Listen to the Rain

Friday afternoon, my father showed up and picked up Laila and left to take her back for a grandparents' weekend (about which more later), and sashagee and I were left to our own devices. I had taken the afternoon off and we originally planned to go do something in the afternoon as well, but sashagee didn't want to feel rushed, so I made reservations at a "dark, romantic" restaurant per her request and at 5:15 we left to head to the L and arrived at our destination just in time: Nomonomo Japanese-Pub + Grill in Logan Square.

I haven't been to an izakaya in years, ever since Izakaya Mita closed after the owner tragically died of cancer in his forties, so I'm glad that sashagee picked it! It was dark (though I'm not sure about romantic) and we arrived just in time for happy hour, so I immediately ordered the sake and sashagee ordered a beer, then we looked at the rest of the menu:

( Japanese food ahead )

Not pictured: the kara-age. The happy hour special had its own specific kara-age that we got and it was amazing, just fantastic, and then we wanted more kara-age so we ordered the normal menu kara-age and it...had bones? It was basically just American fried chicken except with kara-age skin. We ate it, but we had to be careful and sashagee had to use her hands because she doesn't have as much practice with chopsticks as I do--I ate it with chopsticks, which makes me want to try eating fried chicken with chopsticks to keep my hands clean.

The only problem was the service, which was abysmal. We were there for almost two hours, and much of it was waiting around for someone to ask if we wanted more drinks. Getting the check and paying itself took almost half an hour! I would go back because the food was delicious but I'd definitely make sure to block off the appropriate amount of time.

After a mile walk down Milwaukee we arrived at the Stan Mansion, just set among other houses on Kedzie, but with (fake) candles set up outside. The last Fever concert I attended had someone come out in person and give a brief speech advertisement for Fever itself, which was weird because we had obviously heard of the company since we were at their event, but at that time they were trying to establish themselves and I think had only been founded in the last year. Now they're years old and had survived the Plague Years, but we still got the pitch, though thankfully only as a pre-recorded advertisement. Once that was over, the musicians came out:


The concert was shorter than I expected, only an hour, and it only covered the console games with none of the handheld titles. They started with the overworld theme from The Legend of Zelda--perfect for a string quartet since the NES had four sound channels--continued with the palace theme from Zelda 2, and moved on through the other games. The song I was most looking forward to was the Gerudo Theme from Ocarina of Time, but I just didn't like the interpretation where the violinist plucked the strings--it was no Spanish guitar. The best song was the opening theme from Wind Waker, perfectly designed for a quartet.

They ended with a short field medley from Breath of the Wild, a game whose music sounds like nonsense when played by a string quartet, and then after they set down after the bows, someone off to our right yells out "Spirit Tracks!" and much to my amusement, that turned out to be the encore song--the Super Smash Brothers arrangement of the overworld theme from Spirit Tracks, which they called "Full Steam Ahead."

They skipped Twilight Princess, which was kind of sad because I was really hoping to hear the Western showdown song ("Hidden Village"), and they hadn't rehearsed together quite as much as they should have because I heard more than a few instances where someone played the wrong note and had to quickly correct to the right one. But like when I went to go see Vivaldi's Four Seasons by another candlelit string quarter, it was a lot of fun.

I wish they had had more comfortable chairs, though. sashagee told me she kept getting distracted by the people who were shuffling in their seats.

Been a bit since I had a general update post. Time to drink my tea and write another one.

Saturday was Laila's naming ceremony at Mishkan. There's a standard ritual for giving baby boys their Hebrew name, but no standard ritual for girls, because historically women did not have separate Hebrew names. One's Hebrew name was used to summon them for an aliyah, and that was only afforded to men--and still is, in some streams of Judaism--but nowadays we're more broadminded and so Sasha and I, as her parents, received an aliyah for parashat Vayishlach. I didn't read from the Torah because my Hebrew is awful and it would have taken forever--something else I need to work on--but I did get to hear the entire congregation say "awwwwww" as they saw me carrying Laila up to the bimah. The rabbis gave Laila a blessing and told Mishkan her Hebrew name, בינה בת ברק Binah bat Barak (meaning "Wisdom, daughter of Lightning"), and unlike the bat Mitzvah or the couple given an auf ruf (Yiddish: "Calling up"), they did not throw candy at us. But I got to save some for later!

I really like Mishkan's approach to tradition, which I can sum up as: they have female rabbis, but during the part of the prayer service where the priestly blessing (Numbers 6:24-26) is recited, they had the rabbi who's a descendant of the Kohanim priests do it.

A bunch of people came to the service--thosesocks, britshlez, my family, and sashagee's family, but after it was over everyone went home. We put Laila down for a nap and when she woke up, we drove out to the suburbs and played games with sashagee's parents, brother, and his brother's girlfriend until Laila couldn't take it anymore and was nearly an exploding kitten herself. Fortunately, since I was the car, so when Laila got fussy I was able to put a hand back and calm her down. She was angry for maybe twenty minutes and then fell asleep for the rest of the ride home.

Monday was the end of the Scum and Villainy game that thosesocks has been running for a while--what was originally supposed to be a simple three-session game or so turned into fifteen sessions, but a changing work schedule meant that there wasn't enough time left for game. Having crashed on a quarantined planet and recovered the ensouled hoverbikes we were looking for, we escaped the traps set by the things from the Dark Between the Stars and took shelter in a Precursor ruin, where we found a still-functional Precursor ship and learned at last what the Precursors looked like (spider-geese, basically). We took the ship and flew off into space, past the Hegemony ship that certainly wasn't expecting a flying Precursor artifact with possibly the last still-extant Precursor group-mind. It's all set up to be lead into a glorious new chapter of the game that...might not happen. Or it might?! I guess we'll see.

I've also beaten Shadowbringers and sashagee and I have been watching the Wheel of Time TV show, but I'm going to make separate posts about those.

Tomorrow we're going out to my parents for Thanksgiving and staying the night, and then the next day we'll be at sashagee's parents' house. On Saturday we're going to a parents' group that Mishkan is starting as well as visiting sashagee's old roommate who's currently laid up with an injury, and on Sunday we're going to the zoo! The last few days have been quiet, but we're entering the busy period of Thanksgiving week.

Saturday morning, we woke up earlier than usual, showered, and got dressed to prepare for the day's events--sashagee's parents had offered to come into the city, pick all of us up, take us out to their house in the suburbs, and watch Laila to give sashagee and I some time to go on a date! I suggested going to Geneva and walking around the shops, since I haven't been there in years and certainly not since the Plague Year began. After arriving and making sure Laila was all set up, that she was fed and changed and calm and we wouldn't be leaving a screaming sad baby with sashagee's parents, we borrowed their car and set off:


The first priority was finding food. sashagee still can't eat anything too spicy and doesn't want anything that causes gas--Laila had an extremely bad day after the farmer's market dinner on the 10th and it turns out it's because sunchokes can cause gas--and also we didn't want a contemporary American deal because that's where we were going for dinner, so we skipped a few restaurants until I noticed a place called Egg Harbor tucked away in the back of a courtyard plaza. It's a local breakfast chain (and also in Georgia? ) that had a lot of omelets and skillets and so on. That's usually a downside, because American breakfast food is full of either pork, mixed milk and meat, or both, but as soon as I saw they had shakshuka I new what I was getting. It was good, with chunky tomatoes and slightly spicy, and I even appreciated the English muffin they paired it with after sashagee suggested that the English muffin pockets would efficiently carry the shakshuka to my mouth. They paired it with jam so I didn't do that, but maybe in the future I should.

After we were done eating, we went over to Graham's so sashagee could get some coffee. There were very few people in masks--I'd estimate around a third or less, including a third or less of the staff at the stores we went to--and almost every store had a sign saying that masks were optional for vaccinated patrons. I've been fully vaccinated for months but sashagee just got her first shot a couple weeks ago, so she kept her mask on whenever we were indoors. I went by staff practices--if the people working at the store weren't wearing masks, I didn't either.

We didn't have a lot of time because we had left a milk bottle behind but had no idea how Laila would take to it, so we only got to go to a few stores. The first stop was when sashagee noticed a huge collection of plants in the window of a store called GROW. Still mourning the loss of all the herbs we bought, which were devoured by aphids probably blown in from nearby trees the one time we opened our windows on a windy day, she picked out a stromanthe plant for its pink leaves--it's in the office right now, the room which previously didn't have many plants. We left and went further down Third Street before I asked if we could stop in at Harvey's Tales when I saw it was a bookstore. sashagee made a beeline for the children's section and wanted to buy a copy of The Hungry Hungry Caterpillar, so our current plan is to get one more copy so we'll have three--the Japanese copy I already own, the English copy we just bought, and a French copy as well. If we can raise Laila to be trilingual, she'll appreciated it--to this day I'm sad that my father never taught me German growing up, back when he was much better at it than he is now after almost fifty years of it being barely used.

By this point is was almost 3:30 p.m. and we had been gone for three hours, so we stopped at Graham's one more time for ice cream--I got a coconut and almond ice cream malt--and checked into a store that had a bunch of small stalls because they promised a tea collection, but didn't find any tea or even the store that was supposed to sell it. Then we went back to the car and drove back to sashagee's parents' house, where we discovered Laila fast asleep on sashagee's stepmom. They said that she had taken to the bottle just fine--when they initially gave it to her she looked incredulous and screwed up her face to cry right until milk came out, at which point her eyes got wide and she devoured it all and then fell back asleep. What a good baby.

We stuck around a bit before going to Hardware for dinner:


Maybe it's because it was talked up to me so much, but I thought it was nice but not amazing. The Brussels sprouts depicted in the picture were good but not the transcendent experience I was promised--though even sashagee's father, who had expounded on their virtues many times, was a bit disappointed in them--and the smoked salmon salad I got was delicious but too heavily dressed for much flavor other than creamy dill to come through. The baked goat cheese, however, was excellent, with a pickled jalapeño compote on top of the cheese and crispy bread to put it on. Amazing.

Then we went back and sashagee's parents drove us home where she immediately collapsed into bed and I stayed up for the spectacular thunderstorm that smashed into the city around 11 p.m., an event which Laila slept through. Not a surprise, though, since it was the first day she'd had a bottle, the first time she'd been away from us for an extended period, the first time she'd spent a lot of time outside (in sashagee's parents' yard)...so many firsts. Anyone would be tired after that.

What a lovely day!

It's been a while since I posted just about daily happenings.

The biggest news in my life right now is that sashagee is all moved in! We rented a truck on Saturday and, with her parents' help, picked up her heavy furniture pieces and brought them over (we'd already moved most of the smaller stuff during the week). Her bookcase is going to go in between my two bookcases, we turned the futon she was using into a bed back into a couch and put it opposite my couch in the sun nook, her dresser is in the bedroom, and the rest of her stuff is scattered around the living room. We replaced the old, tattered comforter I had on my bed with hers (which has a cover!), added her collection of pillows to my own, and we're currently deciding what to do about her rice cooker. In other words, the normal things that couples who have their own lives do when they move in together. This is the first time for both of us, though--the last time I moved in with someone she was literally just out of college and I wasn't far behind, and sashagee has previously only had people move in with her--so we're negotiating over where everything goes and which things of ours we're going to keep in an environment where we're both used to having our own space. It's a process. We'll both need to let things go that we like, but hopefully not too much--she was renting a room before and I have a two-bedroom condo, so there should be plenty of room for her stuff in here.

Also, we bought a new couch!


I've been wanting to put a smaller couch into the office for a while, since my master plan was to take the TV out of the sun nook, add more chairs there, and turn it into a conversation space while making the office the place we can go to play games or watch movies. And now it's done! It's a little cramped in there, admittedly, but my corner computer desk is off to the right out of frame and there's enough room for sashagee to sit (or lately, lie down) on the couch and play her playstation while I sit at the computer. She convinced her brother to start playing FFXIV with us, so yesterday we spent the morning all on voice chat playing together. It reminded me of those late-night Karazhan runs that were the real reason I stuck with WoW for so long even after the story descended into complete nonsense.

We learned that even though I don't have a PS4, I could still create a Playstation account and use the phone app to connect to voice chat.

I've been in breakfast turmoil for a while. Traditionally I eat Japanese-style breakfast, with salmon, miso soup, pickles, and rice, but for the last couple months sashagee hasn't been able to stand the smell of pickles, fish, or cooking rice, so I've been set adrift. Some days I'll have an omelet and waffles or toast, occasionally I'll just eat a bunch of vegetables, and for one week I had Israeli breakfast, but I'm getting antsy. I need to find something else to eat--maybe a big salad? I do have eggs and nuts and spinach and vegetables, so a big salad with some pita on the side sounds good for today. What I really want is to be able to go back to eating fish again and get all of this frozen fish out of my freezer, but I can't do that until sashagee goes back to work and she's currently not on the schedule. Hopefully she'll be able to go back to work soon, both in the wellness sense and in the given shifts sense.

As I'm writing this winter has truly come to Chicago--big fat fluffy snowflakes are falling outside my windows. It's probably not going to stick, but it's lovely to watch. It's a great start to the week.

On Saturday sashagee and I went apple-picking at Kuiper's Family Farm!

( pictures )

We rarely have the same day off, so both of us having a Saturday off was a special treat. Even though half the farm was closed and we couldn't go to the pumpkin patch or corn maze, we had a great time. We'll be back before the end of the season.

Not much else surrounding the food because I already posted about it! sashagee has left more and more of her things here, now bringing over her yoga mat because she figures that after sleeping on my shikibuton she'll need it more than after sleeping on her double-memory-foamed cloud-bed. I'm probably going to end up getting a memory foam pad myself to make her more comfortable, since while I'm used to it to the point that at ACEN last year I slept on the floor of RogueNire and zbrund's room with just a blanket and a pillow and I was okay, but for sashagee, basically the only thing worse than my shikibuton would be a bed of nails.

News came out today that Chicago is close to reversing progress and could return to Phase 3, which would honestly be fine with me. I've already ranted here about the beach-scolding when going to the beach is literally orders of magnitude safer than going to a bar or an indoor restaurant, and hoenstly we shouldn't have opened indoor activities at all if you can't wear masks during them. If bars and restaurants and groups greater than ten are banned, it'd change nothing about my life. Even a group of ten is too many, I think (the max I've gathered in was six and that was outside). And sashagee keeps telling me about people coming into her work in groups of ten or twenty, maybe half of them masked, and gathering around her and her co-workers. Shutting that down sounds great.

( Farmer's Market Dinner )

I really needed this meal today because the internet is a mess. Today "Jews," "Hebrews," and "Semites" were trending--always a bad sign--and on looking into it, apparently Nick Cannon was fired for antisemitism, meaning Twitter was filled to the brim with "See! He said Jews control the media and (((they))) fired him! He was right!" comments, including a depressing amount of them from Black people. Most of those followed the familiar pattern--Jews are rich, Jews control the media and the banks, Jews can't be oppressed because we actually run the world, you've heard it all before. "Punching up" as a model of interaction fails utterly when dealing with antisemitism, because a lot of antisemitism is about how we're secretly on top, so therefore those comments aren't antisemitic, they're bravely speaking truth to power.

As the meme goes, "The Jews are tired."

I did really appreciate this article by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, though: Where Is the Outrage Over Anti-Semitism in Sports and Hollywood? A good question I wish we had a better answer to.

Finally went to bed on Tuesday night early and yet I still rolled out of bed at the last minute to make it to Wednesday morning prayers on time. I guess that means I need even more sleep. And the last night I stayed until 4 a.m. and woke up this morning at 11 a.m., so I'm not doing so hot on getting that sleep.

sashagee was here for most of last weekend but in the days since I haven't done that much, by design. I cleaned my home on Monday and Tuesday, vacuuming and mopping and cleaning the bathrooms and the oven and the kitchen, and just read some webcomics because I have a thousand articles sitting in my RSS waiting to be read and I need to get to them. Last night I watched more of 3月のライオン / March Comes in Like a Lion, which I've been watching slowly but steadily. It has an excellent depiction of mental illness and far less anime bullshit than 四月は君の嘘 / Your Lie in April, but that means that it's much harder to watch sometimes. Just last episode, after Rei suffered a major setback, he said:

落ち込みまで下手だって
ochikomi made heta datte
"I'm even bad at being depressed."

I've felt like that before--that not only am I so awful that I can't even get my life right, I'm not "really" depressed because I can still go to work, or get out of bed, or cook myself food--so I know what that's like. I'm really glad that I don't feel like that now. At the moment, I'm bad at being depressed in a good way.

I'm still annoyed at work, though, because I've spent most of today churning through records that don't exist. Were they already resolved somewhere else? Do we not have information on the physician other than the license I'm looking at? Who knows!

( Farmer's Market Dinner )

Last night, sashagee and I went over to britshlez's place to watch The Last Unicorn cartoon, which I hadn't seen even though I had read the book. I remember that greyselke loved the movie so much, but back when we were university students it was a lot harder to get a hold of. Nowadays multiple versions are on streaming services, so I got to hear Schmendrick call himself the "last of the red-hot swamis," Molly Grue scream at the unicorn for finally coming to her too late, and Christopher Lee Christopher Lee-ing it up as King Haggard. The animation took a bit to get used to, since it's been a long time since I've seen a Rankin/Bass film, but they did an excellent job with the otherworldly nature of the unicorn and Lady Amalthea's ethereal presence. And I had forgotten the best line in the film:

" I am no longer like the others, for no unicorn was ever born who could regret, but I now I do. I regret."

What a good movie.

We drank wine and chatted until it became a Youtube party, and when we realized it, sashagee and I said our goodbyes and went home, finally falling asleep at 4 a.m. The next morning, we woke up multiple times but finally got out of bed at 11 a.m. so we could meet maptekar for lunch at Sea Ranch up in Evanston. maptekar has been talking up Sea Ranch to me for close to a month, even despite my skepticism of Midwestern sushi, and since she was so adamant that it was good I decided to trust her. My trust was well-placed--the food was delicious. sashagee and I split a spicy salmon roll, tornado roll, and zarusoba while we sat at one table all by itself on the sidewalk and it was just They even had a small grocery section inside, so I got some hontsuyu and muscat gummies, and then after we stopped for gelato, we all walked over the lakefront. The beaches in Evanston are mostly paid--something fortunately illegal in Chicago--so once we hit the lake we turned around and went back home, but we passed a bunch of huge houses in a variety of architectural styles, including one Spanish villa looking house and several early-American red-brick buildings. After a stop at the actual Bennison's Bakery, who repeatedly shows up at the Andersonville Farmer's Market and which apparently dates back to 1938, maptekar drove us back and told us she'd have us over for dinner, since she promised to make borscht for me.

Now sashagee is taking a nap out in the living room and I'm in the office, but daniella.titone invited us to the beach with karolina.gabriele, and we're probably going to eat a big salad and some ochazuke for dinner later. Then, well, we'll see.

Lots of religion in this accounting of my life, and for once, it's not just Judaism!

( Omurice and Chanukah Stories and Singing )

One more week of work and then I have two weeks off for the New Year! I'm really looking forward to having a long vacation. Maybe I'll even play a video game--it is time for me to finally get to Quest for Glory IV: Shadows of Darkness.

So I signed up for Coffee Meets Bagel. That's just backstory, though. I filled everything out, and let it sit, and then yesterday a notification pops up on my phone and it's...this:


This is probably the most kawaii notification that I have or will ever have received. It's hard to even translate because it's so reliant on puns. Maybe something like:

Nyaaa~ Today is Caturday! Maybe today you can find a lovely bagel to meow-t up with?

Apparently, February 22nd is 猫の日 (neko no hi, "Cat Day"), because it's three twos in a row, and the kanji for two (二) is part of the katakana for meow (ニャ. I don't really understand it myself, but it's a thing in Japan that even major corporations get into.

But, can you imagine an American corporation doing this if it wasn't explicitly pet-related? Dating app notifcations do tend to be filled with emoji, but it's usually hearts, and in English the actual text certainly isn't written in that kind of chō-kawaii language. When I got the message, I just kind of stared while I read it, my brain refusing to believe what I was seeing. But no, there it is. A company really sent me "Nyan nyan!" in a notification.

The dictionary also says that にゃんにゃん can mean "to make out" or "to have sex," which adds a whole additional layer to that notification. I wonder if that meaning is actually widely-used enough to be intentional?

So, happy belated Cat Day!

Edit: Today I got a notification about 富士山の日 (fujisan no hi, "Mt. Fuji Day"), another number-based pun. 2/23, and two can be pronounced "fu" (like in 二日 futsuka, "the second day of the month"), or "ji" (like in the name 二良 Jirō), and 3 is "san." Hence, fu-ji-san. It wasn't cutesy, but I think it's funny that I got two pun-based notifications from the same app two days in a row. And they used the Mt. Fuji emoji. 🗻

AIM is shutting down December 15th.

I'm not one of the people who still use AIM. For a while I kept it running through Pidgin for the last couple of people that I used to talk to on it, but they either drifted away or moved to other services. After a few months without a single message, I stopped loading it up, and never bothered installing it when I replaced my computer. Whatever chat logs I had are long since gone.

But so much of my life has been conducted through AIM. All the social planning when I was at university, talking to friends on weekday nights before text messages were free, people I met online or through my pre-MMO gaming days, like the first online freedom RP I ever participated in (check the character page and guess who I was!) or the Neverwinter Nights persistent server I joined for a while.

AIM was how I met schoolpsychnerd, and most of how we kept in contact when we weren't playing World of Warcraft.

I haven't even thought of it in months. I do all my chatting now through Facebook messenger, Gchat, or just iMessage because my phone is always with me. It's more convenient and I'm not tied to my computer. But this, added with Photobucket's self-inflicted demise or Livejournal's transformation, it's a reminder that even though people say the Internet is forever, that's not true. Especially when so much of the internet is corporate territory that they can shut down or change beyond recognition at any time, without any warning. The Internet already is the cyberpunk dystopia that we were promised, corporate fiefdoms and all.

I should get the AIM log-on and log-off sounds and put them on my phone.

Damn them and their thieving ways.

Today is my and schoolpsychnerd's year anniversary! Yay! It certainly doesn't seem that long...I remember when she was just a person on the other end of the IM texting me. It doesn't seem that long ago...

Following greyselke, here's my Japanese name:

My japanese name is 中島 Nakashima (center of the island) 陸 Riku (land).
Take your real japanese name generator! today!
Created with Rum and Monkey's Name Generator Generator.