Listen to the Rain

Usually when Anime Chicago has an event, only one of us can go, or (more often) neither of us can go. But yesterday when Laila was out at the grandparents, Anime Chicago had a dinner and chat event at Gangnam Market in River West, so after I was done with work we took the Red Line and a bus the ~hour out. We were late, thanks to the CTA, but we did get there.

We went to a similar event around six months ago and I remember the food being very good--I got some kind of donburi at the time--but that wasn't the case this time. But, I'm getting ahead of myself. The first thing that happened after we checked in was that we walked over to the restaurants and ran into worldbshiny! She had had a bad day at work and come in to get ramen, which she recommended to me, and we chatted a bit about her day before we left to get food. I say "left" but worldbshiny was sitting less than a meter from the restaurants, and sashagee went a bit further away to Gangnam Taco while I turned around to go to the Seven-Faced Bird (from the Japanese for turkey, 七面鳥, shichimenchō). worldbshiny recommended the ramen so that's what I got, plus a kara-age bao, and sat down at a nearby table:

( Ramen picture )
Unfortunately, we were both a bit disappointed. My ramen wasn't bad, but it wasn't good either. The broth was great and the ground turkey they put at the bottom was a nice surprise, but the noodles were a little too squishy (when I told this to worldbshiny later she said she gets her ramen without noodles). Meanwhile, sashagee thought her tacos were bland and too small, just not really worth buying at all. I heard other people later say that they weren't too satisfied either, which is disappointing because I remember it being more delicious last time.

After eating, sashagee really wanted to hit the gacha machines, so we got $20 worth of tokens (ten tokens and each pull takes more than one token because gacha is a scam). I was going to do one pull on the Kirby machines but despite all the available machines, both Kirby machines were totally sold out. One of them even had three possible Kirbys out of the four results! I can see why it was sold out, but come on. I had to (sashagee demanded I pull at least one thing for myself) pull the That Time I Got Reincarnated As a Slime and won a crowned Rimuru that now lives on my desk. sashagee got some Hello Kitty toys, including a dessert-themed Pompompurin that's in a pudding cup that we immediately had to pick up and put out of Laila's reach because we knew she would gravitate to it (which she did). sashagee's gacha addition thus satisfied, we split up. I spent most of the time talking to mhhilker about video games and our respective Passovers before someone mentioned that the grocery store was going to close soon, so sashagee loaded up on mochi, udon, dorayaki, and various other things that are a bit harder to get in the Asian markets close to us, and when we had paid, we went back to the food court and said our goodbyes.

While we were walking to the bus stop, an autonomous food delivery drone whizzed by on the sidewalk.

The Constitutional Crisis Is Here.

Most Americans, having not lived under authoritarian regimes or dictatorships, don't actually know what they're like. They imagine doors getting kicked in, social chaos, constant warring gangs or warlords, that kind of thing. But the truth is that society basically functions the same way it does everywhere else. People go to work, they go to the movies, they meet up at restaurants and go to religious services and form clubs. Very few people just disappear.

But everyone knows that people do disappear, and that if they're not careful, it could be them, and they act accordingly.

Americans mostly haven't internalized that yet because they think it can't be them. Oh, those people being sent to foreign prisons were foreigners/criminals/radicals/communists/antisemites/American-haters/whatever, there must have been some reason. This is America and we love freedom, the government wouldn't just scoop someone off the street and bundle them out of the country for no reason. There must be a reason. If there's no reason that would mean that it could happen to me, and for my own psychological safety I cannot consider that I am subject to having my life ruined in an instant due to things I have no power to affect, so there must have been a reason.

"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.[...]

"To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it—please try to believe me—unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted,’ that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these ‘little measures’ that no ‘patriotic German’ could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.[...]

"But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D."
-Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45

I wrote after the 2016 that we were in the final days of the Republic, it would just take some time for the country to die. Maybe we'll find a miracle cure, but I suspect not.

Appropriate ("appropriate") that this all happened on Pesaḥ, the holiday where as part of the Seder we repeatedly say "Once we were slaves, but now we are free."

Today was another session of Laila's Hebrew school (called משפחתון Mishpachton, after the small-scale daycares that exist in Israel) today. I've been dreading going, because Laila is pretty wild and usually goes crazy in class. This time, I had the bright idea to make her walk all the way to the bus and then walk all the way from the bus to the Mishkan headquarters, and it worked! She asked a couple times for me to carry her, I always told her no, and by the time we actually got there she was willing to sit in my lap or have me hold her while the teacher sang the opening and closing songs and when it came time for activities (it was a Pesaḥ lesson), she went over to the tambourine-making station and picked out all the tambourine bells herself, ran to the "color a burning bush" station and did a bit of coloring, and then spent the entire rest of the lesson drawing on the whiteboard and asking me to draw in shapes so she could fill them in. I did draw this extremely sophisticated burning bush image of my own:


These are three and four years old. Not a lot of religious instruction at that age. We did sing dayenu briefly at the end, and there were some other songs in between, butwith young kids the important thing is to keep them engaged. They apparently did a lesson on keeping kids engaged at the Seder, because of course all the discussion and debate and talking about the lessons of Egypt and the wilderness aren't important to hungry children. It's only a benefit if you get to do any of the parts of the four children, and Laila's still a bit young for that. We'll see how she handles the Seder this year.

I do have one bit of sad news, though. We walked part-way back to the bus--I relented and carried her another part of the way--and got on the bus to go meet sashagee for lunch. I got off a little early to go to the Middle Eastern Grocery Store to pick up some hummus for Laila, but on the way I noticed something on a nearby lightpole. And when I went closer to look, well:

( antisemitism )

This is the same neighborhood where I've seen people tear down innocuous "Bring them home now" posters about the hostages, though, so I'm not that surprised. I'm just glad that Laila is young enough she didn't notice it or care about it. I only wish that I could have faith that antisemitism would be getting better, instead of on an obvious trajectory to get worse and worse for the rest of our lives.

Insert that quote about how "I'm a content creator--I create problems for myself."

If you know anything about JSON, you might think "refactor JSON? What are you talking about?" If you don't, JSON is a way of storing data that makes it easy for both machines and humans to read. It's all done as key-value pairs, so you have like

"name": "Item",
"Description": "This is an item.",
"black": true

and so on and so on, with as many fields as necessary.

The reason for the refactor is that Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead has a JSON-based scripting language incorporated into it. A lot of games use Lua for modding, a programming language where one of its main feature is that it's designed to be embedded in other codebases (such as that of a video game), and indeed some other forks of Cataclysm use Lua as well. CDDA does not, for several reasons, but as far as I know the most relevant is that it's open source, multiple builds come out every day, and the Lua integration would need constant work and constant tweaks to keep working with all the changes. A full game that releases discrete patches can make sure all the Lua binds are working before releasing the patch, thus avoiding constant mod disruption.

Anyway, CDDA has a scripting language called "Effect on Condition" that's all built out of the dialogue system, which allows certain dialogue choices to only appear sometimes depending on what Conditions are set--what other quests you've done, how long since the start of the game, if you have certain items, etc.--and cause an Effect, like setting NPC opinions, giving you quest rewards, and so on. That was all expanded out to scripts that run under certain Conditions and cause certain Effects. Nowadays a lot of the game is reliant on this system for more complicated effects, since it's easily expandable and testable without re-compiling the game, which lowers the barrier for contribution. One update allowed crafting recipes to run a script on completion, and I used this to make training psychic powers for my Mind Over Matter mod into crafting recipes. At the time, I did not have the skill to come up with a generic framework, so every single recipe (something like 200) had individual handling for training whatever power it is attached to.

Well, this week I pulled the trigger and rewrote every one of those 200 scripts so they all called on a set of ten total scripts, nine for each of the psionic paths (telekinesis, telepathy, etc), and then a final one that handles which power you're using and appropriately trains it. That means if I ever want to make changes in the future, I only to do it at most ten times, and more probably only one time, rather than having to mirror the change 200 times and hope that I never mess it up. It only took like six hours to go through thousands of lines of JSON and make all the changes, but now it's all done and easy to make further changes. I'm already thinking of how to make learning powers a bit more complicated--currently it's a straight Skill + 1d10 vs a difficulty roll, and when that was repeated 200 times I was loathe to change it. But now that I would only have to change it once...

The eternal battle between "add new things" vs. "do boring work of making old thing better" and this time the second one won.

I kind of exist adjacent to most fandom endeavors. Despite my long presence on Dreamwidth and Livejournal before it, I've never really participated in any fandom communities. I have a fanfiction.net account and have used it to read maybe half a dozen stories ever, and I have an AO3 account and have used it to post a single story and haven't read anything on that site at all. Of the stories I have read, some of them aren't on fanfiction.net--like the old classic Children of an Elder God that I read while it was updating at university. On fanfiction.net I read Aeon Natum Engel--you can see my interests here, in the intersection of cosmic horror and giant robots--and...I think that's all I can remember? I have a bunch of stories I turned into ebooks with the intention of reading them and then just never did. Part of it is that I'm not at all interested in romance in fanfiction. I found one Stargate/Cthulhu crossover fanfic, an area I had thought would be ripe with potential, and never ended up reading it because 1) it was abandoned 2) it was Stargate: Atlantis and 3) it was mostly slash. The only part I remember is that the nanoswarm cloud in the original Stargate: Atlantis was turned into a rogue shoggoth in the fic. I read a relatively short fic about what if Harry Potter were raised by the Culture (which I really appreciated because it did not assume that the Culture Minds automatically understood magic, they were baffled how an owl traveled thousand of light years from Earth to poof into a room on an Orbital) which ran about nine chapters before it petered out.

I have read a lot of Let's Plays, and some of them approach fanfiction by using video games to tell a story. I read the Final Fantasy VIII Altimate Rewrite, which was very good but also never finished. I read a long narrative let's play of Morrowind that was originally hosted at morningstarlady until it was purged and moved to Dreamwidth, which was then hosted at lady_morningstar until it was locked and limited to access only, and is now seemingly being remade (again!) using models from The Sims at aeronwen. I only got partway through the previous version (they were very long), but I think they never finished as well. You can probably see where the source of me being leery of reading fanfiction comes from, here.

I guess the most fanfiction I've ever read, now that I think about it, are the stories set in The Night Land. I read every single story on that site and keep thinking about buying the books, especially after the untimely death of its maintainer.

The reason I brought all this time is because last night I thought "I wonder if that old Sailor Moon website I found back in the day is still around..." and it turns out it wasn't, but it's still available on the Wayback Machine. Sailor Moon Expanded ran from the late 90s through the early 00s and...well, I have to admit that while there's a ton of fanfics I've never read any of them. At the time, 2010, I had never seen a single episode of Sailor Moon, and wouldn't watch any until Sailor Moon Crystal came out several years later. The part that drew me in was the meticulously-expanded bestiary, maps, and cultural information on the Dark Kingdom and the Silver Millennium, which was envisioned as a magic-based solar-system-wide confederacy that ended with the sealing of magic after Queen Beryl attacked the moon. Or, as I described it at the time, "The war between the Seelie and Unseelie Courts when the Unseelie Court wanted summon Cthulhu."

The other reason is A Dark, Distorted Mirror, a Babylon 5 AU fanfic that assumes that the inciting event of most of the plots in the early series--the Earth-Minbari War, a war where the vastly-technologically-superior Minbari curbstomped the humans for two years, only losing a single capital ship in all that time, until on the very moment of victory as they annihilated Earth's last defensive fleet before suddenly ceasing fire and surrendering--did not end with a treaty. As a result, Earth was glassed, most of humanity was killed, and the series is much less hopeful in tone. I did actually make it through the entire first book but tapped out when I had four more books of around 200K words each left, around the size of a doorstopper fantasy book. That one is still online and is finished, though, so maybe I should go back and read it.

I apply to fanfiction nowadays the same principle I apply to fantasy series--once the author finishes it, maybe I'll read it.

If anyone has any recommendations for finished, good Cthulhu crossover fic, I'm all ears. I had a lot of hope for Aeon Natum Engel until the author blew it up with a "rocks fall, everyone dies" sudden ending. They then declared they were going to re-write the entire thing better and higher quality, and I read the first chapter of Aeon Entelechy Evangelion and, when I saw how overwrite and baroque it was, I said to myself "This will never be finished" and stopped reading. And, well...it was never finished.

The Hebrew word משכן mishkan is usually translated as "tabernacle" and refers to the traveling tent complex that the Children of Israel brought with them in their wanderings. That's why Mishkan is named that way, since it doesn't have a synagogue building and contracts spaces throughout the city for various purposes. But, as time has gone on, we've settled on a few places that we return to again and again. So it is with the Purimspiel, which has been at the Chop Shop in Wicker Park since Purim 5780 just before the Plague Years. I even wrote in past years that the commentary on the sides was very similar. That part was still true, though I could tell that some parts were updated. The food was the same as last year, and this time Purim wasn't on Shabbat so Ta'anit Esther meant I couldn't eat until the spiel had started, as was traditional. It's all familiar.

That which hath been is that which shall be,
And that which hath been done is that which shall be done;
And there is nothing new under the sun.
-Ecclesiastes 1:9

Before I went, yoni-labow-5693413a asked me if I were coming, and I spent most of it hanging out with him and his wife whoolia45. yoni-labow-5693413a had specifically asked if I were coming, and we spent most of the time I was fasting talking about his coming funemployment--he was quitting his job working for his parents' company and striking out on his own, which was obviously pretty stressful. He was the designated heir but the longer he worked there, he said, the more he got a sense that it just wasn't right for him and he needed make a change, so he was going to strike out and go back into sales. I'm sure he'll be great at it.

Despite what I said earlier, the spiel was different:

The big joke this year was apparently based on the rabbi eating a granola bar for an inordinate amount of time during Rosh Hashanah services, which I missed because we only went to the family service and skipped the other ones. In lieu of a Hot Ones sketch like in previous years, they had a sequence where the rabbis answered question about Purim, Judaism, and...rabbits from Google autocomplete, because it turns out the most answers when you put in "rabbi" into Google are about rabbits. I learned that rabbits are prone to spontaneously dying, at least based on the number of times people google things like "rabbits just die" and so on. There was also a question about Purim Meshulash, which occurs whenever Purim falls near Shabbat--Purim is celebrated a day later in walled cities (in practice, just Jerusalem and Shushan), and while Purim itself will never be on Shabbat, Shushan Purim sometimes can. Due to Shabbat some of the celebrations are delayed until the following day, creating a three-day celebration. They had to take a moment to remember it because we're in America and it's not super relevant to our Purim celebrations here.

Brief cautionary tale--I checked what google had to say about Purim Meshulash and I got this AI overview:

"Meshulash" (Hebrew: משולח) in English refers to "emissary" or "delegate."

It's hallucinating again. The Hebrew there reads "meshulaḥ", with a chet at the end, whereas meshulash is משולש with a shin. AI just straight lying to me. Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.

I stayed through the spiel, ate two full plates of food, got an extra drink--every year I find at least one drink ticket somewhere on the floor and get another drink--and when I left, the goodie bag was being handed out by the husband from the couple I sat with at break fast after Yom Kippur. I mentioned I had seen their daughter was acting in a show based on a theatre poster, and we chatted a bit before I walked off into the night and took the bus home. Another Purim in the books.

I'll be curious to see if the location changes next year, but some traditions are good to stick to.

Alright, in my previous post I wrote about how my phone died. I went into the Apple Store, they managed to get it restarted, and they did some tests on it. It passed all the tests, and then immediately after that it went into a boot loop, so they wiped the phone, restored it over a cable from a laptop, I started downloading my backup, and I went on my way. On Wednesday I had no problems, and on Thursday when I picked it up in the morning off the charger it immediately restarted, so I made an appointment for after work. It restarted a further three more times during the day, including at least once that corrupted an app and required me to delete and reinstall it, and then I went to the North Ave. Apple Store for my appointment. This time the phone failed the test in about 20 seconds and the tech brought up an entire screen of kernel panic logs, so I got scheduled for a repair to fix obvious hardware failure.

This is where my future-proofing failed me. I bought the 1 TB model of iPhone, partially so I could keep it for a while and partially because I have tons of podcasts I listen to and this way I could store them all on my phone. Well, it turns out that very few people bought the 1 TB model, so they didn't have any extras in stock and didn't have any parts necessary to do the repair, so they got a part shipped expedited but I still have to wait until probably tomorrow to get a repair done. At the moment I'm just kind of trying to avoid using my phone much since it's also restarted twice today. Just entering my food, checking my podcast list but then listening to them on the computer, and otherwise putting it down on my desk and just making sure it doesn't freak out. I will report back when I get it fixed (hopefully tomorrow).

A while back I wrote about how the food I get from the restaurant popups at work is almost always just...fine. Not bad at least, but not good either, just fine. And because of that, I haven't bought any meals through the popups in a while. But today, I forgot my lunch and while I was thinking of buying a parfait, but first I figured I should check what the restaurant was--yet another in the seemingly endless parade of taco restaurants? To my surprise, it was an Indian restaurant. I don't get to eat Indian food nearly as much as I used to, since it doesn't agree with sashagee's stomach--she says that my favorite flavor combination is vinegary and spicy, which is one of her least favorite combinations even if she likes both of them together--so I ordered some chana masala with rice.

When I went to pick it up I got a big surprise. I was expecting just chana masala over rice, but the person manning the station asked me if I wanted lettuce, onions, and tomatoes, even pointing out that the app didn't give me the option. When I said yes, and that I'd also like one of the delicious gulab jamun for dessert, he prepared my bowl, added some naan (which I hadn't ordered either) on top, and told me the gulab jamun was on the house after spooning half-a-dozen extra spoonfuls of honey in with it. And then when I got back to my desk and ate it, it was delicious. Flavorful and not too spicy (but spicy enough) and the crunch of the lettuce went perfectly with the softness of the chickpeas, and the gulab jamun was unbelievable.

The popups are work at not a lost cause.

How time flies!

Laila is actually gone this weekend because sashagee and I are going to a concert, but we've already gotten news from my parents that she's full of energy, always running around, wanting to paint, read books, go for walks...she's definitely too big for four walls.

For so long we've been worried about Laila's language acquisition, especially after all of her brain troubles, but it seems like she's finally starting to realize the value of using words to communicate. It's still a bit hard to pry them out of her around us, where she'll fall back on grabbing our hands and trying to pull us toward whatever it is that she wants us to do, but she's started using full sentences when she doesn't remember that she's not supposed to talk. The subject of this post came out unbidden, and just recently when I was at the office sashagee sent me this:

sashagee: "Guess what?"
Laila: "Donuts."
sashagee tries not to laugh
Laila: "Donuts."
sashagee, hiding a smile: "Donuts?"
Laila: "Donuts! Let's eat some donuts!"

Regardless of her use of words, all the ideas are there. She knows what she wants and what she wants is donuts.

The big exciting health news is that we have finally, finally got her medicine right and Laila has not had a seizure since a few weeks after I wrote her last baby update. Now, her seizure detection mechanism on her bed goes off and we rush in, and it's always to just find a smiling Laila who's happy to see us. B"H we won't have to worry about it any more.

We enrolled Laila in swimming classes around the middle of January. Thanks to various things we've only been to a couple classes, and they've so far had mixed results. Laila loves being in the water, but the first two classes she kept dumping the floating foam toys that the instructors kept in baskets and they had to keep retrieving them. The second class she was a bit of a terror, and I overheard the instructor mention how stressful teaching her was, but the third class she was a lot calmer and more willing to listen to instructions. I kind of attribute that to extenuating circumstances, though--sashagee thinks that when she first got excited and pushed off the wall to splash around, she got a big mouthful of water and it scared her into caution. We can't rely on that to happen every time, though it sure would be nice. She tends to be foolhardy and while I'm glad she's not too scared, there's a good medium that would be nice to find.

Just about all little girls go through this phase, and now it's Laila's turn--she's a fairy princess:



sashagee's parents got her the wings, the wand, and the heels. The camera has basically not left her neck since she got it, other than taking it away to be charged. And let me tell you, whoever designed that camera is a genius, because the battery runs out in about 30 minutes. Well, I think so--Laila takes about 20 pictures a minute when she's not flipping through all the in-built Hello Kitty filters, so it's possible that that battery would last longer under ideal circumstances. On the other hand, maybe 20 pictures a minute is ideal for a three-year-old.

Laila's other big thing she does not is she's always dragging me into her room to drive her toy cars down on her rug. sashagee got her a rug that has roads and all kinds of scenery on it--mountains, forests, a hospital, a volcano, a pretzel shop, etc--and she loves grabbing me to pull me in to "drive on the road." Of course, that often turns into building with blocks, or watching the colored light projector's ceiling lights that, or using her toddler toolkit to build some simple shapes. It's no surprise that she can't keep much attention on anything--it's our job to help teach her how to do it.

What other ways will she grow and change?

Right now, Genshin Impact is in the middle of the "Lantern Rite," its in-world version of the Lunar New Year--and after years of WoW and then years of FFXIV, let me tell you how refreshing it is to have holidays that aren't transparent copies of modern American holidays, even if they are transparent copies of modern non-American holidays (they've had a Mid-Autumn Festival version too)--and as is typical, there's the main quest and a bunch of minigames you can do for extra Genshinbucks. One of the minigames is a version of Puyo-Puyo, a kind of competitive block-falling game where combos of matching blocks on your side cause various penalties for your opponent. It's been very popular in Japan (and I guess the rest of East Asia) for a while, but until recently was only released in the West under other names, like Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine or Kirby's Avalanche. And I guess this is another such release, since they changed out all the characters again.

Anyway, Laila has really latched on to this game. It's hard to tell sometimes what games she'll want to watch and what games she doesn't care about, but after seeing this, maybe the key is that she loves minigames. When sashagee is playing Infinity Nikki she loves watching fishing, and when I booted up Vintage Story and she saw a river, she wanted me to go fishing in it. Once she saw that sashagee was playing this game, she settled in on her lap to watch, and I told Laila that it was called "Puyo-Puyo" and that led to this.

( Video of cuteness within )

The subject line of this post was yelled after the video was taken. And this morning, she asked me to play Puyo-Puyo after I mentioned it while we were on a phone call with poppa and nana. She really does love Puyo-Puyo.

We've had it easy the last few years. The temperature rarely got below 0°C, and when it did it was only a small amount and only for a short time. Today, when I left the house the temperature was -31°C (with wind) and I saw almost no one on the way to work. The train was 80% empty when it's usually standing room only by the time I get to Belmont, and then when I got off downtown at Grand the temperature was even worse. My face nearly froze despite all my bundling and it was a relief to walk into the office, where well over half of my co-workers decided not to come in. sashagee was really hoping that I wouldn't have to go out into the cold, but I wasn't going to ask--even though apparently a bunch of my co-workers did--so I just waited and hoped that a message would come through saying we could stay home. None ever did, and so here I am.

Remembering how the conversation I had with my old boss at the end-of-year party where he grumped that basically every other department comes into the office like two times a month. I'm not sure I'd want to go in that infrequently, admittedly--during the summer I enjoy coming in twice a week because I can walk along the river every day--but this time of year, it'd be nice.

The weather also led to me laughing harder than I have in a long time when sashagee sent me a meme about "toddler science" that had the following quote:

Length toddler can run when:

Being chased: 5 miles
Asked to walk: 5 steps

When I took Laila out to the store with me yesterday, I got her all bundled up and ready to go and she just silently put her arms up and wanted to be carried. Halfway to the store she wanted to be put down, so I put her down, she took a few steps over to the gravel and crunched around for a few seconds...then silently turned around and put her arms up.

Well, it being so frozen, I really wanted something warm and filling. I wrote before about the quality of the rotating restaurants at work and didn't want that--I wanted something I'd appreciate. So I went out for ramen:


Ramen-san had brisket ramen, which is the best part of the local ramen place near the Red Line stop up where I live, and it's leaving the menu tomorrow, so I tried it. And it was...good. It wasn't as good as the local ramen place--the local place has big chunks of fatty brisket and Ramen-san had ground-up brisket bits, as you can see in the photo--but the broth and the noodles were both good. I feel like that's the problem with American ramen other than the price (ramen in Japan is like 600円 for a reasonbly-sized bowl, and in America they try to charge you $20). You can get two out of three: good noodles, good broth, good fillings. If you're unlucky you get one out of three. You can almost never get all three. This place had two out of three which is mostly what I hope for.

I got an extra egg though and the eggs were delicious. Slightly melty like they should be but not yet melted into the ramen when it was brought out. Perfect. Still didn't stop me from freezing when I walked back out into the cold, though.

Someday I'll remember that the food I can get from the cafeteria at work is always just fine. It's never good, it's never bad, it's just...fine. Today I had tacos, and the rice and beans had barely any flavor. The taco was grilled veggies and they tasted like they had been grilled just in oil, so good but not amazing. About the only bit of flavor on them was the guacamole that I paid for, which was legitimately good. The worst of these restaurants was a Mediterranean restaurant where the pilaf tasted like they had just cooked some rice, fried it in oil for a couple minutes, and shook out some spices from a jar over it and then put it in a tub to serve. It was legitimately even more disappointing than just having plain white rice. And they didn't offer hummus!

About the only good visiting restaurant I've had there so far was an arepas place with beans and avocado and it actually had some flavor. Coincidentally, they've been here twice. Everyone else, meh.

Am I going to learn a lesson from this? No, I will not.

I hurt my back.

On Monday I was vacuuming and doing the area around the closet in Laila's room when I bent down a bit to get behind the door and felt a sharp pain in my back. I levered myself back up to vertical using the vacuum, told Laila that everything was fine, and tried to do the same to sashagee when she came to see what was going on but she was having none of it. She told me to sit down with some ice on my back, ignored my protests, and proceeded to finish up the vacuuming. Laila came over and sat on my lap--fortunately I wasn't so injured that she couldn't do that--and sashagee handled mostly getting her ready for bed. She said she would do all the bedtime singing and stories, too, but I wasn't going to miss bedtime, and sitting seiza wasn't too bad, so I came in and sat that way and went out at the end and took it easy. When I woke up the next morning it still hurt but not as much, and sashagee put an icy-hot patch on my back after my shower and I was even able to pick up Laila when she asked "Hold you?" I took it easy yesterday, working from home, and today I was able to go back into the office.

I'm lucky. My back is still sore, and I don't have perfect range of movement, but I was able to take a full shower in the standing shower and wipe down all the walls afterwards as long as I knelt down to get the bottom instead of bending over. As I was talking about it to sashagee I described my work as a "soft hands office job" and it's true, but it's meant that even over age 40 my body is still in very good condition. People repeatedly think I'm 5-10 years younger than I actually am, and that helped me bounce back.

But it's a warning that I need to be careful.