Peruvian lunch, home repair, desserts, and market salad 🥬

My calendar is getting more full! Last weekend I saw britshlez and worldbshiny at separate times, and on Sunday maptekar invited me over to her place for lomo saltado from Taste of Peru. I had never heard of lomo saltado, which is no surprise since I know very little about Peruvian food, but it was delicious--rice and beef and onions and peppers and french fries, all cooked in beer, with a green spicy sauce to put on top. We talked for hours, she introduced me to her cat Lily and showed me the portraits she had painted, and then at sunset she took me home and gave me another lomo saltado to take with it. I ate the last bit of it tonight for lunch and it was delicious! She's coming over for lunch on Friday and then we're going to The Recyclery, because owning a bike now that I'm always working from home and not taking the CTA might be a good idea.

Speaking of, yesterday I went and bought another Ventra card. My main card has almost $100 of transit value sitting on it, but it also has two monthly passes queued up that I haven't used, and passes are always used before transit value. This makes sense--if you have an unlimited ride pass, you want to use it and save the value for when you're swiping other people through--and I could get the passes refunded into value too, but they cost $105 and in a pre-Plague Year month I get far more value from them than that. Twenty days to and from work is already $90, and going places at least 3-4 days a week is another ~$50 or more. You can have multiple cards registered to the same account, so I took my old card out of my wallet and set it aside with my badge to get into work and put the new card that just has transit value in its place. Friendship ended with main card, now germ jail card is my new best friend.

My parents came over this weekend and brought a ton of desserts, and my father helped me fix several things in my place. The pipe under the sink had started leaking, and while I took it apart and swapped the nuts and washers on each side and it stopped leaking, that just meant the problem was on the other side and would definitely reoccur. My father took it apart, replaced the bad washer, and left me some spares. Together we took apart my fridge water dispenser, replaced that lever that had broken, and put it all back together and now it works, and alone he went through and replaced some of the old toggle light switches with the more popular rocker ones. I haven't seen them since March, when I helped my sister move her stuff into storage, so it was great to chat. They took off their masks when they came in, and so I followed suit--my parents are generally pretty cautious, so I'm willing to defer to their level of risk tolerance. So we even got hugs.

( Farmer's Market Dinner )

Friday is Juneteeth, and the AMA gave us the afternoon off and I took the rest of the day off. It's also the livestreamed premiere of a theatre piece that worldbshiny invited me to watch with her, and we were originally going to get takeout from Tanoshii, but she suggested that in light of the day we support a black-owned business instead. I'm all for that but we're currently running into a problem--a lot of the black-owned restaurants serve soul food, which is usually 1) treif (which I don't eat) 2) fried (which worldbshiny doesn't eat) or 3) both! There's an option that will work--several Ethiopian restaurants nearby, or maybe Vee-Vee's or Betty Lou's--we just need to find it.

And now, to watch Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil with my book group! To be honest, I had completely forgotten we even read the book until about ten minutes into the movie and I had no idea why we were scheduled to watch it. I gave the book three stars--we'll see if I like the movie better!