Hopefully it's just a cold, but... 😷

[dorchadas]

Well, sashagee is quarantined from her job. She started feeling bad yesterday with respiratory symptoms--sore throat, low-grade fever, fatigue, achiness--and her manager told her to go get a COVID test. Since a lot of the free city testing sites run out relatively quickly, especially with the protests that are still happening, she drove out to Auraora, an hour away, to get it. That was yesterday, and while she still hasn't gotten her results back yet, today she was told to stay away from work for at least a week or until she gets two consecutive negative COVID tests. She feels better today than she did yesterday, and I'm a little fatigued but don't have any another symptoms (especially not ones like loss of taste/smell or trouble breathing), but I'm glad her work is being cautious. Everything I've heard before now made me think that as soon as she got one negative test they'd order her back in. I think it's just a summer cold, but I'll wait on the results and see. If it comes back positive, then I'll get to invoke the "caring for someone with COVID" time category at work and also get a paid vacation of my own, at least until my symptoms get worse. And if it comes back negative, she still gets a vacation!

I'm still in the "if I get sick, I get sick, and if I die, I die" mood from months ago, so. But I have a handy selection of masks for when I go outside! It's not like I have a bunch of places to go, but I did have to go pick up the farmer's market groceries.


sashagee is here for dinner again, as outlined above. I'm glad I took an umbrella to the market--when I left the sky was partly cloudy, when I arrived at the market the first drops of rain started to fall, and then in minutes it was a full-on stormburst, with rivers running along the curb and marketers frantically moving their produce boxes off the ground and out of the water. My pants got wet, but otherwise I was unscathed.

Leftover chicken moruno sausage from Sausage König with with their fresh shaved carrot salad, more pickled onions from Twidley Bits on the side, a salad of white button mushrooms from River Valley Ranch (store-bought cucumbers for sashagee, who doesn't like mushrooms) and kohlrabi from Piscasaw Gardens, along with some coconut curry rice from the Middle Eastern Grocery Store on the side.

The sausage and the onion was just as good as the first time I tried it (well, maybe the sausage was slightly less good), and the carrot salad was pretty good--mostly carrot, a few spices. I had no idea how to cook kohlrabi before tonight I looked it up, and the recipe I found said that it was possible to eat it raw, so I just took the skin off and cut it into small chunks. I sautéed the greens and some mushrooms for me, and just some greens for sashagee. It was pretty good, with the kohlrabi having a taste like watercress and the greens being faintly peppery. I actually liked it better than the carrot salad, which had fennel and olive oil and lemon but didn't taste like much.

sashagee didn't like the rice much and gave her portion to me, which suits me fine! Though when I ate it, I noticed that it's not nearly as good by itself. It's much better when eaten together with something, sausage or fish or curry, and by itself it's a little odd. Not exactly perfume, which is what she described it as, but odd. She told me to keep making it, but for myself, and give her a couple bites each time. Maybe it'll grow on her.

An apple pecan hand pie from First Slice Pie, the place that aaron.hosek and I always used to meet for dinner before the Plague Year. They have excellent pie pies, but I've never tried one of their hand pies. This was pretty good, and sashagee described it as what a McDonald's apple pie wants to be. It was delicious on its own, and I said it would be really good with some vanilla ice cream, which we don't have. sashagee reminded me that we had some Oat-ly vanilla oat cream, and while it was much less ice cream-esque than the strawberry Oat-ly we had, it was still pretty good.

The part that was bad was that I ordered two hand pies, I paid for two hand pies, the label on the bag said two hand pies, but there was only one inside. Nothing I can really do now, since I have no proof about it, but it's annoying.


As I mentioned last week, Tisha B'Av starts at sundown today, so I've been drinking truly enormous quantities of tea and water and ate a gigantic lunch. I already wrote a bit last week about it's easier to get into a mourning mindset this year, but it's also strange. I took the day off and I've never taken Tisha B'Av off before, so I'm not entirely sure how to commemorate it. There's a livestreamed reading tonight of איכה (eicha, Eng: "Lamentations") tonight, along with modern poetry that Mishkan was soliciting from members. I didn't send anything in, but I'm curious what they'll get. Last year had an amazing poem called "Good Bones," and hopefully I'll find something as memorable this year.

It is not a day for celebration, but neither is most of this year.

One final note--איכה can also be read ayeka, meaning "Where are you?", the word that G-d asks Adam in Eden. Lamentations, then, is a reversal of that--the writers asking G-d, "Where are you?"

"Where are you?"

Comments

[corvi]

Uh oh. I hope she feels better quickly.

[helvetica]

Oh I hope her results come back negative! And if not I wish you both an easy time with the disease <3

I was going to write comments about your food but you might read them all while you're fasting so I will only say it looks great!! I hope your fast goes well today, that Good Bones poem is very lovely.