Thanksgiving weekend in photos

[dorchadas]

I last did a photo essay for my trip to Baptist Lake with lisekatevans, and I think I'll revisit the format here:

I shall call it "Big Chungus".

So a couple weeks ago, my garbage disposal started making a horrible rattling noise. As stated there, I called the insurance company, they inspected, I waited, and the insurance company eventually weaseled out of the claim because they refuse to cover anything related to rust and the old disposal was unquestionably a rusted hunk of scrap. On Friday, my parents drove me back into the city so my father could come and do some more dad things around the condo--fixing the toilet water flow, bringing back the shelving unit he had spray-painted--and one of the tasks he took on was installing a new garbage disposal. This big boy is twice the size of my old one and much quieter, and based on me using it over the weekend, it seems to be working perfectly so far!

The toilet is leaking very slightly, but that can be fixed. I used the guest bathroom far less than the kitchen.

Friday afternoon I went over to koppel's place for The Quietest Day of the Year, his post-Thanksgiving slow life celebration. I brought over a bag full of books and expected to quietly read in the corner, but there were a couple dozen people there and I got pulled into conversation. Not that I'm complaining! The only complaint I might have was when AsherS asked me to play the Sonic the Hedgehog card game with him and the mechanics involved rolling dice really fast and looking for patterns, but maybe I'm just sore that I lost.

koppel had a bunch of apple cider for mulling and booze-mixing, and two huge crocks of tomato soup, and a ton of people brought bread and cakes and treats. I had a bunch of, um, I guess I'd call it chocolate matzah brei without the matzah, a piece of fruit tart, and two bowls of tomato soup with French bread. And two cups of apple cider with bourbon, from koppel's enormous stock of Christkindlemarket mugs.

The time honestly flew by. Before I knew it two hours were up and I had to leave to go to my next thing. I had invited several people, and of those only thosesocks got back to me, but much later:

thosesocks: "Are y'all still going strong?"
Me: "I don't know--I left to go on to my next thing \(//▽//)\"
thosesocks: "Ok Extrovert."

Maybe next time.

I finally have my cozy nook set up over by the staircase!

When I held my housewarming slash Rosh Hashanah party, I was really worried about the distribution of people around my home. That there wouldn't be enough places for people to gather while feeling like they were separate from everyone else. It turned out that I didn't have to worry--there were at least six separate places people put themselves, and other than the noise level, there weren't any problems with people finding their niche, getting to the food and drink, and otherwise moving around.

But, then I only had one chair next to that carved table, and I always meant to put a pair of matched chairs there so a couple people could sit and talk. When I mentioned it to my parents, they told me that they had a pair of chairs that my grandmother used to own that might work--the spacing was really tight, so I had to be careful about what I used--and they brought them with them when they came out on Friday. And it fits! It's a tight fit, and I should probably get a couple cushions for the chairs just to make sure that they're comfortable to sit in for a while, but I'm happy with how well they fit in.

worldbshiny visible off to the right.

After lighting the Shabbat candles, I went over to britshlez's apartment for pre-show drinks with her boyfriend and her friend who had flown into town for britshlez's birthday. I brought a bottle of nigorizake, we cracked it open and had some, had some wine, and then before the show we took an Uber over to the theatre.

lisekatevans had asked me what I was doing on Friday and it turned out the answer was "The same thing you were going to invite me to," so we met her and her boyfriend afschifler there, sat in the back, and watched the supernatural adventures of Clark and Belmont and the sword-and-sandal adventures of Thultak, wandering barbarian, punctuated by worldbshiny dropping potatoes to represent the bodies hitting the floor. The latter is probably best explained by this Tumblr post.

After the performance, britshlez, her boyfriend, her friend who's in town for britshlez's birthday, lisekatevans, afschifler, worldbshiny, and I all went out to a bar for food and drinks. I got one Old Fashioned and half of the food that worldbshiny generously offered to me (Brussels sprouts and a blondie with ice cream), and then we separated into groups. I went back to britshlez's apartment, drank more wine and sake, and left at 1 a.m. when her friend fell asleep.

This was the only night I went home super late, drunk, and woke up with a slight hangover, so good for me!

Wednesday I woke up early after six hours of sleep because I was planning to make Israeli breakfast after a throwaway comment from britshlez inspired me, and I had invited thosesocks over. So I woke up and chopped up the cucumbers, tomatoes, and onion for the Israeli salad, took a shower, started the shakshuka (spiced and simmered tomatoes, onions, and peppers with eggs on top), and then thosesocks arrived. I put mint tea in her hands at her request, and assembled the aforementioned dishes with olives, pickled turnips, pita, hummus, baba ghanoush, and labneh. It was extremely filling and delicious, and thosesocks went back for seconds, so I'm happy with my cooking.

I mean, I won't be too modest. I'm a good cook. But while I'd made both Israeli salad and shakshuka before, I'd never assembled a meal like this, so I'm glad it worked.

We talked for a while afterwards, and then thosesocks said she was warm and comfy and didn't want to go back out into the cold, so she asked if I wanted to watch a movie. I suggested 秒速5センチメートル / Five Centimeters per Second, but she suggested Ratatouille, which we had planned to watch the weekend where I went over to her place to make curry rice but never got around to. So I bought it through Amazon Prime--fortunately Disney hadn't entirely stripped it from everywhere as part of its goal of devouring all content in the world--made more mint tea, and we watched it.

I liked it a lot! I knew that it was about a rat that knew how to cook and that was it--I didn't know about the inheritance plot, the explicit denial of the usual Chosen One bloodline plot, the romance, or the...uh, ghost? Whatever that was. I was especially fond of the animation on Linguini when Remy was puppeting him around.

thosesocks: "You have to kind of suspend your disbelief here."

We talked about making ratatouille and inviting more people over to eat it--she said the cooking is simple but all the chopping is pretty labor-intensive, so more people would mean a better spread of the workload--and then around 3:30 p.m., when there was a lull in the rain, she took her leave.

Light meat and dark meat separated so I can eat only dark meat, as G-d intended.

Soon after thosesocks left, I also left to go to my next event--a friendsgiving! fin.emery's "Thonksgillving," as he called it. I couldn't stay very long, but I had some delicious roasted Brussels sprouts--one of my favorite vegetables, if you hadn't realized that yet--and dark meat. I'm not sure what fin.emery did to the turkey, but this was definitely the most delicious turkey I had all weekend. Probably because he left the skin on.

While we waited for mutantur's stuffing to finish, we watched a Bon Appétit Test Kitchen special about making Thanksgiving dinner that fin.emery had gotten almost all of his recipes from. I stayed through the turkey cooking and then I had to go, but I took a bit of mutantur's stuffing with me. It had milk in it, so due to בשר בחלב basar bechalav I couldn't eat it for a while, but I definitely wanted to try it.

Then, on to my next thing:

Neon and rain.

It was probably a dumb idea to go see the Lincoln Park Zoo lights alone on a cold rainy day, but I certainly couldn't get anyone else to go with me and I figured that the zoo wouldn't be too crowded on such a day.

I was right, but there was a reason it wasn't crowded.

I had to walk ten minutes from the L to get to the zoo, in the cold and the rain, and I definitely was dressed for the sun still being out--or at least for daylight--rather than the cold and the wind. I turned my giant scarf into a cowl to keep the rain off my face and trudged through the wet to the zoo, and when I got there the lights were all lit in the rain, reflecting off the pools of water on the ground, and the crowds were thin enough that I could take all the pictures that I wanted.

They were still clearly Christmas lights with Christmas hastily scrawled out and "seasonal" written across it, but they certainly were pretty.

I put more pictures up on Instagram if you want more of that A E S T H E T I C.

On Saturday during the day, I got a text from worldbshiny that said "Meow meow?" and a link to a theatre performance on Sunday called The Idle Musings of Sherlock Holmes: The Boscombe Valley Mystery. I said I'd love to come and that we should go out for maple custard beforehand, since our original attempt to do so didn't work. She agreed and I didn't think anything of it until she asked me on Sunday whether I had bought a ticket. I said I had not, and she said it was sold out, but that she was pulling strings to get me a seat. Hooray for corruption!

The original time was a 7:30-8:30 cocktail reception that we had been invited to, and general tickets at 8:30 for the show, so we leisurely ate custard, worldbshiny suggested that we take the L instead of walking through the garbage weather, and when we got to the platform, she noticed she had a missed call. When she got the call, it turned out there was a difficulty. The ticket-selling company had told everyone curtain was 7:30, not 8:30, so they all showed up during the reception expecting to see the show. They were holding curtain for us, and we watched two L trains pass the opposite direction before ours finally arrived and we jumped on, got off at the next stop, and rushed to the theatre, where they got us seats in the far back right. Sadly for worldbshiny, the furthest possible seat from the Foley table, but at least we were there!

The show was not what I expected. I knew it was a live radio play of a new Sherlock Holmes mystery...but there was a lot of extra material around it implying a wider world, like the announcer's relationship with the actress playing Irene Adler"Miss Snow," the way the actress playing the cabbie just up and stole another actress's part in the middle of the show, arguing about dialogue--the actor playing Holmes was none too happy about the announcer having decided to replace "circumstantial" with a long digression that repeatedly used the word "circumcised"--and it kind of slid back and forth between "actors on stage reading a play" and "the people in the play" in a way I at first found offputting but grew to appreciate. I especially liked when the Foley artist was making wet squishing sounds for the walk into the marsh around the pond, or when she handed the skull to Watson so he could demonstrate where the wounds were inflicted on the murder victim.

We did get a chance to get cocktails at intermission, though, when worldbshiny bought us the last two rum-and-cider drinks poured. Which meant that both of them had three or four shots of rum in them, and we drank the whole thing, and it certainly made it easier to get into the second act!

She kept introducing me as a "taste-maker," which I'm not sure I would say applies, but perhaps I don't see the influence I have. And when I said my only involvement with the theatre was as a patron and having done stage crew in high school, she interrupted me to point out that I had won first prize for my reading of "The Rats in the Walls" at cjkarr's Christmas Ghost Stories party last year. Which is true. I guess there's more there than I thought!

Also, I asked if it was a fancy event and worldbshiny told me that I always outshined her, but she was wrong this time. She had on a ruffled skirt, an off-the-shoulder top (that was cunningly part of one of her standard jumpsuits), a corset, boots, and her hair up, and looked the perfect image of a steampunk saloon girl. I had on a Zolnar shirt, cargo pants, a long cardigan, a huge scarf, and my raven skull necklace, so if you gave me a top hat and a cane I could have been an evil airship captain...but I did not have those accoutrements, so she beat me.

After the show, I walked her to the L, stopping in at Jewel so she could buy a bag of microwave popcorn for her introvert decompression time, and then I went home and went to sleep, another successful weekend spent.

I've played five minutes of video games in the last month and a half.


And now, back to work after vacation! Work is never so annoying as after you haven't had to do it for a while.

Comments

[corvi]

Oooh, pretty rain lights.

Do you have a recipe for shakshuka? It sounds tasty!

[dorchadas]

I eyeballed it, but this is pretty close to what I made!

Some people add feta, some add spinach, and so on, but that recipe is a good base to start from while you decide how you like it.

[aguart]

I am really glad to read your posts.

[dorchadas]

Thank you so much!

[helvetica]

Those chairs are really beautiful! and your israeli breakfast looks AMAZING

I'm glad you had such a fun series of days!

[dorchadas]

Thank you!

One of my favorite things in my home is that almost all the furniture comes from either my grandparents or my father's work room. It really gives the whole thing a homey aesthetic when ever piece of furniture has a memory attached to it.