Listen to the Rain

Yesterday, while Laila and I were out on a walk, someone got out of the car and said hello to me, and it took me a moment to realize it was one of our downstairs neighbors. His wife also got out of the car, and they said hi to Laila--Laila immediately wanted to be held by the wife and wouldn't even give the time of day to the husband--and we walked back to the condo building and chatted. When we got to the top floor, Laila said "kitty!" so they invited her in to say hi to their cat and sashagee heard us talking and came down to see what the commotion was. Our neighbors made us tea and we talked while Laila ran the wife around asking to read books, look for the cat, and otherwise make the husband feel ignored. He got his high five in the end though, after we finished our tea! This is the kind of thing that makes my parents feel better about their granddaughter living in the big city.

Then today, I got a text message about the new kitchen appliances that I ordered and I read through the checklist and noticed the glaring:

"Verify there are less than (3) flights of stairs to get to the install location (not applicable if elevator is available)"

We live on the fourth floor, but our address has a three in it because the floors are addressed like a European building (Ground, 1, 2, 3). So the person who helped us make the order might have seen a 3 in the address and been like, oh, no problem, they'll be fine. Well, I called in to check and it was not fine. The person on the phone was very clear that it's third floor or lower, no exceptions, so I cancelled the order after writing down what all the models of everything we ordered were. A little weird they don't account for higher floors in the city, but there will surely be another place that does.

As I speak, the dryer is going with the first load of laundry.

As I wrote about a month ago, we had a leak in the wall that required a hefty plumber's bill to fix. I went back and forth with the association for a while trying to wrangle payment out of them and last Friday they finally sent me an email with an image of the full repayment. So I told my parents, and since my father had offered to come fix the wall, he and my mother spent pretty much the entire weekend at our place with him doing the work. I helped where I could, but to my slight embarrassment it ended up being probably 99% my father's doing--the laundry closet is small enough that only one person can fit in there at a time, so I couldn't even really help with painting or holding anything. I mostly just passed tools to him when he needed them and held down baseboard when he was cutting them.

But the laundry room is fixed and redone and now we can do laundry again! Time to do the fluffy new towels we bought.

Today's the day that I get my second dose of the Moderna COVID vaccine! Soon I'll be immune, one of the lucky people in the zombie movies who somehow don't react to the rage virus, and I'll be able to...still stay at home most of the time because really, what is there that I'd want to go and do? The CDC's updated guidelines means I'll probably be able to have a Seder this year since Pesach is two weeks from now but it's not going to be a huge one. It'll be me, sashagee, britshlez, and maybe one other person. It won't be until much later in the holiday cycle that things get back to normal, though I am excited for sashagee to go to her first Seder!

We've gotten a ton of emails from high up in the AMA the last few days over an incident with podcast put out by JAMA. The emails didn't have any context, so I just notice that something was horribly insensitive and we'd need to do better and recommit ourselves to racial equity and it was a lot like every time I log onto social media against after Shabbat and try to reconstruct what the Discourse is. So I looked it up and that article is a good summary, but here's the pull quote that JAMA tweeted out:

"No physician is racist, so how can there be structural racism in health care? An explanation of the idea by doctors for doctors in this user-friendly podcast [...]
-image archived here

Even the idea that they were going for clicks is belied by the content of the podcast, which has a lot of complaining about how terrible it is to be called racist. So we're meeting this afternoon for a town hall where they're going to go over steps forward and what we're going to do. We'll see if there's any good actionable steps they announce

I started a new TTRPG! thosesocks invited me to play in a Scum & Villainy game (a derivative of Blades in the Dark). We've had one session so far and most of it was taken up by character and ship creation, so I can't really say that much about how it plays, but we started off with a mission to steal a bunch of speeder bikes (essentially) and came up with a plan to do it via staging a race and then winning. My character is a "gothic hood ornament," a mystic devoted to fighting the Dark Between the Stars, since I read this setting primer and the space feudalism, humanocentrism, guilds, and vanished aliens called the Ur all sound a lot like Fading Suns, one of my favorite RPGs ever. I'm looking forward to seeing where the game goes!

Lastly, our drier is fixed! I didn't realize it was broken, but it had always been weird--the windows fogged up when it was used and I thought that something might be leaking, but it's stuck in a closet and since it's a washer/dryer combo it was far too heavy to move myself without risking it falling on me, which was not something I wanted to happen in a pandemic. Last weekend my parents came over for dinner and for my father to do some Dad Things around the house and when sashagee mentioned how dusty everything is, he managed to wiggle his way over the top and find out that the hose had been disconnected at the back! Probably by something falling off before I even moved in--there were drier sheets and a detergent back there that I've never used. My father reconnected the hose, I vacuumed out the inside of the closet, and now hopefully it won't be nearly so dusty in here all the time. Good thing too, with a baby coming.

Alright, now time for that town hall.

I've written before about Shoujo Kageki ⭐️ Revue Starlight, back when I first saw it at an Anime Chicago sampler two years ago and when I went to a panel with the designers and director at ACEN 2019, but one thing I haven't mentioned before is banana miso soup. Daiba Nana (punning on Dai-Banana, "Huge banana") makes it in one of the episodes, and it turns out it was weirdly popular on the Japanese blogging site Ameblo around the time that Shoujo Kageki ⭐️ Revue Starlight was being made. I've wanted to make it for a while, but usually I didn't have any bananas, or I didn't want to try it. But today was the day! I found a recipe on cookpad (the title is, "Is it dangerous to eat lol? Banana miso soup lololololol"), made it over sashagee's objections, and tried it.

( Banana nice. Bananice! )

I also had to perform a bit of home repair today. When I went out to the Middle Eastern Grocery Store to pick up more hummus and pita, rain blew in and sashagee had to close the windows. Two of the windows in my home are on sliding levers and one detached from the lever, so when I got back I removed the blinds, unscrewed the holders for the blinds, detached the screen, and then put the lever back into place. After celebratory handpies, I put it all back together and then we sat down just as a stormburst blew in, so I got it in the nick of time. Those windows open outward toward the west, and all storms in Chicago come from the west, so there would have been a lot of water on the floor if I hadn't fixed it in time. And thanks to sashagee for trying to do it herself and figuring out how the blinds attach to the wall.

Now, to play more Chrono Trigger and beat Magus.

I did so much this weekend, everyone.

( BBQ Shabbat, Rickicles, and beach day )

Today is Purim, so I'm fasting for Ta'anit Esther, because even though I completed a tractate of the Talmud and thus am eligible for a siyyum, I did it mostly by listening to podcasts and catching Daf Yomi memes, so I don't really feel like I'm actually eligible. Tonight is the Mishkam Purim party, which was the first major Mishkan even I went to after Kol Nidre, and I'm excited! I just need to concentrate on my work long enough to get there.

What an amazing weekend!

Last weekend was one of those weekends where you feel like you need a weekend to recover from the weekend. But mostly in a good way.

Wednesday was mostly ordinary, except that the previous week a real phishing attack happened to hit us at exactly the same time as an IT-initiated phishing exercise. Some people fell for the former, so IT pushed a company-wide password reset. So I reset my password, left, and prepped for a four-day-long weekend.

Thursday was theoretically going to be mostly cooking the Seder dishes that would keep, like the flourless choco cake or the kamaboko, but what I actually spent most of the day dealing with was the plumber. I put in a maintenance request for a leaky faucet and a non-functional sink stopper on Monday, and on Thursday the plumber (unexpectedly) arrived, so I guess it's a good thing I was home. He inspected things, stepped out to get parts, then came back and spent a couple hours working on the pipes. He replaced much of the visible kitchen sink piping and bathroom piping, installed new faucets, and then left. And when I went to take a shower, I discovered that he hadn't actually attached the bathtub faucet and the pressure of the shower stopper forced it off of its pipe.

I told the handman, who reported it to the management company, who told the plumber. After an extremely uncomfortable and awkward shower, I went shopping for my Seder ingredients, and about fifteen minutes after I got back, the plumber showed up again and finished the job. That meant I had time to eat dinner and go to therapy and then only a little time to do the cooking, but I did finish the charoset and the flourless choco cake, so at least I got something done.

Friday was Seder prep and my Seder.

Saturday I woke up early, went back to sleep, and then woke up again later and spent the morning watching anime and otherwise taking a bit of time to decompress. Then in the afternoon I went to gothiklezmer's Seder out in Avondale, which was lovely. gothiklezmer asked me about what was different between her Seder and mine, so for posterity I'll record it here: there was a lot more discussion during my Seder, probably because my Seder had more people who had never attended a Seder before and her Seder had a child in attendance; my Seder was on the floor in a circle and hers was at a table, as is more traditional; and her Seder had more vegetarian-friendly food. Like me, though, she also made her own gefilte fish , though hers were due to her family's long residence in the Pacific Northwest, so it was made with salmon and cod (substituted for the original halibut). I ate a half-dozen of them, and more like a dozen of the deviled eggs. There were maror-themed versions, with pickled ginger and wasabi, and charoset-themed versions, with nut butter, and both of them were fantastic. As was the homemade ice cream for dessert, especially the matcha flavor.

As I mentioned before, though gothiklezmer had built her own Haggadah using Haggadot.com, and a couple times during the reading--we went around and read in turns, of course--I read part of the Hebrew that's usually sung, because I'm so used to hosting Seders now where Jews are in the minority and if there's any singing of Hebrew, it's just us doing it.

I don't often get to attend First and Second Seder, but this is two years in a row it's happened. If I had attended even one Seder, it would have been enough (), but I'm certainly glad I got to go to both.

I left almost immediately after the Seder ended, turning down the offer of leftovers since gothiklezmer and I both knew my fridge couldn't handle any more food, because I had another obligation. lisekatevans had invited me to an Easter Vigil suite of events starting at four o'clock--pool swimming, dinner, the vigil, and a gathering in her hotel room--but she had done it at 3:15 p.m., just when I was leaving for second Seder. I told her that all I could probably attend was the party in the hotel room, but I specifically made time to go to that. I was only there for an hour or so, since the reason she and some people from her church had gotten a hotel room downtown in the first place was to more easily attend the dawn Easter service the next morning, but it was lovely company, even if I couldn't eat the homemade brownies, cookies, or other treats available.

I also learned that Easter begins at sundown, which was new information to me.

Sunday I woke up early, fell back asleep, then woke up again and read a bit before it was time for meowtima's birthday celebration! I could only attend a bit of it, the opening lunch at SUBO Filipino Kitchen in Albany Park, but the food was delicious once I took a bit of time to navigate the menu and avoid all the treif and chametz it was covered with (no lumpia for me, sadly ). At one o'clock everyone got up to go to a nearby park to break open a piñata, but I had another obligation, so I said goodbye and walked down to the Windy City Playhouse to attend a performance of Noises Off with liszante.

I had never even heard of Noises Off before liszante invited me to it, but nearly everyone I told about it told me how much they loved it so I guess I'm just out of the loop. It started slow for me, because while my parents love watching shows like The Vicar of Dibley or Fawlty Towers or Keeping Up Appearances, I've only seen them in passing while at their house, so I'm not familiar with the tropes of British comedy. Once we were moved backstage, however, and we saw the deteriorating relationships among the cast members while they were still trying to perform to the "audience" out in front, that was when I really got into it. By Act III, when we moved back to the front and the third run of the play-within-a-play disintegrated into chaos, I was laughing as hard as anyone else. It's already been extended--liszante originally saw it in January and she said the entire cast is different--but I highly recommend it.

At that point I had to run to finish my chores, so I went home after a stop at Whole Foods and spent the rest of the night doing laundry and cooking. Today is more laundry and hopefully nothing else. This last week has been amazing, but I need a day to just sit. Starting Thursday and going right through Sunday, it was like Clock Town Day 3 from Majora's Mask was just playing on loop in the back of my mind.

Here's to a day that's not just . And I hope you all had a great weekend too!

WELP.


So schoolpsychnerd and I were sitting down and enjoying a quiet Sunday afternoon listening to the Metroid Episode of VGMPire when we heard a tremendous crash from the kitchen. I yelled out to ask what the hell it was, she replied that she had no idea, we both went to check and found...that. One of the cheap plastic shelf supports had snapped in half, causing the shelf to collapse and dumping all of our large plates, rice bowls, and pickle dishes out on to the floor. Most of them, including the majority of the plates I inherited from my grandmother, the rice bowls we bought at the Ginza Festival, and the pickle dishes we got as a wedding present from schoolpsychnerd’s uncle, were shattered into a million pieces.

At least the smaller plates survived. And the shelf didn’t actually break, and the cabinet doors opened instead of having the dishes smash through the glass there. If the cabinets had broken too, it would have been much, much more annoying than it is.

After we cleaned everything up, we headed out to the Asian grocery store to get some more supplies for curry and night and now to pick up some cheap rice bowls until we can get more durable replacements. On the way back, we stopped in to a restaurant and grabbed some cookies. And since we already had milk, well:



Hopefully nothing goes wrong with the curry!