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.

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.

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.

Not a ton to report, but I'm still haunted by how little I wrote here with I lived in Japan and how much I wish I had written more so I'd have an insight into my mind at the time. Memory is too fallible.

Autumn has finally come to Chicago. What's more, it's the end of autumn, since we seem to have completely skipped the fun part of autumn. It was warm enough on Halloween night that when Laila told us she wanted to see the decorations, we went out without coats and no one had to do the "put a coat on over their costume" thing I remember doing when I was younger. And now it's 10°C and was colder when I left this morning. Yesterday the wind bit enough that my autumn coat was almost not enough and it was only the exertion of carrying the CSA box that let me power through it. The weather report shows that it won't be warmer than 16°C for the next week, and it'll be cloudy and rainy the entire time. No good time to go look at the leaves, though I'll see if I can get at least one good picture soon.

My diet is slowly getting more and more vegetarian as I lean into keeping more kosher. The best way to prevent mixing milk and meat is to just not eat meat (plus, meat that hasn't been sheḥted isn't kosher anyway), so I'll often go weeks without eating any. I don't order meat from restaurants because I can't trust that there won't be any dairy in the surrounding ingredients--at least if I order a salad and there's bacon bits on it I can see the bacon. So, most of what I get now if we're eating out is fish or salads. I try not to eat too much fake meat because, unlike something like tofu, we don't have any idea what the long-term effects of eating a lot of it are. Plus, it's probably not that healthy--the same reason I don't eat tons of falafel, because sure it's vegetarian, but it's deep-fried so I shouldn't be eating it at every meal. So if I really want a hamburger I get a black bean or impossible patty and real cheese, but mostly I get fish.

I have not noticed any particular effects from this, either positive or negative. Now, I was already in good health before I did this and I still get tons of moderate exercise in--at least 75 minutes of tracked, dedicated walking per day, not counting the incidental walking I also do--so I don't know that I'm the best test case. But going 98% vegetarian has been pretty nice. It's actually quite easy to find tasty food...though not quite so easy when going out to eat.

Walking to get my CSA box yesterday, I ran into one half of 2hotcookieschicago on her way home and slowed down to talk with her. She hadn't realized that I lived nearby, though it turns out that a lot of people from Mishkan live in the neighborhood, including the director of programming, the music directory, and one of the people on the board of directors, and there's probably even more people that I don't recognize but would recognize me if they stopped to talk to me. We only had a few minutes to chat but I told her about the CSA that I get and how I go to pick it up every week, and she's probably going to look into it. I used to get another CSA back when True Nature was still a store before the Whole Foods moved in--this is how you know I've lived in the same place for a while--but the owner of that farm died and I guess there was no one to take it over. It's nice that we have another CSA and it's also nice that it stops for part of the year and the contents obviously changes--you can get it in January and February, but they said it's basically just root vegetables then.

We used to have local restaurants come to work occasionally to offer lunch, but after the Plague Years they stopped because there simply weren't enough people still in the office to make it worth their while. Well, they started offering it in the building restaurant down on the 16th floor, one restaurant on Tuesday and sushi (always sushi for some reason) on Wednesday, and just a few weeks ago they decided to expand it to separate restaurants each day. I decided that it might be nice to get food out once a week, since most of the meals were $10-$13, which is pretty good, and so far I've had mixed results. Last week I got vegetarian biryani from Taste of Assyria and it was tasteless--it was like they fried up some rice in olive oil for thirty seconds and then sprinkled on spices after it was already done frying. They didn't even have any hummus! On the other hand, I got a vegetarian paisa bowl from Arepa George today (rice, cabbage, beans, plaintain, avocado) and it was delicious. Tuesday is a soul food restaurant called Cook It Mama I'm probably going to skip--"soul food" and "kosher" generally don't exist in the same room--and the Wednesday restaurant isn't available yet, so we'll see what it is. A nice change of pace from the salads I bring to work and also usually eat at home on workdays for lunch.

Meeting Laila and sashagee after work for dinner, and after work is now.

A few weeks ago, someone on one of the Discord servers I'm on posted that Night Tempo was coming to America to do a concert. I had never heard any of his music, but sashagee is a huge city pop fan (one of the playlists I remember her listening to a lot on Spotify when we first met is called "City Bops") and it came recommended by 4PlayerPod, so I bought two tickets and got ready for some future funk.

On Tuesday I went to work as normal, and then when I was, I went down to Grand and waited for sashagee to get off the L. We had two hours before doors opened and no real plans about where to eat, so we wandered around River North looking at the restaurants. Most of the places I used to go--Slurping Turtle, Imperial Lamian, that burger restaurant on Hubbard whose name I don't remember--are closed now and I haven't spent enough time to find new places to really recommend one, and we had just decided on going to a burger place when we were walking by Ema and I mentioned how good it was and how long it had been since I had eaten there. sashagee said, well, why don't we go here then, and so we did! When we got in there was basically no one in there, just a couple people sitting around the bar and maybe one or two tables full, so we got a table in the bar section. And it's a good thing that we got in when we did, because in the middle of our meal the place started filling up and by the time our main courses came it was nearly full and people were having to wait.


Hummus and pita, crispy potatoes (absolutely amazing), feta cheese and olives as my main course. Not visible here was the salad that sashagee ordered and shared with me, and in return I shared the potatoes with her. Not visible here is the gin cocktail I got or the chocolate mousse cake we split. Since we had plenty of time and were about three blocks from the concert location, we stayed at dinner around two hours, right up until the doors opened, and then walked over to House of Blues.

I have literally never arrived at a concert when the doors opened so it was eerie to go in and see the place almost entirely empty. That turned out to be not just that we arrived early--we had heard from 4PlayerPod that Night Tempo had mentioned online that some cities on his US tour had sold extremely well and some of them had sold...less well, and it turned out that Chicago was one of the less well-selling cities. Even when everyone finally arrived the room was only about half-full, and while I'm sure this was disappointing for Night Tempo, it turned out that this was the most fun way to experience a concert I've ever had. Much like the problem with tourist locations being all the other damn tourists polluting it with their presence, the problem with concerts is that there are too many people there and it's impossible to get a good view, dance without people getting in your way, or really have the best time until you get there early and stand in the middle the whole time. Not here. 4PlayerPod, his girlfriend, sashagee, and I all had a great spot near the middle when for the opening act--a local named DJ Mochi who was actually really good--and then Night Tempo came out, introduced himself as "Random Asian man," and got to playing.


One disadvantage of a smaller crowd size could have been lowered enthusiasm, but that wasn't the case here. Everyone who was here really wanted to be there, so when he got up to the front and started jumping around on stage, the entire crowd followed. We listened to some of his original pieces and a lot of funky remixes of classic city pop hits like "黄昏のBay City" and of course "Plastic Love." 4PlayerPod and his girlfriend had to leave about twenty minutes before the end of the show so they missed Plastic Love, but we stayed up until the end. And with a medium-sized audience, there was no crowd all leaving at the same time! An amazing show, and I'm glad we caught it because the ticket sales make think it won't happen again.

If you want to check out Night Tempo's music, his entire discography is available for $16.

A couple days ago I was looking for something to make for lunch that was delicious and different and wouldn't take 10-15 minutes out of my hour lunch to make when I stumbled onto an article about 卵かけご飯 (tamago kake gohan, "egg on rice"). I knew about it and had made it before, but when I made it, it was soupy and nearly inedible. Turns out it was because I used too much egg, or rather, I made too little rice, so I cooked up a cup of rice instead of half a cup, cracked in a raw egg and got to mixing; added some soy sauce, black sesame seeds, and shio furikake; crumbled up some roasted nori on top, and here we go:


It was extremely good. So good that now I'm thinking about alternating this with my usual breakfast (salmon, pickles, miso soup and rice) on days when I go into the office. I can add a small miso soup to it if it doesn't seem like enough food, and on winter days it'll be lovely and warm. We'll just need to make sure to have more of that toasted nori around to crumble up on top, and maybe some 沢庵 (takuan, "pickled daikon radish") to put on the top. Then it'll be perfect.

The TKG thing is from hearing that the youths call it TKG and it was a Tiktok trend, but I completely ignore Tiktok so I can't verify if that's true or not.

Currently it's just at home, since sashagee and Laila went out to visit her parents in the suburbs. Both sets of parents have been wanting a weekend with Laila, but since we're switching her to a new medication we didn't want to leave her without us until we're more sure how she takes to it and if there will be any side effects. So far she seems to be mostly her normal self again, which is good--at the beginning she seemed a bit like a zombie and would barely talk, but that faded away after a couple days. Now she's back to being much chattier. B"H.

A few months ago, I signed up for SakuraCo's snack box at sashagee's insistence, since we used to get a snack box from a different company but that company went out of business due to Plague Years-related troubles. In some ways I like the old box better--for one thing, they put two of every snack in the box because they correctly assumed a lot of the boxes would be shared and so you wanted a full snack to yourself--but there is one way in which the box beat out the old one:



Warabimochi.

If you're not familiar, warabimochi is a Japanese summertime treat, with roasted soybean flour dusted over the top and served cold. Chiyoda occasionally had a warabimochi truck that would travel along the back roads playing its happy warabimochi truck song:

"Warabiiiiiiiiii mochiiiiiiiii beep beep beepbeepbeepbeep *musical jingle*

I haven't had it in over a decade--I've been able to find momiji manjū, a Hiroshima regional specialty (名物 meibutsu), much easier than warabimochi, and it was lovely. I'll stay loyal to SakuraCo just for that.

I haven't actually done that much, though. I texted a couple people to see if they were free but no one was, so I worked on Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead modding content and played Final Fantasy XIV in my free time, but I also cleaned the whole house, which is a lot easier when there isn't a rampaging toddler determined to make everything messy again after you've been cleaning. They're coming home later today, through, just in time for Shabbat, and when Laila sees all the clean, uncluttered floors who knows what she'll do.

And we all survived. Even Laila--somewhat to my surprise, she's still asking for matzah today after the holiday is over. By name, too! She just really loves matzah.

Last night I went to aaronhparker's combined post-Pesaḥ ḥametzathon and birthday part at Piece Brewery and Pizzeria in Wicker Park. I'm not usually much of a pizza person, but the pizza choices aaronhparker made--a standard red sauce and cheese one, sure, but also a mushroom white pizza and a margherita pizza. The white pizza went first with astonishing speed and the margherita pizza wasn't that far behind, and I even liked it! I told sashagee that she would have liked it, and that she should have come. It was just me since it took place at a brewery, but I guess the pizzeria part took precedence because there was a baby changing table in the men's bathroom. It could have been pizza for the whole family! As it was, I spent a lot of time talking to yoni-labow-5693413a, who was very interested in whether I was watching Tokyo Vice. I told him I had read the book but not seen the show, he encouraged me to watch it, we talked about kids (he and his wife are expecting a baby), we did vodka shots, it was a lovely time.

We went to two Seders as well. Last Monday we were at britshlez's place with just a few people for a small First Seder, and last Tuesday I went alone to aaronhparker's for another Seder. For the first one we didn't really do the after-meal portion of the Seder but we did for the second one, so I got at least one full-on Seder experience this year.

Laila spent most of the weekend at her papa and nana's while sashagee and I repainted the sun room, but the experience was somewhat marred by her having another seizure. This was much more worrying to us than to the doctors--it's been six months since her last seizure, and she's grown quite a bit since the last time her medicine was upped. By the time she was being checked out at the hospital, Laila had already gotten 100% back to her normal self--the doctors said that it can take up to 24 hours sometimes, so her recovering after only a few hours was a very good sign--and since she responded well to all the seizure tests they sent us home, with a prescription for a higher medicine amount. We even gave Laila back to her grandparents to finish out the weekend since it wasn't a serious problem, just scary in the moment. My mother said, "I'm too old for this" when we met them at the hospital.

Alright, Laila didn't take a nap today. Back to work.

Chicago weather sure is something. Yesterday I didn't even have to wear a coat to the office and when I went out at lunchtime it was a balmy 21°C. Last night we had a massive thunderstorm roll through, tornado warnings, golf-ball-sized hail, lashing rain, lightning every 10 seconds, and then this morning it was -4°C with a howling wind when I left for work and it's still only 0°C now. I definitely did not go for a walk today.

Yesterday, though, sashagee and Laila came downtown after Laila's gymnastics class was over and met me outside the building and I took them up to the office and showed them around. When Laila heard my boss's voice--she'll often call during the day on any excuse so she can see Laila on video chat--Laila ran over and into her arms, and that definitely made her day. Several other of my coworkers got to see Laila too, culminating in the division head, my boss's boss's boss, having Laila sitting on her lap and drawing on her notepad with a pen. After half an hour, we left and walked down to Revival Food Hall for lunch, taking the stairs down to the river and walking west for a couple blocks. It took longer than I expected and sashagee had a rough time with it, but the food was worth it. sashagee and Laila got burgers, and while sashagee stood waiting for her burger I found a table and kept Laila company. When they started eating, I went and got my food:


Za'atar chicken, hummus, chickpeas, tahina, baba ganoush, etc.
From Lashuk (from the Hebrew לשוק, "to the market"), which I've been meaning to go to for a long while but never had the time. This was the time--sashagee wanted burgers and I didn't, and there were no good burgers places very close to the office anyway. By the time I got back, Laila had eaten almost all of her burger already and so had sashagee, so I scarfed down my incredibly delicious hummus bowl ( I need to make some of these for myself at home), and then we walked back to the office where my boss, who was heading home as well, picked up Laila and they and sashagee walked off while I went back to work.

And now it's freezing outside, but it was definitely a lovely day.

So Laila had a playdate last Thursday with another kid that we met through baby Shabbat. Exciting! Of course, the thing about children that everyone knows is that they're germ factories, and poor Mira had a cold. The playdate was only a couple hours, but that was enough time for Laila to pick up Mira's cold and then spread it to sashagee and me. My parents came to pick up Laila for a grandparents' weekend on Tuesday, before we knew that I was sick, and it's a good thing they did, because I got sick on Wednesday morning. I came home from work, worked from home that day, was sick Thursday, and now I'm mostly feeling better, just in time for Laila to come home. She was exhausted when she got home but I got a big hug.

Unfortunately, that does mean I'm very behind on my reading page, but I have a lot of tabs open so I can catch up after Shabbat (when I stay off the internet).

Yesterday evening I was feeling a little better, and sashagee was as well, and we've been wanting to go to a new Japanese restaurant that opened up on Thorndale called Kōhoku-ku Ramen, apparently a second location for a restaurant that's in New York. Sure, they have ramen, and that's fine, but I didn't want any of that. What I wanted was curry, and curry was what I got:


It turned out to be an extra-good decision for warming up, because two minutes before we reached the restaurant there was one of those Chicago squalls where there's a few raindrops and then the sky just opens up. We walked maybe half a block and got half-drenched, entering the restaurant as lightning and thunder crashed outside, and then ordered our delicious curry. And it was delicious.

They had taikyaki too! I was too annoyed that they were $8 to appreciate it--I still remember paying ¥150 each from the truck that showed up outside of Thanks sometimes--but sashagee got one.

Alright, back to drinking more tea to heal my throat.

Chinese food.

Yesterday we went to Ming Hin, where arsduo in years past had held his Erev Christmas gatherings. He's moved to Toronto to be with his partner, but I decided after three years to take up the mantle and continue the tradition. I invited a bunch of people, some of them could come, and at 6 p.m. we met up for Chinese food:


Delicious.

I was hoping to have a Russian-speaking contingent there (shoutout to aguart), since tom.hen.12's wife is Russian, dinaraua is Khazak and speaks Russian, and maptekar is Ukrainian and speaks Russian. But both of the latter couldn't come, so my plans were foiled. Someday!

After dinner, the others stood around outside while I gave sashagee some time to have a grown-up conversation and chased Laila around--she saw a maybe seven or eight year old jumping from small stone bench to stone bench and demanded that I help her make the same jumps. Then we went to Uni Uni for boba, I got a coconut milk taro tea with coconut milk jelly that was AMAZING, and we all went home. Laila didn't get to bed until 10 p.m. but by 8 a.m. she was awake and demanding to be let out...and then took a four hour nap. So it goes.

Today, as our first full day back at home, we did absolutely nothing. I was going to go shopping, but I was foiled by Whole Foods being closed, so we...ordered Chinese food. The Halaḥah is clear--while it is permissible to eat it on the 24th, the 25th is praiseworthy, though there is a maḥloket on some issues:

While the rest of the questions above are good she’elot, poskim generally hold that the food must be either purchased from a Chinese restaurant or recognizably Chinese, but ideally both. If your food is in one category but not the other, the accepted practice is to eat a fortune cookie (the symbol of American Chinese restaurants) in order to rule out a safek of any kind.

So if you’re on a diet, sushi would be fine (b’dieved) as long as it was purchased from a Chinese restaurant and not a specifically sushi establishment, as long as you also ate a fortune cookie.

Judaism is like that.

Merry Christmas to all my Christian friends!

Laila is two and a half years old!

In the two year and four month update I wrote about how I was worried about her sentence usage, but she's been making up on that score. We taught her "I want [x]" and she picked up on it very quickly, and we've been quick to enforce it too. Of course, she's a toddler, so she gets derailed halfway through. She'll point and say "This. Bite." and then I'll say, "I. Want. Bread." and she'll think a moment and say "I...want...mohlow!!! [marshmallow] and then point to the kitchen cabinet where sashagee keeps her hot chocolate supplies. She know what she wants and what she wants is dessert.

She started her early intervention therapy after her assessment which showed her as almost a year behind in speech. After the speech therapist's first visit, she asked sashagee if the assessing therapists told her anything when they did Laila's assessment, and when sashagee said it was over Zoom, the therapist did a 😐 face. She has since said that she's positive she won't be seeing Laila after her next assessment and that most of the kids she sees don't talk at all, or barely. The occupational therapist had a similar reaction and that one I was there for--she interacted with Laila for an hour, and then rather than telling us what her plan was to help Laila get on track, she asked us if there was anything we waned her to work on. Laila is clearly not nearly as bad as the Zoom assessment would indicate.

Lately, she has really taken to Judaism, by which I mean that she'll sometimes take two cups from her dish playset, put them side-by-side like Shabbat candles, cover her eyes with one hand, and start trying to sing. And her current two favorite books were sent to us by PJ Library--one is called Fridays Are Special, about Shabbat preparations including baking the ḥallah (her favorite part), and the other is called Hoppy Hanukkah!, about a family of rabbits getting ready to celebrate Ḥanukah. That book is still a little advanced for her, but she's asking to read it. Book progress!

Also, she's finally helping mama in the kitchen. After watching a Kimono Mom video about a フルーツサンド (cream and fresh fruit sandwich), she helped sashagee make the cream and put the sandwich together and then got to eat it while wearing her Totoro apron:


Once again, I can use the Chiyo-chan cooking icon.

What other ways will she grow and change?