sethg | Reading

2 pounds of carrots
2 pounds of beets
2 pounds of potatoes
4 heads of garlic
2 bunches of collards
1 pound of spinach
1 pound of 'spicy' salad mix
8 small eggplants
8 green peppers (I swapped them for 4 more eggplant and 2 more garlic, not being a fan of green peppers)
2 bunches of red radishes with greens
take-what-you-want herbs and hot peppers (I took 4 jalapenos)

First thoughts: saute the radish greens and spinach with garlic. Bubble-and-squeak with collards (/kale/cabbage from previous weeks). Roasted eggplant and potato (I don't know why that combo always makes me happy, but it does).

gingicat posting in

thisfinecrew

Of possible interest:
https://www.mobilize.us/theyoungcenter/event/1023584

Free virtual event from an organization that protects immigrants. All I know is what I received in my email.

Join us on October 1st at 5 PM CST for "The Child Within: Reflections on Separation and Resilience," a virtual author talk featuring the renowned Isabel Allende and Luis Alberto Urrea. They will discuss themes of family and migration, including the effects of family separation and other immigration-related traumas on children.

Gladis Molina Alt, Executive Director of the Young Center, will moderate the event and share her personal story of resilience.

magid

O Autumn, Autumn, by Effie Lee Newsome (1885-1979)

O Autumn, Autumn! O pensive light
    and wistful sound!
Gold-haunted sky, green-haunted ground!

When, wan, the dead leaves flutter by
    Deserted realms of butterfly!
When robins band themselves together

    To seek the sound of sun-steeped weather;
And all of summer’s largesse goes
    For lands of olive and the rose!

magid

Today I focused on getting through as much of the farm share backlog as possible.

sauce with onion*, bell peppers*, tomatoes*, garlic*, and pureed basil*
started two half-gallon jars of fire cider vinegar with onion*, garlic*, lemon, a couple of kinds of hot peppers*, horseradish*, and ginger* (there wasn't any turmeric at either farmers' market)
pureed the rest of the ginger* with sugar so I'll be able to make a ginger oil cake from Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat more quickly
radishes* added to a mixed batch of fridge pickles
started fermenting hot peppers* for hot sauce
sauteed spinach* and radish greens* with onion*
dilly* cucumber* salad
a tray of roasted eggplant*
mashed potatoes with massaged kale* and horseradish leaves*
purple slaw: purple cabbage* and purple-skinned carrots* with Asian-inspired dressing (soy sauce, lime juice, toasted sesame oil, sesame seeds, cashews)
chicken wings baked with onions*, fresh sage*, and branches of rosemary*

* sourced locally

siderea

Yall, I am so tired.

I had cleared Tuesday to write, and discovered when I settled in to do so that I had lost the entirety of the post I was working on. It's just gone. I have very little idea what happened. I write post drafts in my email system because it both autosaves and has a robust versioning system I configured precisely to prevent data loss. I guess there is something that's become flakey in my email system, because the draft file apparently got clobbered by another draft file (i.e. of another document), which is something that should not be possible. This system autonumbers new drafts, and for some reason, it seems it reused the number of an extant draft when I started a new file and overwrote the extant file. Either that, or the extant draft was deleted for some reason, and that's why the number was free. In any event, I didn't notice in time, and the backup file is a backup of the new file.

This is not the first time this has happened, but the first time I have it dead to rights it wasn't just that I failed to save the file to disk (and thus reserve the number): as it happened, I had the old file open in an emacs buffer in an SSH session which timed out, so I have one screenful of the text frozen at the moment of the disconnection – and at the bottom, in the emacs mini-buffer, the confirmation from the auto-save system that it was saved. It also confirms that the draft I was working on was 2766. And 2766 is the file containing the draft of an entirely other email.

I was looking forward to getting that post out the door, and this just sandbagged me. For months, I have had one problem after another disrupting my ability or opportunity to write: medical appointments sucking up time; sleep disruptions of various kinds leaving me with too-impaired concentration; random high-urgency interrupts like an adventure with the neighbor's malfunctioning smoke detector. I had finally gotten something that was coming together. It was about six hours work I'd lost – 76 paragraphs according to the emacs minibuffer. I was just utterly demoralized; I'm a bit better now, but given that I don't know if my work is going to disappear, I am still feeling paralized about trying to do any substantive writing.

I used to have a proper remote backup system – in addition to the draft and autosave system – which would have probably been proof against this, but it's been down since the drive died, some years ago. I didn't have the wherewithal to fix it, and then my back problems started, which prohibited doing much with hardware.

Like I said, this is not the first time I suspected I have lost drafts in progress. That is not the only problem with this email system. When I moved hosting companies somewhat precipitously in Jan 2024, I didn't manage to get the whole thing fully up and running, and there are still parts of it not working right (mostly about mail delivery to me, not the reverse, but also I never got around to plugging Spamassassin in).

I kind of feel I am drowning in technical debt. In addition to my defunct backup system and my not-wholly-migrated email system (which may be randomly deleting drafts or failing to count correctly), I have recoursed to doing my business bookkeeping in spreadsheets, because I haven't found a remotely acceptable replacement for the system I was using on my Palm Pilot. Even if I could tolerate the state of most bookkeeping software, a lot of it is now In the Cloud which I'm less than thrilled with. Also, I think if I use a SaaS platform, I will need a HIPAA compatible one, bc medical.

Relatedly, I realized with the recent Proton outage, I need a backup solution for Proton. I don't even know where to start with that. I have two Proton accounts, one professional and one personal. Part of why I decided to put my confidential data in Proton is precisely to get it out of the US, which means backing it up to a local device here in the US... kinda defeats that. On the flip side, what if something happens to the internet such that I can't get to my bytes in Switzerland?

I looked, in a cursory way, into options for backing up my cloud assets to some form of encrypted volume or device on a NAS in my home. This, in turn, brings up the eternal question of, "No, really, how do you do encrypted backups without doing the equivalent of leaving the key in the file cabinet lock all the time."

This is the wrong historical moment to be buying hard drives. They have gotten eyewateringly expensive.

magid

2 pounds of potatoes
2 pounds of purple-skinned carrots
2 medium heads of green cabbage
4 small heads of cauliflower
2 bunches of red radishes with greens (I swapped one for two more cauliflower)
2 big bunches of kale
8 medium-to-small tomatoes (I chose 2 smaller red ones, and 6 larger yellow ones)
1 pound of spinach
1 pound of 'spicy' mixed salad greens
10 sweet peppers (I chose smaller ones because they'd ripened past green to red, or purple, or one yellow)
8 hot peppers (there were jalapeno, Hungarian wax, what I think were cayenne, habanero, and ones that looked like habaneros except red; I chose a mix of all except the jalapeno (I still have some of those from last week))
six little Italian eggplant
take-what-you-want herbs (I chose none)

First thoughts: I'd assumed I'd get onions this week; need to go get some. Time to make some fermented hot sauce, and maybe start a batch of fire cider vinegar. I'm drawn to the thought of sauteing all the spinach and radish greens with onions and garlic, then mixing with ricotta, and layering with slices of roasted eggplant and stewed tomatoes-and-peppers, possibly with some melty cheese and some type of pasta. Massaged kale with mashed potatoes. Roasted cauliflower. Some kind of cabbage-carrot slaw.

magid

I was reading today's Ask A Manager post about work habits transferring to the rest of life, a round-up of her favorite answers to the question some weeks before. There are some excellent ones, but one in particular stood out, due to a comment it generated.

The answer:

Back in the 90s, I volunteered at a zoo and I still scramble eggs the way the raven preferred them.

Many, many people want more detail about how the raven preferred its eggs scrambled, and one with username Hermit Crab was inspired to poetry:

Once into a wide bowl merry
I cracked the eggs and added dairy
Whipping into a froth, this cheerful chore
While I stirred the eggs for eating, a fry pan thence was gently heating
The bird gave greeting, seated at the kitchen door.
“’Tis not ready” I muttered, “eggs need beating more and more”.
Quoth raven “Now you pour”.

bloodygranuaile

I have finished another two-year cruise ‘round Moby Dick with my Whale Weekly shipmates! We have, unlike the crew of the Pequod, all survived.

My decision to buy myself a fancy hardback really paid off this time, both in that I enjoyed sitting around with my fancy hardback (and whale bookmark), but also it really was way easier to pay attention to actually reading the words when it was in print and not in my email with a billion other computer things going on. As much as the idea of “my good friend Ishmael is sending me increasingly insane emails from his ill-fated business trip” is funny, I found last time that I would start skimming the emails, because I am a person who lives in the modern world where we all get too many emails. The print format allowed me to sit in a chair away from the computer, and then just use the email to access the powermobydick notes to see if I missed anything important in the annotations.

I really do like this book more every time I read it, despite its (fairly significant) flaws; it is full of little details that I had forgotten or didn’t notice the previous read, and also it is just an epic story about a weird little gay guy with ADHD who makes a career change on a whim and ends up with the world’s actual craziest boss. And he cannot do anything about it because he is stuck on a boat. And this is one of the greatest novels in American literature. Actually, it makes entire sense that one of the greatest novels in American literature would be about a very dangerous and exploitative workplace in an extraction industry (and that the other two contenders are primarily about racism and the moral hollowness of becoming rich).

I think we are taking a year off to read a bunch of other Melville before we start our third voyage. It will be weird for me to not be reading Moby Dick for so long, as I have been in a continual state of reading Moby Dick for four years now. But I’m looking forward to seeing how it compares to our boy Herman’s more commercially successful novels.

bloodygranuaile

Having realized I was about to hit my 50-book goal for the year in early September, I felt free to pick up a book that had been sitting on my shelf for ages, wasn’t part of any readalong or commitment, and that I knew would probably take me at least several days to get through–Alison Weir’s The Wars of the Roses, a 400-or-so page history of the 15th-century conflict between the English royal houses of York and Lancaster.

Last year I read Dan Jones’ The Plantagenets so I was reasonably prepped for this in terms of having a somewhat working knowledge of the dynasty preceding the split. Next I’ll clearly have to read something about the fall of the House of York and the rise of the House of Tudor, since I have a little bit of a fuzzy understanding of all that except for as laundered through various fictional media featuring the murder of the princes in the tower.

I found this to be about as readable as a text on English monarchies can be; the biggest readability issue is something that Alison Weir could absolutely not have worked around in any way, which is the English habit of only having like four names in use in any given century. The system of titles that end up being used as names is also confusing for me, and possibly could have been disambiguated better for those of us who are absolute goddamn idiots about keeping track of who it is who’s just going by “York” these days, but the book is certainly full of family trees if you can bother to look at them, and it always is explained at least once; it’s just a matter of remembering (it just happens to be hard mode remembering). Overall, though, Weir does a really good job of making these historical figures not just names attached to dates; she cites a wealth of historical sources to try to bring across a sense of each of these people’s character, at least in the cases of people who are well documented enough that it’s possible to do so. As such, the main players–the formidable but out-of-touch Margaret of Anjou, the pious but unpolitical King Henry VI, the controlling Earl of Warwick, the brilliantly martial King Edward IV, the financially shrewd Duke of York, the conniving Duke of Gloucester (who was running around the book for nearly two hundred pages before I got jump-scared with the tidbit that this was the guy who was going to eventually become Richard III), various scheming French people–start to emerge as real people with complex inner lives and extremely human tendencies toward bad ideas.

I cannot pretend that I will remember everybody in the enormous cast of characters that peoples this book, especially with the “everyone has the same three first names and passes the titles around” factor, but I will certainly retain impressions of more than one of them, which is a lot more than I had known about the War of the Roses previously. I also learned that the phrase “The Wars of the Roses” is Sir Walter Scott’s fault and not anything anyone was saying at the time.

At the end of the day I really do just love reading about British monarchical history; it’s such a huge mess, and, like Marie Kondo, I LOVE mess. But it’s also important to have it in the hands of a capable writer who has done the research, and Weir is an excellent guide to this particular mess on both fronts.

gingicat

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

Current Mood: blah

magid

ratatouille (roasted eggplant*, zucchini*, and bell peppers* added to sauted onions*, garlic*, and tomatoes*)
cod cheeks sauted with onions*, eggplant*, and garlic*
a tray of roasted beets* and purple carrots*
a tray of roasted potatoes with rosemary*
potato* salad with dill*, sage*, pickled kale stems*, 'spicy' salad mix* (includes arugula), with mustard vinaigrette dressing
beef tongue boiled with hot pepper*, onion, garlic* and peppercorns
tsimess-like dish with onions*, leeks*, carrots*, sweet potatoes*, diced lemon, Italian plums*, shin meat, and knaidlach

I'd thought about making a few other things, but I think I'm done for now.

Happy Rosh Hashanah to those who are celebrating; may the coming year be one of peace, health, and joy for us all.

* locally sourced

siderea

Many years ago, I was sitting on the steps of the MIT Student Center, eating my Tosci's ice cream after SCA dance practice, when a young philosophy major I was mentoring ran up to me and exclaimed, "I just realized! You're not a platonist! You're an empiricist!" I cracked up. To this day I have no idea what ever might have lead him to think I was a platonist in the first place.

I think about that from time to time, moving in the worlds of smart sciency people. One of the things I often feel sets me apart from most of my conspecifics in my cognitive approach to the world is that I am an empiricist. I've been described as "Rationalist-adjacent", which is fair enough, but I am not a small-r rationalist. I love reason – but I love data more. Reason can be great stuff, but without valid data to reason from, it's just a way of going wrong with confidence.

This came round on the guitar again lately with regard to the US cyclosporiasis outbreak. At least one reasonable medical professional whose judgment I generally respect has announced they feel it's safe to go back to eating lettuce, because usually the cyclospora season ends at the end of August. That would be some of that them there reasoning I am dubious about.

I can't help but notice that usually we don't have a cyclosporiasis outbreak like this at all, so reasoning from what usually happens seems to maybe not be so warranted. Sure, maybe all the new cyclosporiasis cases will fall off dramatically in the immediate future because of some seasonal effect. But we don't know why this outbreak happened in the first place, so we don't know what will stop it. Like one of the possibilities here is something climate change related, that, thanks to climate change, will not be dropping below whatever threshold until later in the year than usual.

Personally, I'm going to wait for the data to come in showing that lots of people aren't getting new cyclosporiasis cases.

Now, because of the enormous lag between infection and symptoms, and symptoms and testing, and testing to reporting to health authorities collecting the information, and then publishing it somewhere I can see it, chances are that by the time the new infections numbers go down, lettuce – and the other suspect produce I've been avoiding – will have been safe for weeks.

That's fine. I'm not hurting none. I've had lettuce almost every day this summer, and blueberries too, because we've been patronizing our local farmers market here in Massachusetts, far from the epicenter of the outbreak. Blueberries are out of season now, so I'm on to peaches which to my surprise are apparently in season here to the end of September. When we get takeout, we get thoroughly cooked food. If this goes on, I might get a countertop hydroponic lettuce kit. I don't see a huge need to rush back to eating grocery-store lettuce. I don't think it's some sort of tragedy if I avoid bagged lettuce that retroactively turned out to have been safe for a month or two.

I'll agree that grocery store lettuce is safe to eat again when I see data that indicates that.

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petunia

February 2020

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petunia

Reading

Farm share, week 16

Young Center event with Isabel Allende

A poem for the first (full day) of autumn

Today in food prep

Technical difficulites [me, tech]

Farm share, week 15

[AAM] Ravens...

The villain is industry standards

Of English kings and kingmakers

Useful reference: xkcd Now

Today's bout of cooking

Cyclospora update [pest, US]

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February 2020

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