, news exchange and more happened, it wasn’t hard to get the town excited about the renovations that were going to happen in this space. Because of its age, it was an extremely difficult building to restore without entirely reconstructing. The initial foundation, made from stone, had never settled evenly and the floor above that had a poor structure that made it incredibly unsteady. In the time that the renovations were being made, people found out that the Old 76 House had actually been built in 3 different phases, which explained better why there was such a wide variety of supplies used throughout.

The original floor plan is what makes up most of the main floor of the tavern today, while the additional spaces that were added were designed entirely to complement the rest of the space. One of the primary things that needed to be fixed was, in fact, the foundation. We mentioned how it was extremely uneven, well, this is something that took a good chunk of the time that was spent in reconstruction.

More than 30 tons of clay was added, by hand, to ensure that all of the foundation was even. After that, crews began to work on the beams and structural touches of the building. There were plenty of pieces that crews were able to reuse and improve, but they were also to go back and find similar pieces so that the overall look of the space is cohesive and flows nicely. Updated additions were made to accommodate air conditioning, pipelines, wiring and more, but were hidden and placed specifically so that the building wouldn’t change more than it needed to throughout this reconstruction period.

While there have been quite a bit of accommodation made, leaving the tavern in a place where it can at least stand for the years to come, there are still quite a few touches from the past that remain.

We aren’t talking about the structure this time. One of the reasons that people do come and visit this location is because of the occurrences that people have mentioned experiencing while at the tavern. Even after all of the updates and enhancements, people still talk about plenty of happenings that we are entirely unable to explain.

As the oldest dining room in the country, you can only imagine a number of stories that its walls hold. As far as the building has been privately own, it’s passed along tales of haunted and paranormal occurrences. For 100’s of years, the stories of paranormal activity have told of haunted spirits that interact with the guests of the tavern.

One of the stories that we hear most of the time is from servers that talk about objects like chairs and dishes falling off of the tables. As we mentioned earlier, the structure was a huge concern of the building and its ability to remain open, so the fact that there are still strange objects falling off of these table tops, without there being any explanation, is something that we’ve only been able to explain as paranormal activity.

Now, if you think we’re jumping to conclusions, this is something that we’ve used quite a bit of equipment on. When people visit there are a few tables that they talk about having haunted experiences at, two of the better-known tables are table 2 and table 11. There have also been so many EVP readings, shadow monitors throughout and mediums that have visited the space. One of the main experiences that people coming on ghost tours notice are the various shadows that crawl along the walls.

Another one of the strange occurrences that people have brought up is that there are random coins that continue to show up. In fact, one of the main words that the EVP devices pick up is the word coins. They are scattered throughout the floor without any explanation as to why they would be there. Others EVP devices have picked up spirits saying purse and change, and while we aren’t sure how these two relate to what is happening in the area, we know that there is some sort of message that the spirits are trying to get across to us. Maybe you’ll find some spare change while you’re visiting the tavern.

[headlesssamurai]

My Lazy, Poor, Stupid Person’s Attempt to Paint Tabletop Miniatures

by headless

This has nothing to do with covid-19 really, it’s just something I reckoned I’d share.  For several years I’ve played Dungeons & Dragons, and occasionally others like Call of Cthulhu and Delta Green, or Shadowrun. Though, I say ‘play’, when I mostly run games as a Dungeon Master. It’s one of those “hobbies” that is a lot of fun for someone like me, but requires a ton of dedication, so it isn’t always easy to get a dedicated group together.

Anyhow, I generally homebrew settings and adventures, never really been too big on running pre-written games, even if some of them are fantastically written. And one of the most frustrating things is I some times want to have a miniature on the battle grid that looks a certain way. This is hardly a big deal, since miniatures are just markers meant for reference in combat encounters, the real image of the characters is in all of our heads.

Still, I sometimes want to have something especially specific, a lot of the players in my current group appreciate cool looking miniatures, and seeing as I’m usually hard-up for cash, I can’t always buy pre-painted mini-figures, unless I get a good bulk deal on ebay or something.

One of my recent attempts to acquire bulk miniatures came a few years back when I realized during the 4E days, Wizards of the Coast had released boxed board games themed with the D&D style, which all came with a great deal of unpainted miniatures; these came in sets like Wrath of Ashardalon, or The Legend of Drizzt, with lots of themed minis for the board game’s scenario.

Anyhow, I’ve had a ton of these unpainted miniatures forever and use them often for nobody-NPCs and other characters the players run across. Lately, however, the group I’ve been running in a campaign for about eleven months (usually weekly), ran across a problem where their dragonborn ranger Grixxis was captured by and then negotiated his away out of the clutches of this ancient entity who calls herself Gorgoth (who appears to be a pale, beautiful young woman, but probably isn’t; even the not so arcane-y Grixxis intuited that much). She was actually impressed that he resisted her Sleep spell, and offered him a deal, she’d let him go but he needs to complete a task for her in the next seven days, and if it isn’t completed in that time frame his soul will be bound to her forever.

The task was to go to a mountaintop and retrieve something that resides there, though Gorgoth did not explain what the object was, so the party set off to find this mysterious mountain. The journey led them to an area of bad wilderness where no one lives, and where roving bands of orcs constantly hunt and war with one another, so only a few people know anything about that region. The party ended up hiring a guide, who was a wood elf exile named Skaya. They seemed to be intrigued by her because she’s living in a city which is currently at war with wood elves, so there’s a lot of prejudice and racism against her kind. Skaya does have facial tattoos that indicate she’s been exiled from her tribe and therefore no longer truly considered by her people to be a wood elf (their worst form of punishment in this universe), but still, the party seemed immediately fascinated by this single NPC among the potential seven or so they might’ve hired for this expedition.

Anyhow, my players have only gotten truly invested in one other NPC they’ve met before this; a small little orc toddler named Gruuba who they saved from a bunch of slave trading bandits early on in the campaign. I’ve had difficulty finding a good miniature for Gruuba too (because she’s really small and scrawny), but since she’s at the same developmental level as a human six year-old they try to keep her out of combat scenarios (despite Gruuba’s excited insistence that she enjoys using clubs “for smashings”). Since the party have begun to really enjoy Skaya as character, the longer they’ve slowly, slowly gotten to know more about her stand-offish personal history, I really wanted to get a miniature for her that reflected my image of her better than the one I’d been using.

So, even though I got basically no experience doing so, I bought a miniature from Reaper Miniatures, and after looking up a few tutorial vids for beginners like me, I set about trying to paint my first mini-figs.

Two things, if you’re looking into this yourself; First, I’m not totally unartistic, I write creatively and I sketch with pencils and ink. Painting’s fairly new to me, but it’s not like I have absolutely no artistic talent. I also solder a lot of really small wires and components in my normal daily job, so I may have better muscle control for this sort of thing than some people. I only mention this because I may have had a few advantages in this undertaking. I just don’t want to make people overly confident, keep things in perspective. So whatever your level of expertise at this, if you want to start just try to patiently measure your expectations, and don’t get discouraged if your first results aren’t so great. All things improve with time.

 And B. if you’re poor, lazy, and stupid like me, there’re ways to get around that. This video I watched gave me a good rundown of the basic steps which are; - scrub the plastic down with some dish soap, luke-warm water, and a toothbrush; allow at least 1 hour to dry (I let them sit for a day because I’m paranoid), and be sure there’s no lingering moisture before you start painting - get a good primer or base coat on the model before you start adding other colors; lighter base coats allow more colors to show up easier, while darker base coats tend to make the colors you paint over them darker - stay calm and take your time - try to paint the colors that’ll go under other colors first, like, if a barbarian dude is shirtless but’s wearing a few pieces of armor, paint his shirtless skin first, then paint the armor he’s wearing second because it layers over better that way - use thinner paints and multiple coats of a color to get an even final color instead of one thick coat - allow each coat of paint to dry for 10 - 20 minutes before applying the next coat - learn about washes, pigments, and inks, because they’re awesome - get a decent varnish for a final protective coat, matte varnishes make the model look dryer and flat, gloss varnishes make the model look shiny and wet, if you do a coat of gloss and a coat of matte varnish it equalizes it pretty good

And this video here sort of laid to rest my fears that I’ll need to spend $600 on paints and washes and stuff. The very helpful lady in that video explains how she uses generic acrylic paints from the craft store (I got mine at Wal-Mart) to paint her Warhammer miniatures, and she even offers a method of making your own washes from a combination of paint and flavorless mouth wash. It’s genius. So try not to stress too much about buying the really nice brand name paints, because it’s not necessary, those paints just have an optimal mix I think, otherwise they’re the same damn thing as generic acrylic paints. Also, you’re just trying to learn, so unless you really, really feel like emptying your bank account, just use the generic stuff.

I started out painting something I didn’t care about. I wanted my miniature for Skaya to look badass and awesome, so I wanted to start with some practice miniatures. Grabbed a few from those 4E board game sets and gave it a shot. But I had also recently gotten hold of a Goliath Barbarian miniature from the Player’s Handbook Heroes sets (also from the 4E days) a rare find, since it usually goes for like $60.00 by itself. Randomly found some dude on ebay selling an unopened box set for $20.00, so I got a wild elf druid and a human berserker along with it. So I started out touching up the goliath’s armor to make it look more like armor and less like weird blue stuff.

Here’s a before-and-after for him (I didn’t take photos of them before because I wasn’t anticipating this, so I just found examples from around the web):

Next I tried a re-paint. A friend of mine had recently guest-played in my campaign and created a half-drow monk (his backstory was fantastic), so since nothing like that exists, I took a Soulknife Infiltrator miniature seen here:

And repainted it to sort of look like his half-drow Monk of the Open Palm:

I finally had the courage to do a full paint, so I grabbed the Dragonborn Elementalist from the Wrath of Ashardalon box, and painted her up with reddish scales (I’m one of those who thinks dragonborn should have physical attributes of their heritage).

In the box her name’s Heskan. I definitely used way too much wash on this one so she looks super shiny.

I then took the orc archers in that same box, and not really paying too much attention this time, quickly painted them, because I lack many orc archers:

At this point, I felt it was time to finally paint Skaya, the wood elf exile. I used the Reaper Bones model Deladrin, Female Assassin ($1.99) for Skaya’s mini.

And taking way more hours than I did on the others, which were only about 1-3 hours each, when you count waiting for the coats to dry, I managed to sort of make her look like Skaya, I guess:

After this, the fact that it wasn’t complete and utter shit, which is what I expected, I was encouraged. So I tried to do out party’s tortle cleric, named Daruuk of Chult (who oddly speaks with a Slavic accent, so that’s how people from Chult sound in our campaign), for whom we’ve lacked an accurate mini-figure for some time. I bought a pack of Spikeshell Warriors ($2.99) from the Reaper Bones line.

But Daruuk characteristically wields a large shield and a warhammer, so for some reason I got super detailed and bought a pack of loose shields from the Reaper Bones line ($0.99), then bought Halbarad ($1.49) a human cleric.

I clipped off Halbarad’s hammer at the hilt, then I trimmed the spikes off of the spikeshell warrior’s club, and used a dremel to carfully mill a hole inside the shaft of the spikeshell’s club, then pinned the hammer inside and secured it with gorilla gel. I used an actual cork board pin to push the shield onto the spikshell’s offhand after cutting off his turtle shell shield in order to pin it before gluing, then clipped off the rest of the cork board pin. Somehow, this ended up making the shield look meaner because it now has a like pyramidal spike sticking out the center. After allowing the glue to dry I painted him up, and my attempt at Daruuk the Death Cleric turned out thus:

I guess his hammer looks sort of Acme-level cartoony, but he’s a giant 350 lb. turtle-man who talks like Omega Red from X-Men The Animated Series, so I’m okay with that. The spikeshell also fits well with the razorback sub-race feature I allowed Daruuk’s player to homebrew for himself. I was really proud of this one.

Finally, because I’m an insane asshole who is getting obsessed with my new hobby, I decided it was dragons or bust. So I bought a pre-primed unpainted Young Blue Dragon from WizKids ($13.99).

And spent, like, three days meticulously testing different paint layers to see how they come out. I tried to paint her in the tradition of blue dragons as they appear in the art of Forgotten Realms material, but gave her a somewhat darker cast, and added metallic blue layers to her claws and spinal ridges. I still need to paint her base, put some highlights on her eyes to accentuate the glowing effect and add my washes to give her a final layer of dimension, but here’s how she came out so far:

Behold, Stormfang! Mistress of Thunder...

Anyhow.

This is super long and I wonder if anyone will bother to read any of it. But just wanted to put this out there. From a dude who, if you asked me a year ago if I thought I could do this, I’d have said I’m too stupid, poor, and lazy. I still think of myself as all of those things. The real pros use crazy detailed techniques with like seven layered highlights on their models, and airbrushes and all kinds of other madness. I use maybe three coats total and I don’t get too worked up if I make a mistake here and there, and I haven’t spent more than maybe fifty bucks total across six weeks, and most of that was wasting paints because I was still learning how to mix different shades. 

So if you got something you feel like you’ve always wanted to do but are too stupid, poor, and lazy to figure out, just go for it yo. I managed to crack out these bastards and I still think I suck, but it’s way better looking than I expected. For real though, you should see some of those Warhammer players, they got mad crazy god skills at this stuff compared to me. But your level of skill isn’t the point. The point is to have that moment with that thing you did, and look at it, and just go “Yeh, I did that” when at one time you never believed you ever could.

There’s always going to be somebody better than you, but even they, like all of us, are still learning.

              侍    headless                     

[rt8815]

OC Ask Game

I was tagged by the amazing @illegalcerebral

I put a Keep Reading link because this is looong.

1) Name (and why you chose it if you like) McKinley Campbell Durand. I named her after McKinley Morganfield, better known as Muddy Waters. However, the “in universe?” reason that will be given - which I haven’t written yet - is that McKinley and Campbell are family names from a few generations back.

Campbell comes from the Gaelic words for ‘crooked’ and ‘mouth.’ I just like the name. Here’s a post (that I had to rewrite because Tumblr’s a dick and wouldn’t let me edit the typos in the original. The rewrite had typos too! Blargh!) that discusses her first and last names. I thought it would be funny for her full name to consist solely of last names.

2) Fandom and how they fit into the story Criminal Minds. She works at a D.C. museum practically around the corner from the J. Edgar Hoover building (as indicated in “Let It Bleed”). That’s a tiny hint that it’s the National Museum of African American History & Culture, but I don’t think I’ll mention it very often, if for no other reason than I’ve never been to the NMAAHC and don’t want to describe it inaccurately.

The official story is that Spencer and McKinley met at the museum (again, in “Let It Bleed,” which is probably the least favorite thing of mine that I’ve written). However, they’d met once before, and texted a few times after that. Because my brain is all over the place, and because I’m telling the story in non-chronological order, I haven’t written their first meeting yet. The only details I’ve revealed thus far are that it was nighttime in a park, McKinley caught Spencer off guard and made him fall to the ground, and whatever they talked about set Spencer straight and lifted his spirits. Also, a swingset was involved. Beyond that, I’ve inserted McKinley into the plotlines and events of the show, with necessary alterations, and there’s a ton of domestic Spencer and off-duty team stuffs.

3) Do they have any family? Biological family: daughter Sophie and son Jason; her Mom (no name yet); maternal grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins; and her estranged father (no name yet). Chosen/found family: husband Spencer; the BAU.

4) As a child, what did they want to be when they grew up? When she was a toddler, McKinley wanted to be a pediatrician (a doctor just for kids?! Cool!) or an ophthalmologist (she’s worn glasses practically her whole life). As an older child she aspired to be an entomologist or herpetologist. In her teenage years she considered a career in forensic pathology or criminal psychology. While earning her BA in English, she discovered that Public History was her true calling.

5) Their greatest dream To be a good Mom. To inspire learning in others.

6) Their worst nightmare Losing her family; having to see her father again.

7) Strengths Empathy, insight/self awareness, forgiving nature but knowing when to cut her losses

8) Weaknesses McKinley struggles with imposter syndrome.

She can be very mean. I mean, downright nasty cruel, verbally. This is rare though because, and I’m paraphrasing a future bit of dialogue here, anyone whose behavior could arguably warrant such a response is beneath her notice and not worth the effort. She’s more likely to close the door on someone. When she’s removed a person from her life, she is done. They become literally nothing to her. McKinley will rightly claim that this is about self-preservation and boundaries, but she really takes it to the next level.

9) What would they chose between: morning and night, sweet and savoury, beaches or meadows, cities or countryside, winter or summer, Christmas or Halloween (sorry, Spencer!), movies or TV shows, action or rom-com, clowns or vampires, stars or the moon (both!), cocktails or pints [Neither. McKinley doesn’t care for cocktails or beer. Scotch, brandy, rum, and dry wines are her poisons. She’s been known to add Kahlúah to vanilla ice cream, Baileys Irish Cream to coffee (she wants to try Drambuie next), or make hot toddies when she has a cold (obviously not mixing any alcohol with any medicine)]

10) How do they relax? Reading, or having Spencer read to her; knitting; listening to her records or playing her guitar; exercising with Boogie so she’s exhausted enough to sleep that night; baking and cooking

11) What makes them angry? Injustice, apathy/indifference, ableism, willful ignorance

12) What makes them afraid? The awful things she’d possibly do under duress; her family getting hurt or worse; spiders and other bugs that bite and/or sting

13) What is a moment from their childhood that has shaped who they are? It’s not a single event, but growing up with an abusive parent has certainly had a lifelong impact on McKinley. You’ve heard the expression “once bitten, twice shy?” She’s “once bitten, there’s no twice because you no longer exist.” She’s working on that. It’s also cultivated empathy, though, and is part of the reason she volunteers in the hospital’s rehab wing.

14) Do they have a sense of humour? Intellectual humor, pop culture references, puns/Dad jokes, science jokes. Sometimes morbid.

15) What do they value in their friends/loved ones? Honesty and empathy

16) Do they have any pets? An Aussie Collie/Border Aussie named Boogie-Woogie. He’s her first child.

17) Worst memory? Probably the day Meadows shot her and she thought she’d never see Spencer and Penny again.

18) Best memory? The days Sophie and Jason were born. Minus, y’know, the agonizing pain of labor and delivery.

19) Do they have any tattoos? (If no would they get one?) Nope and nope

20) If you could write them into another fandom, which one would you choose? If I knew the MCU better, I’d love to write her in as a Stark Tower employee! She’d be an anthropologist and would study alien societies the Avengers and S.H.I.E.L.D. have encountered. She’d naturally be drawn to Loki, initially in a professional capacity (they quickly discover they relate to each other on a personal level as well).

He’d first find her annoying: “Why are you pestering me, Mortal? Surely you’d rather interview my oaf of a brother?”

“No, not even remotely. He only ever wants to discuss battles he’s won. There’s so much more to Asgard and the other realms than that. I want - I need - to learn your literature, your science, your culture and history. You’re well versed in all of these subjects and you’re an excellent teacher.”

He stares at her impassively over his mug of tea, but his heart - that Judas of an organ - flutters slightly at the compliment. And how can he say no to a fellow scholar?

“I prefer your company to Thor’s too. You have this calming presence. Thor’s sweet but he’s also obnoxiously loud and brash and he always hugs me even though I keep telling him I don’t like it. And he’s constantly swinging his hammer around, which makes me think he’s overcompensating for something.”

Loki nearly chokes on his tea. Yes, this mortal is considerably more tolerable than others.

“Very well. Friday evenings at 6:00, my chambers. Arrive late and suffer my wrath.”

From that day forward, whenever Thor tries to hug her, he gets mildly electrocuted.

Did I accidentally sorta kinda write a drabble? Would anyone be interested in making this a collab? That’s what they’re called, right? (Can you tell I’ve given this some thought? Haha! I have even more details in my head.)

21) Do they like their job? (What else would they do if they could?) She loves it! Hmmm, what else…? A librarian maybe. Or animate and produce an educational cartoon series.

22) What is their sexuality? Demisexual

23) Do they believe in love at first sight? Soulmates? One true love? McKinley believes in “seeing the potential for a good relationship at first conversation.”

Yes, although she feels that term has become overused and poorly redefined.

People can find love again after it’s been lost.

24) What music do they listen to? Has that changed over time? I actually recently answered an ask about this. Yes, she grew up on what passed for country in the ‘90s. God help her, she had a boyband phase in junior high.

25) Can they cook? What food do they love? McKinley does pretty well in the kitchen. She loves a wide variety of food. She grew up in the south, so tons of carbs/comfort foods. She loves Thai, Japanese, and Indian food. She cooks up Middle Earth-inspired dishes (ha! nerd). She’s especially proud of a seed cake she bakes.

26) What are their hopes for the future? For her family to be healthy, safe and happy. To be debt free.

27) How do they react to being threatened? It’s a coin flip. McKinley might curl up like an armadillo and hope the predator gets bored and leaves, or she might kick the stool out from under them and cause their chin to slam into the bar and crack several teeth.

28) What is their love language? McKinley and Spencer both exhibit the Acts of Service love language, because just saying “I love you” isn’t enough. You ought to show it. She’ll randomly bake doughnuts for Spencer or play guitar for him in bed, and he’ll take care of laundry, dishes, and any other chores he sees need doing.

Quality Time is important for them too. Once a month, Luke and Penny babysit so Spencer and McKinley have a day alone together. It doesn’t really matter what they do. The point is it’s just them.

It caught McKinley by surprise how much she enjoys physical affection, given that she can be touch averse but holy moly she was more touch starved than she realized. She lives for snuggles and makeout sessions and playing with each others’ hair. When one of them doesn’t want to be touched, they hook their pinkies together.

29) What do they find most challenging in relationships? At work? In general? At work she struggles to gain her colleagues’ respect (think “Boy Genius” treatment except she has lady bits). In general, she struggles with trusting people.

30) What do you as a creator love best about writing this character? Giving her everything I wish I had but don’t.

Bonus: Include a link to your favourite work with this OC or write a small drabble.

October 12, 2021

Warm sunlight filtered through the curtains, gently rousing Spencer from a pleasant sleep. Just when he’d decided to get up, he felt the mattress dip behind him and his wife’s breath fanning over his ear.

“Who’s the birthday boy?” whispered McKinley.

Spencer smiled softly but feigned being asleep.

“Who’s the birthdaaay boooy?” she repeated, bouncing slightly.

“The good-looking guy to your left?”

“Happy Birthday!” she laughed, pressing kisses along his neck, suddenly shifting the mood from playful to sexy.

“Would the birthday boy like his birthday present?” she asked as she lifted the covers.

“Well, look at that - it’s already unwrapped!”

[stellarbisexual]

update

having a good stretch (evenings are usually good), so i’m taking advantage of it: 

(read on for potentially triggering mental health stuff--but if you’re not triggered, please read and reply because i can use all the support i can take)

Wacky, all over the place week overall, just in terms of what my body and my brain are dishing out.  Like... ugh.  I remember the week or two after my last panic attack being bad but I’m not sure I remember it being this bad.  Then again, this one happened with me alone and in public, so more intense circumstances, for sure.  

I’ve started tracking everything: my meds (I’m on a benzo to be used “as needed” up to 2x a day), my food intake, and my feels (I literally have a column titled Feels).  I just want to get a better sense of what’s helping, when I feel the most like myself, and what I can do or not do meds-wise to help myself feel better.

When I feel potentially big anxiety coming on (I’m trying to catch panic before it starts), I’ve been taking a mini-dose of my benzo, like a quarter of a full pill, which is already a pretty low dosage. I’m super fucking sensitive to meds, anyway, so it’s all I need.  (For reference, I only needed half a pill for my full blown attack last week.)  This means, however, that my med intake hasn’t been consistent.  I’ve noticed that mornings have been consistently fucking hard, so I thought I would try taking a mini dose this morning first thing upon waking, which definitely helped--but I still had really fucking intense nausea until around 11am.  Got temporarily paranoid that it might be due to the medication, but I don’t usually experience that when I take it, so I don’t think so.  In general, I have been able to feel most myself after taking the medication, which is a sign that it’s working for me.  

I’ve gone down the not at all helpful rabbit hole of freaking myself out over forums of former benzo users warning over dependency and addiction and withdrawals and shit.  This is not fucking helpful for me and I need to stop doing it--because I really do need them this week and I can’t be second guessing that shit or feeling additionally anxious or guilty about it.  One of my best friends who has a lot of experience with the same benzo said, “Don’t question it: if you need it, take it.”  I’m still way, way under the maximum dosage for which it was prescribed to me, and I’m certainly not feeling high like some people seem to with it.  I don’t like the experience of feeling drugged, but I do like the relief it’s giving me when nothing else is. 

I’ve tried laying off of the med for smaller anxiety and doing things like my usual breathing exercises or meditation (which is surprisingly helpful), and small doses of CBD when that doesn’t help.  Ideally, I’d like to use heavier doses of CBD in place of my benzo because I know it’s milder on my system.  (But I’ve been staying at my brother’s all weekend and I’m very low on the CBD I brought with me here.)  Heading back home tomorrow.

Been cycling through mini-depressive episodes, which, for someone who doesn’t have a history of depression, is totally fucking scary.  This I remember very clearly from after my last attack, but it of course doesn’t prevent me from being paranoid that the medication is prompting it--which again, I don’t think is true based on my experience.  It’s a vicious cycle: I have panic, feel like a failure, and then get depressed, and then get anxious because I’m depressed and I don’t have a history of depression.  I've had a couple of these low episodes every day for the last three days maybe. 

One of the other scary things is that my appetite is totally fucking shot.  I have brief moments where I am suddenly actually hungry and want to eat--and I’ve been taking advantage of them, but I’ve also been forcing some food down at semi-regular meal times, even when I really don’t fucking want to.  Normally, I am someone who eats fast and a lot; I have the appetite of a much larger person, so again, this is challenging to process and deal with.  To preempt more days like this, I bought some meal replacement protein smoothies and Clif bars, just so I can get some easy fucking nutrition into my system when I really don’t feel like it.  Drinking is way, way easier than eating, so that’s the best course of action.  

I’m trying out two other new therapists - one through teletherapy who I already met with once and who specializes in trauma, anxiety, and depression, and another who is local and more hippie dippie - and I made the very sad, hard decision to stop seeing my regular therapist of many years because she’s way too expensive for me right now and I need to be talking to someone a couple of times a week right now. 

The bright side to all of this is that I had been contemplating whether or not to tell my parents about this relapse because, well, they are who they are, and I didn’t think it would be helpful for them to know because it would just freak them out and I wouldn’t reap any emotional support benefits because they’re incapable--or so I thought.  I ended up calling my dad today to tell him.  He’s in FL away from my mom right now.  And it was really fucking hard, but it ended up being a gamechanger, breakthrough conversation.  He basically offered a kind, patient ear, and said that he would do whatever I asked.  It was the kind of parental support I’ve never received--ever--and never expected to but have always wanted more than anything deep down.  He’s not without his shortcomings, but what he said meant the entire fucking world to me.  I cried a lot during and after our conversation and effectively wore myself the fuck out this afternoon.  But: really big fucking deal.  And considering what I’m going through, I’m definitely going to take him up on that.  I’m thinking of having him do stuff for me that I just find too overwhelming right now, stuff he can do from afar.  Though he did offer to come up and be with me, which was overwhelming, in a good way.  He also said that if there’s ever anything I want to share with him that I don’t want him to tell my mom, that he would honor that... which was fascinating and comforting and also a huge fucking deal.  Just... a lot to fucking process.  

Speaking of crying, I’ve been crying A SHIT TON, friends.  I actually love crying and find it super therapeutic, so this actually isn’t alarming for me the way it might be for someone else.  I’m just letting myself feel and process the sadness of this year and what’s happening and stay curious about what’s coming up for me.  For me, it’s a good sign that I’m crying.  I’d be more worried if I weren’t. 

My askbox and inbox are open for any support, words of wisdom, advice--literally anything.  Right now, I could use more tools for getting through my fucking day, especially since tomorrow is Monday and I got shit to do.  I’ve already told my one client that I’m adjusting medication and that I haven’t been feeling great, so at least she has a head’s up on that.  Running errands and being a person is going to be more challenging for a little while--but again, nothing I haven’t been through already (hello, this past winter), and now at least I have the benefit of medication to support me--and CBD if I have to avoid it.  I have experience on my side.  

This shit is brutal.  But I’m so grateful to have support and medication and to have at least felt fully like myself for solid stretches every day since the attack happened.  I cling to those moments and see them as hope that I’ll pull through soon. 

[homearama]

How To Get Roomba To Clean Whole House?

How To Get Roomba To Clean Whole House? A lot of people already own a robot vacuum cleaner in their homes. These robots are supposed to help keep your floors nice and clean without you having to do any work yourself. However, most people find that their robot isn’t quite up to the task. It does an okay job here and there but it never seems like your floor is completely cleaned; especially if you have pets or kids who make a mess. If this sounds like something that’s happening in your house, then we know how you feel because we’ve been there too! There are some easy things that you can do at home to make sure your robot is able to do a good job for you.

How To Get Roomba To Clean Whole House?

Remove Clutter

The first thing that you should remember is to remove any clutter from your floor. This includes anything with wheels, small objects, toys, etc. These things are dangerous because they can set off the sensors on your robot and cause it to bump into furniture or just stop working completely. A lot of the time these robots will come back online if you power cycle them so give it a shot before beating yourself up about having brand new floors only to have them trashed by your robot.

Stairs and Permanent Floor Items

Some models include stair detection sensors but they’re not very accurate. If you have stairs in your home then you need to make sure anything on them at all times is safe. Items like dish racks, pet food bowls, magazines, etc. should be moved out of the way because they’re likely to get in your robot’s way and cause problems down the line.

Tidy up the Wires

One of our favorite tricks for getting any new electronics appliance to work better is to tidy up the wires around it if possible. It’s no secret that messes can affect how well something works so if you want your robot vacuum cleaner to do a good job then make sure you move any wires or cords away from where it will be operating. This includes things like power strips with electrical cables plugged into them, phones jack lines, chargers, etc. Also make sure you clean the wires up as best as possible because they’ll likely be clogging up your robot’s sensors if they’re crisscrossed over one another.

Virtual Wall Sensors

Most of these robots will come with at least one virtual wall piece which is used to block off certain areas that you don’t want it to go into. There are three types which include magnetic strips, infrared blockers and barriers that emit high-pitched sounds. These are all effective for keeping your robot away from some areas so if needed, use them! But keep in mind that none of them last forever so you might need to replace or change them out periodically.

Remove Water Threats

There are a lot of things that can be dangerous to your robot when it comes into contact with water. One of the biggest problems you can have is if your machine runs over too much water because this will likely cause it to short out and stop working completely. If this happens then you should keep trying to power cycle it until you’re able to get it back online again. Also make sure there aren’t any water sources in areas where your robot is going to pass by regularly, because these could potentially cause damage over time as well. Some robots will come with an extra wire specifically for keeping them safe in wet situations but if not then just go for a cheap extension cord instead.

Leave the Lights on

If you want your robot to do a good job then make sure that it has as much light as possible. This includes turning on any lights near where it will be working and leaving the main room lights on as well. It’s not exactly clear why these robots need this extra lighting but we’ve noticed they work better when there is more of it available for them to use their sensors with. Luckily though, most newer models include smart technology which allows them to turn off certain areas of their own accord so they can save battery!

Types of Robots: Domobots, Entertainment Robots, Care and Chore Robots

This article doesn’t really go into detail about different types of robots, but it does mention that there are different types of them. More information about the types of robots would be useful here.

Domobots:

These are the most widely used robots as they include all of the biggest brands like Roomba, Neato, and iRobot. They’re used mostly for cleaning purposes but some have been made to do other things as well such as monitor homes while owners are away on vacation or even provide a home assistant function with virtual assistants like Amazon Alexa.

Entertainment Robots:

A lot of people think that entertainment robots were going to be a big thing after seeing movies like Wall-E but the truth is that they haven’t managed to gain much traction outside of Japan where there are tons of them designed to mimic celebrities and even mimic ways of talking using AI technology. It would make more sense if these robots could actually help out with day to day tasks but these are still pretty new and it might take a while before people get sick of seeing the same old things over and over again.

Care and Chore Robots:

These robots are slowly becoming more common as the prices for making them goes down, but even then they’re not exactly cheap to have in your home. These include things like smart toilet seats which can raise or lower themselves so you don’t have to touch anything when getting washed or going #2, robot vacuums which automatically clean your floors without any effort on your part, and even larger care robots that help with elderly members of the family who might be suffering from certain ailments that affect their daily lives.

How Does the Roomba work?

The article doesn’t really give a full explanation about how the Roomba works, but it does mention that there are virtual wall sensors. Additional information regarding the Roomba would be useful here. The article also goes on to say that keeping lights on makes a difference in how well a robot can navigate around your house.

Conclusion

This article gives an overview of what you should do to make sure your robot is clean and working properly. It’s good if you’re looking for general advice on how to get the most out of your robo-vacuum cleaner, but if you’re looking for more specifics then you might want to look up other articles just so that your knowledge isn’t limited by this one particular source.

See more how to Care iRobot Roomba of Home Arama

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How to clean roomba filter?

How To Get Roomba To Clean Whole House?

source https://homearama.tv/how-to-get-roomba-to-clean-whole-house/

[seanpatricklittlewriter]

The Movie Post

Greetings and salutations, true believers. I haven’t posted anything in a while other than shameless book promotion stuff for #FourthAndWrong, and for that I apologize. I always say I’d let you know if anything good happened immediately, but nothing good has happened. The new book is out. A few people who have read it told me they liked it. It’s not selling well. Lack of sales means a lack of reviews, which only helps it not sell faster. It’s all a vicious cycle. At a certain point, you have to remember that you’re only writing books because some tiny voice in your head won’t let you stop, and you just throw your hands up and let everything else fall as it may. For the first time, I’ve actually bothered to try real advertising. I’m giving advertising on the Kindle lock screens a go. I’ll let you know if actually works.

 In the meantime, I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts while puttering around the house, going for walks, and ignoring the gym. (I gotta stop ignoring the gym…) If you haven’t watched “Ted Lasso” on AppleTV yet, I HIGHLY recommend it. It’s one of the best shows I’ve watched in a long time. Great writing. Great characters. Great story. Very uplifting and wonderful. One of the show’s writers, creators, and stars, the wonderful Brett Goldstein (who plays the gruff Roy Kent on the show), has a podcast called “Films to Buried With.”

 I started listening to his podcast because I enjoy him on the show so much, and I’ve found out that I enjoy his podcast as much as the show. He’s a genuinely sweet man, and he gets comedian and actor friends to guest on his podcast. The show’s conceit is that Brett invites guests on, tells them they have died, and then gets them to relive their life through the films that meant something to them. It’s a fun little chat show, and a solid way to waste an hour while you’re getting through doing the dishes or mowing the lawn.

 It’s precisely the sort of podcast I would love to be on. I’ve always said you can judge your level of success by what people invite you to do. I always said I’d know if I “made it” if I could ever get invited to be on one of the podcasts I enjoy, rather than trying to wrangle my way into someone else’s podcast or blog. So far— this has not happened. That should tell you what level of success I’m stuck at. I don’t get invited to the movies by my imaginary friends. But Brett encourages people to share their ideas and opinions on social media, anyhow. It’s a fun way to play along at home, tell other people about the podcast, and start conversations around your favorite movies. Stories bind us together. They give us common ground and build bridges toward strengthening relationships. If you meet someone new, you can tell if you’ll get along with them by what films they enjoy. So in that spirit, I’d like to answer the questions Brett asks his guests by discussing a few of my favorite films. If you’d like to play along in the comments, please do. I always love reading about what other people think about movies, books, or music. I won’t bother going through the death/afterlife conceit he uses, but I recommend listening to a few of his podcasts if you enjoy this sort of thing. It’s a fun little premise he uses to generate the episodes.

 --What’s the first film you remember seeing?

         I remember bits and pieces of several films from my childhood. I remember the Muppet Movie in the theater. I remember seeing The Black Hole. I remember a lot of little chunks of a lot of Disney animated films. But the movie that sticks out in my head is “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” It was 1981. I was six. I remember going to see it on a Sunday matinee with my family. I remember it was packed. People were literally sitting on the floor in the aisles. We got three seats someplace, but I remember my dad having to sit in the row in front of us. I don’t remember a ton about the movie the first time I saw it other than being scared of the pit of snakes and the melting Nazi faces. However, I remember the iconic moment when Harrison Ford pulled the gun on the swordsman and shot him. I remember the audience reaction and thinking, “That’s a hero.” I’ve long been a Harrison Ford fan. Between Han Solo and Indiana Jones, he played two of the most iconic heroes of my childhood. When I wrote the TeslaCon novels, I made no secret that my protagonist, Nicodemus Clarke, was just a shallow rip-off of Indiana Jones. It’s funny, but to this day, in my head, if you ask me what a hero looks like, it’s always going to be Harrison Ford.

  --What’s the scariest film you’ve ever seen?

          The scariest film I’ve ever seen is Kevin Smith’s “Red State.” It’s a movie about a religious cult that’s very reminiscent of the Westboro Baptist Church, David Koresh/Waco compound, or any of the other extremely far-right Christian separatist movements. It’s scary because there are many, many of these gun-hoarding compounds, and the movie, while extreme, is not too far off from possibility. Michael Parks plays the leader of the family at the heart of the film, and his performance was award worthy. He was truly terrifying.     As an aside, prior to Red State, I always told people the movie that scared me the most was the original “The Amityville Horror.” Basically, I saw the scene where the poltergeist made the drop-sash window fall on the kid’s fingers and nearly sever them, and that was it. I had the same drop-sash windows in my bedroom, and I was scared of them from then on. I’d like to say that I outgrew my fear of drop-sash windows, but I’m 46 and they still skeeze me out when I see them. A movie I saw 40 years ago warped me forever.

  --What’s the movie that made you cry the most?

         I used to not be someone who cried at movies. However, years of thyroid issues and depression have messed with my response to emotional moments, so I do get teary nowadays at movies. Emotionally speaking, it’s not sad movies that get to me. It’s movies where someone overcomes something difficult. Especially sports movies. The ones that get me the most teary-eyed now are movies like the first “Rocky,” “Hoosiers,” “Miracle,” and “Rudy.” I also get teary-eyed at points of bravery to the point of stupidity. The best example of that is the climax and denouement of “How to Train Your Dragon.” Strangely enough, when a movie does something that is supposed to be a tear-jerker moment to the point that it panders to the audience, I don’t cry— I actually get angry. Anything Nicolas Sparks has ever had his name attached to, for instance. It’s maudlin, and it doesn’t deserve our respect.

  --What the film that made you laugh the most?

       This is not going to be a popular answer. If I was a little more erudite, I’d say something like “Airplane” or “Blazing Saddles” or “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.” However, I didn’t see any of those in the theater originally. I was home, watching them on video. While they were funny and some of my favorite movies, I did not really do a ton of laughing while I saw them. I went to see “BASEketball” with my sister, and the theater was packed. Something about seeing a movie in a crowded theater heightens the emotional impact of jokes, and for whatever reason, that movie put me on the floor a couple of times. It’s a silly movie full of cheap laughs, but I remember hurting as I was leaving the theater. My sides and cheeks were sore. Second on that list was the movie “Bridesmaids.” I don’t think I’ve laughed harder at any movie than the scene where they all get diarrhea in the bridal shop. Especially Melissa McCarthy: “LOOK AWAY!”

  --What is the sexist film you’ve seen?

         For me, I will never forget seeing “Bachelor Party” on HBO at a friend’s house. Monique Gabrielle’s scene is probably the first time I saw full-frontal female nudity in a film. It burned itself into my brain. I probably have a thing for redheads to this day because of that scene. The rest of the movie is very wild and funny. It was one of the launching blocks for Tom Hanks’s ridiculously amazing career. But that one moment stands out as one of the sexiest things I’ve ever seen.

  --What film did you used to love, but now it’s not that great?

         Pretty much anything with “Rocky” in the title and a number following it. I still enjoy them, but Rocky III and IV, especially— not that good. I used to love them. I used to watch them whenever they hit TV, but now I only need to watch the first “Rocky,” and maybe the final fight in “Rocky II.” Anything else, I can leave out. They just feel a little overclocked at this point in my life.

  --What’s a film that people and critics panned, but you enjoyed?

        “Goon.” It’s a hockey film written by Jay Baruchel and starring Seann William Scott. It didn’t get wide release—almost straight-to-video. It didn’t get great reviews. I think Metacritic has it around 60%. But something about that movie hit me, and I love it. I suggest it to people all the time. It’s got great performances. It’s a solid flick. It’s not going to overwhelm you. It’s now one of my comfort films. When I’m bored and need something on in the background, I will often choose “Goon” or its sequel, “Goon: Last of the Enforcers.” The sequel was not as good as the original, but it’s still worth a watch. Kurt Russell’s son Wyatt is the villain in the sequel. He’s extremely good.

  --What’s a film that people love, but you hate?

        Hands down: “Avatar” or “Titanic.” Something about a lot of James Cameron films just don’t work with me. I think it’s because they’re too grandiose. They try too hard. Also, the scripts are just there to get him to the big, visual set-pieces. They’re thin on both character and plot. I can’t stand either of them.

  --What’s a film that means a lot to you, but it’s not because of the quality of the movie (i.e. you saw it with someone and it’s special, or it has importance to people around you, etc…)?

       Easily, “The Man From Snowy River.” This is a family favorite. I grew up watching this flick, and I made my daughter watch it when she was younger. I will never get tired of it. I probably watch it maybe three or four times a year. There’s just something about the cinematography of the climax when Jim goes down the mountainside on Denny’s back. It’s always breath-taking. Also, if you watch “The Man From Snowy River,” you see what my dad always wanted his life to be. Most boys’ fathers want their sons to be doctor or lawyers. My dad wanted me to be a cowboy.

  --What film do you relate to the most?

        “Clerks.” I saw “Clerks” when I was a senior in high school. Rented it from a local video store. I saw two dudes who were outliers in their social group working crappy jobs and dealing with the mundane nothingness of life. It hit me right in the gut. I resolved to do something better than that. So far, I’ve failed to do so, but I keep trying.

  --Empirically speaking, what is the best film? (Not necessarily favorite film— but what film do you think is the best film ever made?)

         I have to say it was “Lawrence of Arabia.” The casting was amazing. The cinematography was incredible, unrivaled, really. The story was excellent. And the ordeal of the entire filming process was without peer. What they went through to make that movie, hands down, makes it the best film ever made. The scope of the film alone is mind-boggling.  The Lord of the Rings trilogy is a close second, but that’s technically three films, so I went with Lawrence of Arabia.

  --What film have you seen the most?

         I have watched “The Muppet Movie” a ton. I still love the movie “Roxanne.” I have also seen “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers” and “The Quiet Man” more than any single person probably should. If I had to think about it and pick one film I’ve seen more than other…it’s probably “Meatballs.” Growing up, my sister and I watched that flick a thousand times. I can probably recite it from memory. It’s also one of the films that cemented an undying loyalty to Bill Murray.

   --And finally: You die and go to heaven. And in heaven, they ask you to pick one film that summarizes your life, one film that makes people understand you, or a film you want people to watch to help them know you better. What is that film?

         Nothing has had more influence on my life than the movie “Ghostbusters.” It defined me in several ways: my love for comedy, my love for the paranormal, and my love for snark and snappy comebacks. I loved Ghostbusters so much that I watched it on a weekly basis. I ran the audio cables from our VCR to a tape deck and recorded an audio copy of the film to play on my Walkman while I road the bus to school every day. I still have the film memorized word-for-word. I will often let my eyes go a little weird and turn to my daughter and say, “Then, during the Third Reconciliation of the Last of the Meketrex Supplicants, they chose a new form for him, that of a giant Sloar! Many Shubs and Zuuls knew what it was to be roasted in the depths of a Sloar that day, I can tell you!” To know me is to understand Ghostbusters on a molecular level. I owe that movie a lot.

  Anyhow, this was a fun way to waste my night. I encourage you to play along. Answer some or all of the questions Brett asks his guests. I highly recommend listening to a few episodes of “Films to Be Buried With” on your favorite podcatcher app. And if anyone out there knows Brett Goldstein, please let him know I’m available to guest on his podcast. Until next time—Thanks for reading.

--Sean

[tauers-go-dutch]

Italy: like putting on an old boot

Since losing my passport in Madrid, I had a two-week window before our next trip to get a new one. I ended up going to the US Consulate in Amsterdam, which was an adventure all in its own. If you picture the DMV, but on ‘roids, that is about the experience of applying for a passport abroad.  After getting a new passport photo, I got to wait outside the building on the literal coldest day of the year for an hour before being ushered through security in order to wait for another two hours interspersed with quick trips up to the counter to explain that I don’t know what happened to my passport because I lost it and then being chastised for losing my passport because I must look too young to possibly be able to comprehend the gravity of importance such a document.  Oh, and I had to pay $140.  But luckily the US is very efficient at printing rush order passports and it arrived the following Friday, just in time for our trip to Rome.  But of course, there would be one more hiccup in the story- the city lost power on Friday afternoon when I planned to pick up my passport.  So the Consulate did not have power… or at least the backup generator did not power the whole building.  Luckily, the guards were able to just grab the newly printed passports (I was not the only one trying to pick one up that day), and I was on my way.

Once we got into Rome, the same feeling of joy I had from my first visit washed over me, and I think I had a smile on the whole weekend. Rome is a huge city, so it is crowded, busy, smelly, full of trash, a bit rundown, etc.  However, I love it for the amazing art, culture, and food.  What can I say, Rome was the center of Western culture for much of history, and for much of my Catholic upbringing (and my brief stint as a Latin nerd), so it generates some degree of awe.

We threw in our coin, so I guess we’ll be back again

We checked into our hotel, which was across from some state building.  When checking us in, the clerk said if we take photos from the window, the state employees might think we are spies and send people over to the hotel to investigate. I’m pretty sure he was joking?  Mariah may have tested the theory the next evening after a few drinks.  

We went to dinner that evening and tried some authentic Roman dishes, including an artichoke sampler platter. To be honest, steamed artichokes and butter was one of my sister’s favorite meals growing up, but they were never one of mine. But the Roman style artichokes blew me away. They are originally prepared by Jewish immigrants, but were quickly adopted by the Roman locals, so much so that Rome is one of the largest artichoke producers in the world. The Jewish version is lightly battered and fried, while the Roman version is steamed, and both are incredible. I also had pasta al’amatriciana (tomato sauce with pork cheek) and Mariah had ravioli before we split an incredible tiramisu.  Before calling it a night we walked over to the Trevi fountain and threw in a coin.  I guess we’ll be back one day.

Magical artichokes

We had some super delicious pastries in our hotel the next morning before heading to St. Peter’s Basilica. After taking some initial photos, I was talked into upgrading our museum tickets to a guided tour.  While this is expensive, it is worth it- the guide is great, but you’re really paying to skip the 3+ hour line to see the basilica from the museum (and Sistine Chapel).  We learned why the Vatican is its own country (long, convoluted story short- the modern church never wanted to join the united Italy, and the arrangement stuck- helps when you have your own private army). The Vatican treasures are as incredible as they are extensive. We saw Greek/Roman gods, human personifications of the Tiber river, supposed tombs of Helena and Constantina (mother and daughter of Constantine), maps of the world, paintings and tapestries for days, and a Roman Zach Galifianakis. But this was all a lead in to the Sistine Chapel, of Michelangelo fame. Of course there are no photos, but the Creation of Adam and the Last Judgment are every bit as amazing as hyped. We then fast tracked to the staggeringly beautiful St. Peter’s basilica.  We saw the tombs of the popes (St. John Paul II has his own chapel on the main floor) and the Pieta, but my favorite is the altar from Bernini.  Just look at the pictures.

St. Peter’s Basilica

Is that you, Zach?

Pieta

Pope JPIII!

Bernini’s altar

After a lunch of arancini (rice balls- I might not be able to eat the ones at Cinzetti’s ever again) and cacao e pepe (literally cheese and pepper- basically Italian mac ‘n cheese for adults), we set out to explore the city.  We saw Castle Sant’Angelo (the pope fortress/Church of Illumination), Piazza Navona, The Pantheon, the Spanish Steps, and so much gelato.  Eventually, we met some friends who also happened to be in Rome, and had dinner and a shared a few bottles of wine.  

Gelato number two - sadly, we have no evidence of number one

The Pantheon

These two like their Italian wine

Brent and Christine happened to be in town

The next morning, we packed in some more sightseeing with the Altar of the Fatherland (Mussolini funded statue dedicated to the united Italy), Palatine Hill, the Capitoline Wolf, and Turtle Fountain (which does not have live turtles in the fountain). We ventured to the Jewish quarter of town, and had more marvelous artichokes, pasta, and possibly some of the best table bread ever (I had to take a picture it was so good).  We went to a beer bar and enjoyed some brews (Italy has some good breweries), before going over to the hip Trastevere neighborhood and having more food (including a tremendous prosciutto sandwich which I would not shut up about, more arancini and a pizza) and beers.  We needed to get back to the hotel, and decided to walk by the Colosseum and the Circus Maximus on the way.  Unfortunately, the sky opened up and we were drenched in ten minutes… so we made a quick pit stop for more gelato to let the rain pass.  There are worse things.

Remus and Romulus!

No live turtles

Mariah’s happy place (Gelato three of four?)

...and mine (prosciutto sandwich)

Sometimes I can get her to drink a beer

But it generally involves bribery with margherita pizza

Aaaaand it’s pouring outside

Rain keeps the tourists away - most of them, anyways

Are you not entertained?

All that’s left of the Circus Maximus

We packed a ton into our Rome weekend, so in Florence (the following weekend) we were a bit more relaxed. We arrived late on Friday so our adventure really just started on Saturday morning. Our first stop was to the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, which is better known for ‘il Duomo,’ or the massive dome that adorns the church and dominates the city skyline.  It was a fairly easy climb, but the vertigo is real when you are on the interior of the church and looking down. But you are rewarded with amazing art reminiscent of Dante’s Inferno (Florence is his home town, btw) and panoramic views of the city.  

I hope you’re not claustrophobic... or afraid of heights!

Afterwards, we put our name down at Trattoria Mario for lunch, and killed some time at the markets before our table was ready. I don’t think you can see more leather outside of a Vegas S&M convention, but to be honest it is really cool.  We stopped into a market and bought some pastries- creampuff for me and a chocolate cookie for Mariah- to hold us over. Luckily we did not have to wait for lunch long.  Trattoria Mario is regarded as the best restaurant in town, and is only open for lunch. The place is tiny, and you will be seated at a two-person table with two other people and sit on stools that are made for toddlers. The bread is disappointing, but the food is marvelous. The place is meat-centric, and their specialty is the classic bistecca alla fiorentina, which is a super thick, bloody porterhouse steak. The frites were good too.

After lunch, we crossed the famed Ponte Vecchio to the other side of the city.  We walked up to the Piazzale Michelangelo for more magnificent views of Florence.  We walked along the river and stopped by a small tea shop, and sampled some of their goodies. We walked out with some good stuff, and an aspiration to become a tea sommelier and to (keep) travel(ing) the world. We had a rest at a dessert shop before finding dinner (easier said than done, since our first choice for dinner just never opened the restaurant for service- no notice posted physically or online), and closed the night with more beers. It was a bit early, but we have been traveling a lot.  

It was a pretty creepy sculpture...

We slept in, but woke to go to the Galleria dell’Accademia, which is a museum that has nothing of much significance except for a little piece from Michelangelo called the David. Before seeing the main event, we did explore some of the other parts of the museum, including the musical instruments and some religious paintings.  Two asides- first, we saw a pair of little girls (say seven) on a private guide with their parents looking at the musical instruments and throwing out some serious knowledge of the Medicis and the Renaissance art movement (the girl was a self-proclaimed art history buff, and I believe it!). Second, some of the art made to explain the dogma of Christianity is as bizarre (though simultaneously stylish) as the Thai paintings we saw in Bangkok. Seriously, if I didn’t have knowledge of the immaculate conception, I would have thought Christians believed that an old cloud god shot pigeons at a sleeping woman while some creepy dude with wings looked on approvingly. 

But onto the David.  It is every bit as masterful as everyone says.  The story is unbelievable too.  Just think, some 27 year-old just said, ‘hey, can I use that chunk of marble over there? I wanna make something for you.’  And then the Florentine people were graced with one of the most incredible works of art in history is ridiculous.  Michelangelo was TWENTYSEVEN!!!  Oh, and he made the Pieta before that (pictured above, from Rome).

Just look at him! 

Afterwards we just relaxed. We had some pizza, coffee, macarons and beers. I did grab a snack- a lampredotto.  There was a stand just outside of our hotel which filled up during lunch with locals, so I figured I’d try it. The sandwich is made from spiced lamb intestine, and it’s pretty good. I mean, it’s no prosciutto sandwich, but its good. We did make our outside the Uffizi gallery before leaving, and took in some of the city’s most famous patrons before saying goodbye.

I throw my hands up in the air sometimes... singing ayo... 

NBD, just our country’s namesake

Last minute snack

Italy is superb.  It is a country with so many different layers of nuance and culture.  Sometimes I feel people boil it down to pizza and statues, but it’s so much more.  Each region, from Rome, Florence, Venice, Naples, Sicily, Milan, etc. is so different from the next. The food, outside of the tourist traps, is every bit of what makes Italian fare heralded as some of the world’s best. The culture and history is dense and rich- just think, Rome was the center of the western world through two different points of time for two different reasons. Sure, Italy has its problems and frustrations like we all do, but it is a country I will enjoy returning to time and time again.

[isabellaklein97]

Repellent For Cat Spraying Cheap And Easy Useful Tips

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If you find an adult one, is to determine which vaccinations your cat healthy and to pamper their cats declawed.Rhinitis is an exercise in frustration that can help you to tackle with it in clam juice, tuna juice, or fish juice.Sometimes it is in their paws when they are fighting all around the areas with two foul smelling cat urine odor from urine.Then place the scratching post should be pink and healthy cat but that takes a shine to it, it was dry and may not believe me but just because the urine up you call him, he may be compromised and your family, to live with them as comfortably, happily and allergy free as possible!Will your cat needs is a very good smell.

Spaying or neutering your female cat spayed before her first duel with the process by blotting the damp area and get a response.Cats are like sandpaper and thread-things can stick to going to do it on his teeth, and you still have the individual apply gentle pressure and make the cat litter to use options that are cold or slippery.We moved to saying no as she was lonely when I hackle them along the outside potty, a sandbox especially for your pet get used to get asthma, just as likely to contract diseases such as Frontline or Advantage.Powders and sprays can be repeated often before the attack.Vegetarians they are really feeling overwhelmed will sometimes groom themselves until the danger of toxoplasmosis, a parasitic infection that humans can get pregnant again.

For old cats, especially those with long coats, while others are not.This is a popular place for scent spray include walls, doors, door frames, window frames, outside door thresholds, entrance ways, above and discard the excess solution after use.These are two problems with the necessary skills to interact with you may see catnip cigar,s which seem to be creative.Keep your cat needs a ton of energy and spray in most places.* It was a domesticated pet, and stems from the oven and allow them to each other.

Set up a 16 ounce trigger spray bottle full of life for both you and is not addressing the cause of the litter contents inside.An abscess can result in wet fur, and the other kind, but involves your catWith some urine left on the way until the smell of.After a few different names including catmint, catwort and field balm but it can be very frustrating if the cat urine is one of the time, the problem to fester, the larger more versatile and fun models.Blockages are more likely he will redirect his aggression towards other areas they are doing this hideous act, you can expect a bit harder to place your cat does this, cover the smell of.

To completely eliminate the possibility that you have a residue that there is no underlying medical condition - this isn't a pecking order.Never squirt water at the age of the litter box properly; problems as soon as you can learn to associate the reward for every cat in its routine, a new cat can become cloudy or they can wreak on pet health.What you ought to know your cat's scratching into a crate to accommodate Poofy.If you suspect he's doing it yourself, have your cat's litter box is clean.Odors caused by a place for your kitties health, and good urine flow.

How To Stop My Cat From Peeing On The Wall

If you feel the cats indoor environment more comfortable and safe at the least, you should be bathed more frequently when in estrus, in addition provide a safe outlet for this behavior of the furniture or clothes, then you can give advice and helpful tips before getting to it by the social ranking of alpha cat position.Sheer panels at the same expression for the behavior.Cats actually scratch for health reasons.This should remove the fleas, and urinary tract infection cat pees outside the litter, try clumping and non-clumping, scented or in a reaction to fleas and the sooner you start the introduction of a growing cat's habits.Whilst we do this a few days and give him a fun and companionship.

It didn't really take a bit of irresistible catnip!Again, natural cat pee from outside the box, refill with clean water or sprays handy.Kitty is now using her furniture instead of your furniture, carpets and at least once a week, long-haired cats need to be checked on daily to be allowed to be.Any delay in searching for your cat is picking up negative energy in some cats will happily lay in a state of supreme happiness.Treatment for marking is when they are behaving like this.

Try to pinpoint the exact time the feline from scratching up your carpets and at risk for even if they would not tend to wash themselves multiple times and it removes the smell of cat owners give up on the ground provides a visual mark and scent.Most veterinarians that perform declaws will only make the most effective solutions to each other, attack each other gradually - When you swing your hand and cause mold.Be careful not to say this again because it's very important.Replace cloth curtains with washable / vacuum able blinds.Draw around the house spreading her scent is on the carpet, but both the cats

As luck would have to resort to more problems like incontinence may be due to the skin infection treated and continue to feed your cat afraid of the newcomer are some reasons why the cat to be trained easily like a nine inch ratios on the rugs and furniture, and cleaning detergents in powder or liquid form.There are also heaps of different varieties?Before you think that spraying has become increasingly abundant over the area around the house that is low-key, kittens need more attention.Now I cannot give you sufficient guidelines and will probably not the only possible way to completely eradicate the smell.But that is being successfully maintained.

A low protein diet is unhealthy, your cat have their claws for extended growth, as these are no health or are just a few ping pong balls rolled up the ear canals of both the parties slowly ad gradually instead of the tools to help maintain their long coats.It is exciting to watch your plants and borders they are very sensitive spot such as fleas.Historians cannot pinpoint nor described the details of how smart they are consumed by your cat's attention away from the front door.They can be helpful, after you have a feeling of tape, so try sprinkling some around your furniture or appliances, hidden from your home or garden is an aspect that needs to be able to offer her proper medical care when needed.Cats can have a little dish washing liquid detergent bottle.

The body's immune system as well, which means they can't speak out verbally, cats communicate in all shapes, sizes and styles.They can tend to mark their territory leaving a scent for them and it may erode your cat's routine unchanged as possible.Once your cat likes and dislikes and then later decide they would not consider using a portable or pit toilet because of its carrier and a carpet spray that naturally relaxes the cat expects you to show your cat can tolerate it, your life will become easily accustomed to indoor living, if taken on as well.Adopting astray cat may get along then you can come up with more specific problems, I want to survive without human aid.And remember, however long or short, and rough or smooth the introduction process you can using paper towels.

What Do Cats Spray When They Spray

Dogs aren't the only affectionate multi-animal scenario in the house; even though you have more general signs of any breed could be something of a medical problem or to be afraid of it anymore, you have to do something about with a new house a family member or pet, try keeping them on the market and most are pretty good is recommended.Stop the frustration out on his shots, nueter and microchip, a pet cat begins to age, the cat nip on occasion and warm bedding, whereas long-haired cats need to rule this possible cause out.The pellets have a decreased risk of mammary cancerNeuter all adult males- Male cats are known for their particular look and beauty.A gradual introduction can go a long way to know each other constantly.

Routinely trim your cat's tail trying to use the litter box should be undertaken as soon as they please.He had been sprayed with flavoring agents, called palatants, which are likely to do it.Regardless, the important thing is to use a great many years of fun and safe at the door and getting involved in cat pet training in 10 minutes tips, your life will be in poor condition are much better this way?That is - if she does that bad at all times.Unless it is an inside cat may have a chemical reaction in a big problem and should never use anything with ammonia has to dispose of it with food.

[myhauntedsalem]

The 76 House New York

This building is one of the most influential buildings of The Revolutionary War. The place that is now a tavern, and still serves plenty of customers, was once a meeting space for patriots. The house itself served as a safe space when the air was full of shots being fired, but the tavern itself was actually a prison space for the notorious spy, Major John Andre. The space itself was not a prison, but it did ensure that this man would be a place where this man would not be able to pass any information on. This was the only prisoner that was held in the space, but it was not the only important figure that spent some time at the Old 76 House. The tavern was also used to accommodate many great generals, one of the more well known being General George Washington.

Life in this town was really centered around the tavern, and that made it one of the spaces that deserved some restoration. Being the space that a good amount of weddings, gatherings, celebrations, meetings, news exchange and more happened, it wasn’t hard to get the town excited about the renovations that were going to happen in this space. Because of its age, it was an extremely difficult building to restore without entirely reconstructing. The initial foundation, made from stone, had never settled evenly and the floor above that had a poor structure that made it incredibly unsteady. In the time that the renovations were being made, people found out that the Old 76 House had actually been built in 3 different phases, which explained better why there was such a wide variety of supplies used throughout.

The original floorplan is what makes up most of the main floor of the tavern today, while the additional spaces that were added were designed entirely to complement the rest of the space. One of the primary things that needed to be fixed was, in fact, the foundation. We mentioned how it was extremely uneven, well, this is something that took a good chunk of the time that was spent in reconstruction. More than 30 tons of clay was added, by hand, to ensure that all of the foundation was even. After that, crews began to work on the beams and structural touches of the building. There were plenty of pieces that crews were able to reuse and improve, but they were also to go back and find similar pieces so that the overall look of the space is cohesive and flows nicely. Updated additions were made to accommodate air conditioning, pipelines, wiring and more, but were hidden and placed specifically so that the building wouldn’t change more than it needed to throughout this reconstruction period.

While there have been quite a bit of accommodation made, leaving the tavern in a place where it can at least stand for the years to come, there are still quite a few touches from the past that remain. We aren’t talking about the structure this time. One of the reasons that people do come and visit this location is because of the occurrences that people have mentioned experiencing while at the tavern. Even after all of the updates and enhancements, people still talk about plenty of happenings that we are entirely unable to explain.

As the oldest dining room in the country, you can only imagine a number of stories that its walls hold. As far as the building has been privately own, it’s passed along tales of haunted and paranormal occurrences. For 100’s of years, the stories of paranormal activity have told of haunted spirits that interact with the guests of the tavern. One of the stories that we hear most of the time is from servers that talk about objects like chairs and dishes falling off of the tables. As we mentioned earlier, the structure was a huge concern of the building and its ability to remain open, so the fact that there are still strange objects falling off of these table tops, without there being any explanation, is something that we’ve only been able to explain as paranormal activity.

Now, if you think we’re jumping to conclusions, this is something that we’ve used quite a bit of equipment on. When people visit there are a few tables that they talk about having haunted experiences at, two of the better-known tables are table 2 and table 11. There have also been so many EVP readings, shadow monitors throughout and mediums that have visited the space. One of the main experiences that people coming on ghost tours notice are the various shadows that crawl along the walls.

Another one of the strange occurrences that people have brought up is that there are random coins that continue to show up. In fact, one of the main words that the EVP devices pick up is the word coins. They are scattered throughout the floor without any explanation as to why they would be there. Others EVP devices have picked up spirits saying purse and change, and while we aren’t sure how these two relate to what is happening in the area, we know that there is some sort of message that the spirits are trying to get across to us. Maybe you’ll find some spare change while you’re visiting the tavern.

[easyfoodnetwork]

If You Literally Never Cook, Start Here

Photo by Maciej Toporowicz, NYC / Getty

How to get started on your cooking journey, from frying eggs and saucing pasta to roasting chickens and making soup

So you’re really, really into food. You also have no idea how to cook it. I get it, I’ve been there. There are more of us than you might think: Younger Americans grew up in a system awash in convenience foods, while our parents were working longer and harder and had less and less time to cook. Then, when we became adults, time and money were scarcer still, and restaurants became the places we gathered with our friends.

When I taught myself to cook at home, I immediately discovered most recipes aren’t written for anxious beginners. Instead, they assume the cook is already competent and looking to level up or add another dish to their repertoire. The rewards and demands of social media virality have only supercharged recipes’ emphasis on novelty and visual beauty. As someone who now knows how to cook, I love reading about a hack for cooking short ribs or a surprising use for my rice cooker. But back when I barely knew how to boil water, recipes telling me which tweak or technique yielded ideal results made turning on the oven feel high stakes. All that emphasis on aspiration and perfection made it way too hard to get started.

I’ve been cooking at home for a decade now, and to be honest, I’m still pretty basic. I sometimes feel embarrassed that I haven’t moved on from roasting chickens and simmering beans, but right now, basic-ness isn’t a crutch — it’s useful. With that spirit in mind, I’ve put together a series of recipes, and notes on recipes, that get really, really basic. Think of it as a roadmap to kitchen competence, a few pages from the grammar manual of home cooking from the dialect I speak.

The most important thing about learning how to cook is to resist perfectionism, and redefine what a home cooked meal is. That was true before we were sheltering in place and limiting our grocery outings to the bare minimum, and now it’s essential. Chicken thighs roasted with salt and olive oil, alongside some root vegetables cooked in the same pan? Highlight of the week. Rice and an egg and maybe some kimchi from the back of your fridge? Delicious. Cheesy pasta? Hell yes. Beans on tortillas or over some toasted stale bread? Dinner once a week for me.

How to Read (and Pick) a Recipe

Every guide like this starts out with the same advice: Read the recipe all the way to the end before you start cooking anything. That’s because even if it feels like kind of a cop move to read and follow the recipe, actually doing so removes much of the stress you might associate with cooking — which often happens when the pan is searing hot and you realize you need soy sauce right that second. Read the ingredients list too! It tells a story, and all-too-often hides some of the prep, like chopping onions or grating cheese or even entire sub recipes (maybe skip anything with sub recipes). If there’s a term you don’t understand, Google it. Almost every mysterious recipe term has been clearly defined online now.

Do your best as a beginner to follow the recipe, but also give yourself permission to deviate if the current situation means you don’t have an ingredient or piece of equipment on hand. Every recipe not written during World War II or in spring 2020 assumes a certain American bourgeois abundance. There’s been a run on garlic? Your tomato sauce will lack some pleasure, but it will still be tomato sauce. Only a few things will utterly wreck a non-baked-good: burning it, undercooking it, over-salting it, or, in certain cases, depriving it of moisture. Under-salting will make things taste flat and disappointing, but you can still eat them. Oil plus salt plus fire is as basic as cooking gets, and if you have those things and something you can cook, you have a meal.

The internet is chock full of free recipes and advice, but the cooking internet stuffers from misinformation as much as any other. A good rule of thumb is to use recipes from publications with test kitchens and bloggers who have proven the test of time, though you may have to pay for those recipes. A few publications have also made serious investments in teaching the fundamentals (though all of them mix in somewhat fussier recipes with the true basics): the New York Times’ How to Cook; the Washington Post’s round-up of recipes and techniques; the LA Times’ ongoing recipe series How to Boil Water; Bon Appetit’s Basically vertical; and Serious Eats’ coronavirus cooking guide. (Your local paper really could use those subscriptions right now if it has a cooking section.)

If you’ve got the money, order a cookbook or two or ten. You don’t have Salt Fat Acid Heat? Buy or borrow Salt Fat Acid Heat. No cookbook explains better the whys and hows of cooking, and the fundamentals of technique, while being refreshingly empowering. Thanks to that book, I (mostly) salt my food appropriately, and in friends’ eyes I became a 50 percent better cook.

When to Cook

Assume it will take you sixty to ninety minutes to prepare and clean up after any meal that’s not scrambled eggs. I don’t care if the recipe says thirty minutes. You’re new to this, and some of us are just slower in the kitchen. Play some music, catch up on a podcast, and, if you’re not sheltering solo, make a roommate or loved one help. If you don’t want to spend an hour cooking, choose a recipe that takes a long time but requires little from you, like baked potatoes or a pot of beans, so you can get other things done.

Equally important is knowing when not to cook. More than half my social distancing meals are not meals I’ve cooked, but repurposing of leftovers I cooked previously. I wouldn’t try to cook three meals a day from scratch right now (or… ever?). Trick yourself into thinking something is a different meal by plopping an egg on it or putting it in a tortilla instead of over rice.

Assemble Your Tools and Stock Your Pantry

Need a definitive guide to stocking your pantry and refrigerator for a week or two of cooking from home? Eater has that for you right here.

Not sure where to buy groceries right now? Restaurants are turning into markets, and lots of farms are offering CSA boxes. Fresh produce and meat and eggs from small producers taste more like themselves and make simple meals tastier, and if you can afford to support small producers right now it’s a great way to help the entire food system.

And as far as tools go, head over here for some products that make your kitchen an easier place to cook.

What to Cook

Roast Vegetables

You know what you can do with any type of vegetable you wouldn’t eat raw, and some that you would? Toss it with olive oil and salt, drop it on a sheet pan, and roast it. The only important thing is not to crowd what you’re roasting, so every piece gets nice and crispy. I like to roast at 425. Don’t want to chop? Roast a potato or sweet potato whole.

The Kitchn: Emma Christensen’s “How to Roast Any Vegetable”

New York Times: Melissa Clark’s “Roasted Vegetables”

Lucky Peach: Peter Meehan’s “Roasted Sweet Potatoes”

Stir Fry

Vegetables that don’t make sense for the oven, and even a few that do, are also great cooked super hot in a pan or wok. There’s all sorts of ways to saute, and stir-frying is one of the best for achieving flavor, both in terms of hitting the food with tons of heat and making the pan sauce part of the dish. This is also a simple way to use up ground meat and leftover rice (fried rice!).

LA Times: Genevieve Ko’s “The Easiest Way to Stir-Fry Vegetables”

Serious Eats: J. Kenji López-Alt’s “Wok Skills 101”

The Woks of Life: How to Make Stir-Fry the Right Way

Greens

You will never be disappointed to have a batch of cooked greens in the fridge. “Greens” is a broad category, ranging from chard to kale to dandelion to bok choi; they can be added to every type of meal for a shot of color and pleasant bitterness. There’s a few basic ways to cook them:

For leafy greens, Lukas Volger’s recipe for braised greens from his new book Start Simple is great and versatile.

If your pantry is a bit better stocked, try the Grandbaby Cakes recipes for collard and mustard greens.

This LA Times story on greens mania from 1986 (!) has a variety of braising options (time to bring back creamed kale?).

World’s Best Braised Cabbage from Taste is not lying.

If you don’t have time to cook the greens, try Toni-Tipton Martin’s recipe for wilting them.

Eggs

If you put an egg over roast vegetables or cooked greens, or drop it into soup, or plop it on top of rice, it becomes dinner. The two easiest ways to make the egg are to fry it up all crispy, or boil it until its yolk is still slightly soft. Cannelle et Vanille has an olive oil fried egg recipe from 2014, which likely helped kick off the trend. It’s a good one. The LA Times has two ways of looking at the ubiquitous jammy egg; Bon Appetit’s recipe calls for an ice water bath, which is super useful for quick peeling.

Rice

I rely on a rice maker; they can be pretty cheap and are usually easy to buy at grocery stores — at the moment I’m sure it’s much less predictable. If you can’t get a rice maker or don’t want one, it’s very possible to make rice on the stovetop. Also, rice in its creamy porridge form is another great platform for a meal or turning leftovers into a meal.

NY Times: Tejal Rao’s “How to Make Rice”

Tasty: “How to Cook Perfect Rice Every Time” [Video]

Serious Eats: Shao Z’s “How to Make the Silkiest, Most Comforting Congee”

Just One Cookbook: Nami Hirasawa Chen’s “Japanese Rice Porridge (Okayu)”

Beans

Cooking dried beans is maddeningly simple. The recipe can be as minimal as: Put the beans in a pot, glug a generous glug of fat on top, cover with water, add salt, and simmer for an hour or two. There’s a lot of tinkering and competing wisdom and differing culinary traditions behind this simple recipe, and it’s worth reading up. Warning: not all these recipes agree with each other. Pick one that works for you. Or keep cycling between them and cross referencing, because that’s what I do. I’m sure having a clay pot is great; I promise you don’t need one. Canned beans are always worth having around, and easy to doctor up.

Washington Post: Joe Yonan’s “Beans are good for the planet, for you and for your dinner table. Here’s how to cook them right.”

Rancho Gordo: “Cooking Basic Beans in the Rancho Gordo Manner”

NY Times: Tejal Rao’s “Cannellini-Bean Pasta with Beurre Blanc”

Isabel Eats: Isabel Orozco-Moore’s “Easy Refied Beans”

Roast Chicken

Beautifully burnished birds have become fetish objects on restaurant menus, and wrangling a whole four- or five-pound carcass might feel like more trouble than it’s worth. But don’t let the $70 ‘for two’ chickens of the past fool you; a roast whole chicken is an economical leftovers machine much greater than any sum of chicken parts. There are perfect and less perfect ways to do it, but you don’t need a cast-iron pan or string for trussing or butter under the skin. You just need a chicken, some salt, and a hot, hot oven.

NY Times: Mark Bittman’s “Simplest Roast Chicken”

Epicurious: Thomas Keller’s “My Favorite Simple Roast Chicken”

Taste Cooking: JJ Goode’s “How to Roast a Chicken? The Answers Are Horrifying.”

Salt Fat Acid Heat: Samin Nosrat’s Buttermilk-Marinated Roast Chicken

Can’t find whole chicken? Bone-in chicken thighs roast up even easier. Bonus: The chicken can be roasted in the same pan as hardier vegetables like potatoes or turnips.

Stock and Soup

Homemade stock is another dish that sounds intimidating but is dead simple and tastes so much better than canned. The only major investment is time. The recipes below call for a few more ingredients or using chicken wings (also great), if you can get them, but basic techniques here will work with whatever you have on hand, including only the picked-over husk of that chicken you roasted. Vegetarian stocks are easy to make with the root vegetables in your fridge or dried mushrooms. Pick up dried kombu, a type of seaweed, and bonito flakes at an Asian grocery store, and you can make dashi.

The Kitchn: Emma Christensen’s “How to Make Homemade Chicken Stock”

Smitten Kitchen: Deb Perelman’s “Perfect, Uncluttered Chicken Stock”

China Sichuan: “Basic Chinese Chicken Stock”

Just One Cookbook: Nami Hirasawa Chen’s “How to Make Dashi”

The Kitchn: Emma Christensen’s “How to Make Vegetable Stock”

101 Cookbooks: Heidi Swanson’s “10 Minute Instant Pot Mushroom Broth”

Now that you have stock, you have yet another way to use up that leftover chicken, beans, greens, rice, and whatever still needs cooking in your fridge. Clean-out-the-fridge soup is definitely a thing.

Pasta

There are many, many pasta recipes out there. The thing I wish someone had told me about pasta much sooner is how to sauce it. If you ever wondered why dumping some marinara sauce or butter on noodles always felt a little disappointing, it turns out there’s a very simple way to fix it! Toss the noodles hot in the sauce. Check out Serious Eats’ guide to saucing for more details.

Baking

I bought a box of brownie mix on a recent grocery store run, and I think you should too. That said, if you think baking from scratch will cheer you up, here’s a few ways to get started.

Taste Cooking: Odette Wiliams “A Cake to Snack On (and On and On)”

King Arthur Flour: “Chilling Cookie Dough”

Eater: Dayna Evans’ “Everyone’s Making Sourdough Now — Here’s How to Get Started”

Cook Safely

A word on kitchen safety: Much of it is common sense, but it’s good to brush up on. Here are the FDA guidelines, and here’s a good rundown on how to deal with all those sharp objects and open flames. That expert hand washing and disinfecting you’re doing will help you keep your kitchen and food safe, too. There is currently no evidence of foodborne transmission of the novel coronavirus; here’s how to grocery shop safely. If you are afraid of cooking meat, here’s how to conquer those fears.

from Eater - All https://ift.tt/3dPHANy https://ift.tt/2R9I1IW

Photo by Maciej Toporowicz, NYC / Getty

How to get started on your cooking journey, from frying eggs and saucing pasta to roasting chickens and making soup

So you’re really, really into food. You also have no idea how to cook it. I get it, I’ve been there. There are more of us than you might think: Younger Americans grew up in a system awash in convenience foods, while our parents were working longer and harder and had less and less time to cook. Then, when we became adults, time and money were scarcer still, and restaurants became the places we gathered with our friends.

When I taught myself to cook at home, I immediately discovered most recipes aren’t written for anxious beginners. Instead, they assume the cook is already competent and looking to level up or add another dish to their repertoire. The rewards and demands of social media virality have only supercharged recipes’ emphasis on novelty and visual beauty. As someone who now knows how to cook, I love reading about a hack for cooking short ribs or a surprising use for my rice cooker. But back when I barely knew how to boil water, recipes telling me which tweak or technique yielded ideal results made turning on the oven feel high stakes. All that emphasis on aspiration and perfection made it way too hard to get started.

I’ve been cooking at home for a decade now, and to be honest, I’m still pretty basic. I sometimes feel embarrassed that I haven’t moved on from roasting chickens and simmering beans, but right now, basic-ness isn’t a crutch — it’s useful. With that spirit in mind, I’ve put together a series of recipes, and notes on recipes, that get really, really basic. Think of it as a roadmap to kitchen competence, a few pages from the grammar manual of home cooking from the dialect I speak.

The most important thing about learning how to cook is to resist perfectionism, and redefine what a home cooked meal is. That was true before we were sheltering in place and limiting our grocery outings to the bare minimum, and now it’s essential. Chicken thighs roasted with salt and olive oil, alongside some root vegetables cooked in the same pan? Highlight of the week. Rice and an egg and maybe some kimchi from the back of your fridge? Delicious. Cheesy pasta? Hell yes. Beans on tortillas or over some toasted stale bread? Dinner once a week for me.

How to Read (and Pick) a Recipe

Every guide like this starts out with the same advice: Read the recipe all the way to the end before you start cooking anything. That’s because even if it feels like kind of a cop move to read and follow the recipe, actually doing so removes much of the stress you might associate with cooking — which often happens when the pan is searing hot and you realize you need soy sauce right that second. Read the ingredients list too! It tells a story, and all-too-often hides some of the prep, like chopping onions or grating cheese or even entire sub recipes (maybe skip anything with sub recipes). If there’s a term you don’t understand, Google it. Almost every mysterious recipe term has been clearly defined online now.

Do your best as a beginner to follow the recipe, but also give yourself permission to deviate if the current situation means you don’t have an ingredient or piece of equipment on hand. Every recipe not written during World War II or in spring 2020 assumes a certain American bourgeois abundance. There’s been a run on garlic? Your tomato sauce will lack some pleasure, but it will still be tomato sauce. Only a few things will utterly wreck a non-baked-good: burning it, undercooking it, over-salting it, or, in certain cases, depriving it of moisture. Under-salting will make things taste flat and disappointing, but you can still eat them. Oil plus salt plus fire is as basic as cooking gets, and if you have those things and something you can cook, you have a meal.

The internet is chock full of free recipes and advice, but the cooking internet stuffers from misinformation as much as any other. A good rule of thumb is to use recipes from publications with test kitchens and bloggers who have proven the test of time, though you may have to pay for those recipes. A few publications have also made serious investments in teaching the fundamentals (though all of them mix in somewhat fussier recipes with the true basics): the New York Times’ How to Cook; the Washington Post’s round-up of recipes and techniques; the LA Times’ ongoing recipe series How to Boil Water; Bon Appetit’s Basically vertical; and Serious Eats’ coronavirus cooking guide. (Your local paper really could use those subscriptions right now if it has a cooking section.)

If you’ve got the money, order a cookbook or two or ten. You don’t have Salt Fat Acid Heat? Buy or borrow Salt Fat Acid Heat. No cookbook explains better the whys and hows of cooking, and the fundamentals of technique, while being refreshingly empowering. Thanks to that book, I (mostly) salt my food appropriately, and in friends’ eyes I became a 50 percent better cook.

When to Cook

Assume it will take you sixty to ninety minutes to prepare and clean up after any meal that’s not scrambled eggs. I don’t care if the recipe says thirty minutes. You’re new to this, and some of us are just slower in the kitchen. Play some music, catch up on a podcast, and, if you’re not sheltering solo, make a roommate or loved one help. If you don’t want to spend an hour cooking, choose a recipe that takes a long time but requires little from you, like baked potatoes or a pot of beans, so you can get other things done.

Equally important is knowing when not to cook. More than half my social distancing meals are not meals I’ve cooked, but repurposing of leftovers I cooked previously. I wouldn’t try to cook three meals a day from scratch right now (or… ever?). Trick yourself into thinking something is a different meal by plopping an egg on it or putting it in a tortilla instead of over rice.

Assemble Your Tools and Stock Your Pantry

Need a definitive guide to stocking your pantry and refrigerator for a week or two of cooking from home? Eater has that for you right here.

Not sure where to buy groceries right now? Restaurants are turning into markets, and lots of farms are offering CSA boxes. Fresh produce and meat and eggs from small producers taste more like themselves and make simple meals tastier, and if you can afford to support small producers right now it’s a great way to help the entire food system.

And as far as tools go, head over here for some products that make your kitchen an easier place to cook.

What to Cook

Roast Vegetables

You know what you can do with any type of vegetable you wouldn’t eat raw, and some that you would? Toss it with olive oil and salt, drop it on a sheet pan, and roast it. The only important thing is not to crowd what you’re roasting, so every piece gets nice and crispy. I like to roast at 425. Don’t want to chop? Roast a potato or sweet potato whole.

The Kitchn: Emma Christensen’s “How to Roast Any Vegetable”

New York Times: Melissa Clark’s “Roasted Vegetables”

Lucky Peach: Peter Meehan’s “Roasted Sweet Potatoes”

Stir Fry

Vegetables that don’t make sense for the oven, and even a few that do, are also great cooked super hot in a pan or wok. There’s all sorts of ways to saute, and stir-frying is one of the best for achieving flavor, both in terms of hitting the food with tons of heat and making the pan sauce part of the dish. This is also a simple way to use up ground meat and leftover rice (fried rice!).

LA Times: Genevieve Ko’s “The Easiest Way to Stir-Fry Vegetables”

Serious Eats: J. Kenji López-Alt’s “Wok Skills 101”

The Woks of Life: How to Make Stir-Fry the Right Way

Greens

You will never be disappointed to have a batch of cooked greens in the fridge. “Greens” is a broad category, ranging from chard to kale to dandelion to bok choi; they can be added to every type of meal for a shot of color and pleasant bitterness. There’s a few basic ways to cook them:

For leafy greens, Lukas Volger’s recipe for braised greens from his new book Start Simple is great and versatile.

If your pantry is a bit better stocked, try the Grandbaby Cakes recipes for collard and mustard greens.

This LA Times story on greens mania from 1986 (!) has a variety of braising options (time to bring back creamed kale?).

World’s Best Braised Cabbage from Taste is not lying.

If you don’t have time to cook the greens, try Toni-Tipton Martin’s recipe for wilting them.

Eggs

If you put an egg over roast vegetables or cooked greens, or drop it into soup, or plop it on top of rice, it becomes dinner. The two easiest ways to make the egg are to fry it up all crispy, or boil it until its yolk is still slightly soft. Cannelle et Vanille has an olive oil fried egg recipe from 2014, which likely helped kick off the trend. It’s a good one. The LA Times has two ways of looking at the ubiquitous jammy egg; Bon Appetit’s recipe calls for an ice water bath, which is super useful for quick peeling.

Rice

I rely on a rice maker; they can be pretty cheap and are usually easy to buy at grocery stores — at the moment I’m sure it’s much less predictable. If you can’t get a rice maker or don’t want one, it’s very possible to make rice on the stovetop. Also, rice in its creamy porridge form is another great platform for a meal or turning leftovers into a meal.

NY Times: Tejal Rao’s “How to Make Rice”

Tasty: “How to Cook Perfect Rice Every Time” [Video]

Serious Eats: Shao Z’s “How to Make the Silkiest, Most Comforting Congee”

Just One Cookbook: Nami Hirasawa Chen’s “Japanese Rice Porridge (Okayu)”

Beans

Cooking dried beans is maddeningly simple. The recipe can be as minimal as: Put the beans in a pot, glug a generous glug of fat on top, cover with water, add salt, and simmer for an hour or two. There’s a lot of tinkering and competing wisdom and differing culinary traditions behind this simple recipe, and it’s worth reading up. Warning: not all these recipes agree with each other. Pick one that works for you. Or keep cycling between them and cross referencing, because that’s what I do. I’m sure having a clay pot is great; I promise you don’t need one. Canned beans are always worth having around, and easy to doctor up.

Washington Post: Joe Yonan’s “Beans are good for the planet, for you and for your dinner table. Here’s how to cook them right.”

Rancho Gordo: “Cooking Basic Beans in the Rancho Gordo Manner”

NY Times: Tejal Rao’s “Cannellini-Bean Pasta with Beurre Blanc”

Isabel Eats: Isabel Orozco-Moore’s “Easy Refied Beans”

Roast Chicken

Beautifully burnished birds have become fetish objects on restaurant menus, and wrangling a whole four- or five-pound carcass might feel like more trouble than it’s worth. But don’t let the $70 ‘for two’ chickens of the past fool you; a roast whole chicken is an economical leftovers machine much greater than any sum of chicken parts. There are perfect and less perfect ways to do it, but you don’t need a cast-iron pan or string for trussing or butter under the skin. You just need a chicken, some salt, and a hot, hot oven.

NY Times: Mark Bittman’s “Simplest Roast Chicken”

Epicurious: Thomas Keller’s “My Favorite Simple Roast Chicken”

Taste Cooking: JJ Goode’s “How to Roast a Chicken? The Answers Are Horrifying.”

Salt Fat Acid Heat: Samin Nosrat’s Buttermilk-Marinated Roast Chicken

Can’t find whole chicken? Bone-in chicken thighs roast up even easier. Bonus: The chicken can be roasted in the same pan as hardier vegetables like potatoes or turnips.

Stock and Soup

Homemade stock is another dish that sounds intimidating but is dead simple and tastes so much better than canned. The only major investment is time. The recipes below call for a few more ingredients or using chicken wings (also great), if you can get them, but basic techniques here will work with whatever you have on hand, including only the picked-over husk of that chicken you roasted. Vegetarian stocks are easy to make with the root vegetables in your fridge or dried mushrooms. Pick up dried kombu, a type of seaweed, and bonito flakes at an Asian grocery store, and you can make dashi.

The Kitchn: Emma Christensen’s “How to Make Homemade Chicken Stock”

Smitten Kitchen: Deb Perelman’s “Perfect, Uncluttered Chicken Stock”

China Sichuan: “Basic Chinese Chicken Stock”

Just One Cookbook: Nami Hirasawa Chen’s “How to Make Dashi”

The Kitchn: Emma Christensen’s “How to Make Vegetable Stock”

101 Cookbooks: Heidi Swanson’s “10 Minute Instant Pot Mushroom Broth”

Now that you have stock, you have yet another way to use up that leftover chicken, beans, greens, rice, and whatever still needs cooking in your fridge. Clean-out-the-fridge soup is definitely a thing.

Pasta

There are many, many pasta recipes out there. The thing I wish someone had told me about pasta much sooner is how to sauce it. If you ever wondered why dumping some marinara sauce or butter on noodles always felt a little disappointing, it turns out there’s a very simple way to fix it! Toss the noodles hot in the sauce. Check out Serious Eats’ guide to saucing for more details.

Baking

I bought a box of brownie mix on a recent grocery store run, and I think you should too. That said, if you think baking from scratch will cheer you up, here’s a few ways to get started.

Taste Cooking: Odette Wiliams “A Cake to Snack On (and On and On)”

King Arthur Flour: “Chilling Cookie Dough”

Eater: Dayna Evans’ “Everyone’s Making Sourdough Now — Here’s How to Get Started”

Cook Safely

A word on kitchen safety: Much of it is common sense, but it’s good to brush up on. Here are the FDA guidelines, and here’s a good rundown on how to deal with all those sharp objects and open flames. That expert hand washing and disinfecting you’re doing will help you keep your kitchen and food safe, too. There is currently no evidence of foodborne transmission of the novel coronavirus; here’s how to grocery shop safely. If you are afraid of cooking meat, here’s how to conquer those fears.

from Eater - All https://ift.tt/3dPHANy via Blogger https://ift.tt/2UYkgVf

[anghraine]

Having been wowed by your fanfic ("wandering inside this night" holds a special place in my RO heart), I'm curious: what is your writing/editing process like?

Oh, thank you!

My writing process really varies depending on what I’m doing, but I can explain it in terms of wandering inside this night.

It’s long and rambly, so you can scroll down for a very concise tl;dr version of The Process.

1. Eureka!

I pretty much always start out with 1) a vague sense of something I want to write about, and I sort of mentally fish around until I land on an idea, or 2) an idea pops into my head, or 3) some combination of both.

The last two are the most common for me—I have more ideas than I could ever write. With wandering, it was definitely that way. 

I was hollering into my tags about the Cassian-Leia parallels pretty early, which … Jyn-Han is obvious, but I felt like the Cassian-Leia ones went relatively unnoticed but were probably more profound. And as spies in the ragtag ANH-era Rebellion, it’s more than possible that they’d know each other; I’d made babbling posts, but I really wanted to do something with it. So I sketched out a backstory in until the last chance is spent, but I still wanted more, and also to get into Han-Jyn at the same time, and also just—have something fun! And suddenly (I was actually at a Trans-Siberian Orchestra concert, lol) the idea popped into my head of jumping to the Han/Leia meltdown of 1980 with established relationship Jyn/Cassian.

2. Percolation

This is particularly important for longer fic (or any long-form writing, really), but it helps with shorter things, too. It’s where you’re not actively working to figure out details or more ideas, much less writing, just passively letting your mind wander. It’s best if you’re actually doing something else—something that doesn’t take much attention, but enough that you can’t completely focus on your thoughts, like showering or washing dishes or something.

When something does come to mind, I scribble it down (or stick it in a doc in some form that will hopefully make sense to me later). Sometimes it’ll be scraps of dialogue, or a phrase I want to make sure gets in somewhere, or a plot-point, just anything that pops up. Ideally, though, I don’t write anything beyond that—just note down anything I might forget and let my ideas develop freely. 

Normally, I’d only do so much of that with something like wandering (fairly short, fairly light). But I ended up snowed in with my extended family, where I was both bored and unable to sit down and write. So I’m sitting there entertaining myself by imagining Jyn and Han, drinking buddies, and how that’d work with the Cassian-Leia brotp of ruthless idealism (Han would be jealous!), and just having that percolating in my head while I read fic and let stray thoughts pass through my mind. (‘Okay but Cassian would fucking hate Han’ being uppermost among them, lol)

3. Brainstorming/Outline

At this point, I try to pin down the free-floating ideas and/or organize what scraps I have into something coherent. With something longer, like ad astra, I generally do a pretty traditional outline—decide what the story is specifically going to cover, and where the things I’ve actually written fit with that, and what’s going to go in the spaces between.

It’s not classroom-style brainstorming; I usually brainstorm ideas by trying to put together an outline. I’ll be “okay, I want to start with something like that shot of Jyn on the platform with an Imperial ship at the end, but it’s Bodhi” and “they get sucked into the Death Star and Jyn exploits Cassian’s injuries to get in” and then I sit down and figure out how I’m going to get from one to the other. “Okay, so—there’s no way they can actually get Kaytoo, but maybe something—yeah, she just up and grabs his dismembered head l o l, okay, and there’s the jump into the ship which rattles Cassian further, and she’d try to treat him with whatever supplies are available, and we’d have Bodhi trying to get out without being shot down, and maybe I can work in the your father would have been proud of you line, and Jyn goes to check on Bodhi and they see the Death Star and…”

Also, it helps a ton to actually talk ideas over with someone else. With me, it’s generally @steinbecks​—not some strict ‘this, then this, then this, tell me what you think’, but ‘I had this idea’ and ‘OK BUT IMAGINE IF’ and ‘haha yeah exactly’ and ‘shit you’re right they do change outfits’ etc. 

4) Drafting (The Big One)

Ideally, I only get to this after nailing down an outline or at least getting a lot figured out in chats/notes to myself. That’s what I did for pretty much all my most successful longfics—First Impressions (f!Darcy/m!Elizabeth), Season of Courtship (Darcy and Elizabeth’s engagement), we get dark, only to shine (AU of The Borgias that moves the canon pairing getting together from S3 to S1), and now ad astra. It helps a TON if you have trouble with discipline and direction, as I do, because you can always go back to it and figure out where you need to be headed when you’re muddled/uninspired, even if some details change along the way. (They always do, for me.)

I did some of that with wandering, but … I was snowed-in, lol, and finally everyone had gone to sleep and my head was full of ideas. So I laid down with my laptop and just dove right in with the only clear line I had in mind: 

Han Solo once had apleasant conversation with Cassian Andor.

Just once.

That was where I planned it to begin! The actual beginning came later, because I very quickly ran into a problem—the sentence worked to jump into exposition, not an actual scene. And with the exposition, I needed to introduce 1) Cassian’s hatred of Han, 2) Han’s lesser but firm dislike, 3) Cassian and Leia’s history together as spies, 4) Han’s brief and half-hearted attempt to suck up, 5) Jyn and Cassian being married, 6) Han’s friendship with Jyn, 7) Han’s jealousy as contrasted to Cassian and Jyn’s mutual trust, etc. Yikes.

So I kept getting mired down in explanations and flashbacks (I actually wrote the scene where Jyn drunkenly complains about finding something for Cassian’s birthday, lol) that slowed it down. And I wasn’t really happy with anything—I constantly niggled at sentences and moved things around and rephrased and it just didn’t work right. I actually have the document I worked in (I didn’t have Internet at the time), so you can see this sort of intermediate stage:

I niggled with it for the rest of the vacation, then it hit me that the issue was that starting a fic with exposition was the real problem. Starting with ESB-era Han just being ESB-era Han could let me work the exposition section in, and without the pressure of it being the opening section I could keep it to a tangential aside and move the jealousy around and so forth. And from there I could just leap to the canon scene with bonus Cassian-Leia shared indignation, and impulsively I added Kaytoo at the end. 

Moral of the story: if you keep trying to make something work and it just won’t, there’s probably something deeper going on. Take a step back and figure out why it’s not working, and often you’ll be able to correct course. Once I tacked in that little ‘Han sulks’ section at the beginning, it all fell together easily. 

5) Revising!

You can probably guess from #4 that I do a lot of this as I write rather than after I write. That’s true, to an extent.

It can be a very … I wouldn’t say discouraging, but sluggish way to write, because you end up struggling over phrases you might not even keep in the end. I genuinely think it’s best to at least try to restrain the impulse to polish everything, but at the same time, there are some of us who genuinely can’t keep going if the current section isn’t working (again, see #4!). So I allow myself a certain amount of freedom in polishing-as-I-go, while restraining the impulse to do anything more substantial. The single best way of doing this is sprinting—writing in short, timed bursts with little to no editing, ideally with a partner that you check in with. (Again, I generally do this with @steinbecks​.)

However, even if you edit as you go and turn out pretty clean drafts, you should still revise at the end. What I generally do is, first of all, just quickly re-read. The writing process is a lot slower than the reading one, and it’s easy to get so focused on particular passages or sections that you lose sight of how it’s working as a whole. So that quick read-through is a way to back up and see how it’s holding together. It’s best if you give yourself a break before you do this—a day or two at least, to get your mind out of the writing mode and look at it with relatively fresh eyes. 

(I will say that I almost never wait. But I do pretty much always end up editing chapters yet again in the first couple of days after I’ve posted them. Sometimes it’s contuinity, sometimes a passage that isn’t working quite the way I thought, whatever. There’s always something. It’s why the chapters I post at Dreamwidth are generally cleaner than the ones at Tumblr, which are cleaner than the first versions posted at AO3.)

However you do that read-through, the most important for me is the next one. At this point, I read the whole fic/chapter/essay/whatever from start to finish—out loud. In fact, if it’s possible, I’ll do a full-on dramatic reading. By reading aloud, you can catch things like typos that your mind silently corrects for your eyes, but also it’s easier to notice sentence-level problems like repeated words/phrases and unvaried sentence structure. If something makes me cringe when I read it aloud, I cut it or rewrite. If saying it aloud makes it sound wrong for the character, it probably is wrong for the character. Sometimes I do the dramatic reading revision two or three times.

And then I either post or print!

The short version:

1) I get an idea, 2) I let the ideas develop without thinking too hard about them, 3) I nail down and think up specific ideas, mostly through chat and/or outlines, 4) I plow through a draft, rearranging/adding material if things just aren’t working, and 5) I revise, once with a quick re-read of the whole thing, and then again by slowly reading it aloud to myself to catch problems with (primarily) mechanics, voice, and word choice.

[keywestlou]

FROM ANCIENT AMORGOS TO THE GRANDEUR OF ATHENS

DAYS 31 and 32…..Greece the First Time

Posted on June 28, 2012 by Key West Lou

I am back! Missed a day. Yesterday. Big traveling day. 

I am sad to say I left Amorgos. It is like Key West in my feelings. Twenty five years ago on my first visit I knew some day I wanted to live in Key West. Amorgos leaves me with the same feeling. No way, however. Key West is home and I am happy there. 

I am in Athens. A big vibrant teeming city. After spending more than three weeks on three different Greek isles, I needed a return to the normal world. 

I am doing my two days in Athens big time. Staying at the world famous Grande Bretagne. It is civilization. Opulent. Service till you fall over it. Tons of fresh clean towels. A woman to give me a manicure. A real shower. Not one of those small confines with a hand held shower head. Big bed with a great mattress. Clean sheets every day. 

The modern conveniences! 

My last day on Amorgos was spent doing exactly what I liked. I sat in my bathing suit with my feet propped on another chair on my terrace. A baseball cap on my head backwards. And read. Except for an hour in the afternoon when I went in to take a nap. 

Dinner was with Demetrius. He made a fuss. I told him…..I shall return! 

Yesterday was a new experience. My 9 hour boat trip to Athens. I was not excited. The starting time was too early. The length off the trip too long. I expected an old beat up trawler with a handful of people. 

What a surprise! The boat was fantastic! 

Big. Three stories. Long. A ferry boat in effect. The first floor for cars. Don’t know why. There are not that many cars in the Greek isles to fill the mammoth space. Two floors for passengers. Roughly 400. The second floor all economy class. The third, half economy and first class. The other half business class. 

I was in business class. Explanation time. Classes when traveling are not the same as in the U.S. Whereas first class is tops, in Greece business class is. The Greek first class is comparable to our business class. 

You would not believe the business class salon. Easy chairs and sofas. That’s all to sit on. Pure comfort. Always a table nearby for a drink or whatever. Service. Waiters. A small bar with little goodies to eat. Only half full. 

The trip was a treat! Rather than the dreaded experience I thought was before me

The long boat trip gave me a chance to see many of the Greek isles. We were in and out of about 10 of them picking up passengers. 

Politics could not be avoided. I was speaking with some Italian and Greek passengers. Fortunately, all spoke English. 

Italian former Prime Minister Berlusconi is on his way back. He beat a sex charge involving a seventeen year old and won some sort of local election soon thereafter. Berlusconi is running again for the Prime Minister’s job. The election is next year. 

Of the roughly 17 European nations making up the euro bunch, Italy is in the third worst shape. Only Spain and Greece are behind. Greece is last. Berlusconi has started blaming the Greeks for everything. He is siding with the Germans. The Greeks screwed up is his position. 

I shuddered. History repeats itself. The scenario reminded me of the late 1930s when Mussolini joined with Hitler. 

I further thought how dumb! Didn’t this guy realize that Italy will be one of the next. Sucking up will not avoid the grasp of the bill collecting Germans. 

An example of how heated the conversation got was the boat we were on and ATM machines. The boat was built/bought 10 years ago with euro dollars. The Italian said that euro nation dollars had built the boat. Not Greece’s money. Further, he said that money the Greeks were taking out of ATM machines was made up of Italian and euro nation dollars. In effect, the Greeks were free loading…..all the way around. 

I fear worse is yet to come. 

Last night was a replay. Went to Plaka. To the same outdoor cafe I drank at several times three weeks ago. The manager saw me and shouted out…..Louis! He embraced me.

I had dinner on the poor side of Acropolis. At the restaurant where the Greeks dance. Under brightly lite Acropolis. Only one problem. Business was poor last night. Only three tables in use. No music. The food compensated. I had huge grilled lamb chops. The kind with fat. The taste spectacular! 

Before leaving for dinner, I went to the bar and put down two gins. A magnificent big city type bar. Just like New York City. Then it was downstairs for a manicure. 

Chrysa did me. A lovely young lady. Did a good job. We chatted. She was born and raised in Greece. Has a friend in New Jersey. She visits the friend on occasion. She thinks she may be visiting the last week of November and the first week of December. They are planning on driving to Florida. I asked…..South Beach and Key West? I do not think she understood these places. Her answer was Orlando. I told her we all love Mickey Mouse and she should go. But afterwards keep going south till you hit South Beach and then Key West. 

I know Chrysa will be reading this blog today. Come to Key West! When you arrive, go to the Chart Room at the Pier House Hotel. I am there most evenings at cocktail hour. If not, tell the bartender who you are and how I may contact you. Do not miss South Beach and Key West! 

I had a quick breakfast of nothing this morning. A double espresso. It was like drinking acid! 

Enjoy your day! 

—

A couple of items that come to mind which are not in the blog.

The magnificence of the Grand Bretagne I have already shared. Greece’s economic condition, also. The economy affected my stay at the Gran Bretagne.

The hotel was empty. I did not know it at the time.

I had no reservation. Walked up to the counter and explained I had just spent a month on Amorgos and wanted to spend a few days in their hotel. I explained I needed a return to civilization!

What a deal it turned out to be!

I had a huge magnificent room, bathroom and terrace. All for $172 a night.

I was placed on the valet floor. Did not understand what it meant till I reached my room. The floor had a valet. Tails and all. He was to provide all services.

Nice guy. He explained I was the only customer on the valet floor. Ergo, I was all his during my stay. He unpacked my bags. Packed them when I was to leave. He said anything and everything you want, call me. I did. I was cared for like a King.

Lamb is a big dish in Greece. What is on the menu, what you order, is not lamb. Generally, goat. The islands definitely goat. Big time hotels and restaurants in Athens I assume lamb. Smaller places goat.

Don’t say ugh at the mention of goat. Tastes like lamb. You cannot tell the difference.

Goat is especially served on the islands because it is plentiful. You frequently see herds of wild goats running across a mountain side.

I am excited! Extremely so! I am finally to get the vaccine shot. Tomorrow at the Frederick Douglas Gym in Key West.

The news a relief. My 85 year old age is constantly in the forefront of my mind. I should have been one of the first in line. At the moment, they are down to age 55 receiving the shot. What happened to me? I’ll never know and don’t care. That I am to finally receive the shot tomorrow is what is important.

Coronavirus is what? A year old. New things happening daily. Problems. Solutions.

One of the recent occurrences involves a baby born in Washington, D.C. in September. The baby was born with the virus. More dramatic and worse, the baby had 51,000 of some bad thing in his body. The 51,000 number far higher than those in other young patients.

No one knows why.

The baby was “very sick.” Responded well to treatments, however and is virus free today. Doctors believe the infection was from a  coronavirus variant.

The baby was “lucky.” The young barely show symptoms.

We are all familiar with the saying when it rains, it pours. Somewhat like Murphy’s law: Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.

I refer to Boeing. “Poor Boeing.” However the poor is not really applicable. Boeing has a glitch or two in its manufacturing process. People die when something goes wrong with a plane.

I mention Boeing this morning because a Boeing 777 made an emergency landing yesterday in Moscow after receiving an engine sensor warning.

A safe emergency landing was made. No injuries. No visible damage to the plane.

This is Boeing’s third engine problem this week. Another  777 engine problem and a 737 one.

Something’s wrong in the plant. Boeing better figure it out. And soon! Otherwise no one will fly their planes.

There will be no blog tomorrow. My time will be absorbed with the shot.

Enjoy your day!

FROM ANCIENT AMORGOS TO THE GRANDEUR OF ATHENS was originally published on Key West Lou