Listen to the Rain

Just got back from the work popup of Tandoor Char House, previously written about here. Last time they gave me free dessert. This time I paid for dessert...but they gave me a free samosa. I'm not sure how they plan to make money if they constantly give away free stuff but I'm certainly not going to complain.

We got sick from the wedding we went to the weekend before last. At least, I assume that's why--we felt a little bad the day after, but while I recovered on Monday morning, I started feeling worse and took Tuesday off and worked from home on Wednesday. sashagee never felt better and it cumulated in us going to the doctor a couple days ago. Laila and I waited out in the waiting room, alternating between Laila being nearly comatose and laying on my lap, and her wanting to run around the waiting room only to give up and want to go back and sit down when I took her outside to give her more room to run (and also not disturb all the other patients). After an hour of waiting for both us and sashagee--she was updating me on her time just sitting in the exam room in back--a doctor came in, did some checks, diagnosed her with bronchitis acquired after a week of coughing, and sent us off with prescriptions for an inhaler and a couple medications. We went across the street to a place that had both burgers and shawarma, able to satisfy all parties concerned, and when our food came it is ludicrously large portions. None of us finished our food, but we ate what we could, took some takeout boxes, and went on our way.

We're also 2/2 on Middle Eastern places hearing that our daughter's name is Laila and giving us free baklava.

After her first couple swimming classes where she was very wild, Laila got very timid all of a sudden. Her next class she barely wanted to swim at all, just wanted to cling on to the instructor, and the next couple classes after that she tried to get out of the water. The instructor told me that they were going to work on Laila's confidence, though, and yesterday during the lesson she was a little wild but she managed to swim a bit all by herself and I was told she was talking more and did a much better job at swimming. She's slowly getting to the point of being independent--which is good, because we want to put her into preschool this fall and she needs to be conditioned to deal with other kids and with adults she doesn't know telling her what to do. She doesn't have a lot of experience with either of those right now.

Alright, post took me a few hours and now that work day's done. Time to head home. I got a transceiver ping from Laila at 9:30 a.m. saying she misses me so I'm sure she'll be glad to see me when I come home. Have to treasure Laila running to the door to say hi to me for as long as it lasts.

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.

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.

The thing about a routine is that sometimes I can just let the days pass by and think "What do I have to write about, anyway?" but I do remember that diaries about daily life are most prized by historians because they'll often mention things that "everyone knew" and so no one else wrote down (like, where is the land of Punt?), so here I am. And anyway, that's the whole reason I have a Daily life tag.

The most recent fun incident was at work. A month or so ago, I signed up for a DEI seminar about psychological safety at work. It was fine, they had some good points, everything went well, and they mentioned at the end that they were supposed to email us with further instructions. Well, I got an email thanking me--actually, thanking TRAINEE.FIRST.NAME--for completing it, and nothing. And nothing, and nothing, and eventually I emailed HR and they sent me the email they were supposed to send me a month ago. No other comment. Hilarious after a seminar about belonging and feeling like you are a valuable part of the organization who can safely raise concerns. It reminds me of a speech I went to given by an SVP about leadership, about really connecting with people and giving them your attention and listening to them and then went I ran into her in the hallway later she asked me a couple questions about how I'm doing and...didn't even break her stride as she was walking away. Sure felt like I was given genuine attention!

Right now Laila is out of town visiting her grandparents for a while before her birthday while we prep for ACEN and get the house ready for said birthday. It's somewhat marred by sashagee not feeling well due to all the storms that have been sweeping through. We got a bunch of rain a couple days ago, and sashagee's parents said it rained literally all day yesterday. Today they had a cute picture of Laila helping her grandmother with the gardening, putting soil into a pot after her grandmother had put in the plant. She's such a little helper.

Right now after a cold and grey morning, the sun is finally out. Except I tabbed away from this for ten minutes, came back, and now there's no sun. Chicago weather.

I've started paying more attention to the work events e-mails. In December I went to a meditation event and was the only person to attend (ten people signed up and no one else showed), and yesterday they advertised a St. Patrick's Day event with green food. I expected a bit more than I got, in that when I showed up there was only a single type of green food available, but it was green dessert pancakes:



They had a little bit of a mint taste and were good with the chocolate, but it was a bit odd eating dry dessert pancakes. If any pancakes should have syrup on them, it was these.

Today is Ta'anit Esther, the fast day in commemoration of how Esther fasted before she went to talk to Aḥashverosh, so I was up before dawn to eat. I'm also not feeling particularly well today, but the rule is that you are exempt if you are sick enough that you cannot participate in normal life (i.e., if you're stuck in bed or similar), and I'm at work and posting on the internet, so having a scratchy throat and feeling a little warm doesn't count. Only six hours to go.

Wednesday was our department meeting and my division got nominated for an award! Which we didn't win, because of course we didn't, because we're entirely internal. The division that won is exactly the division I knew that would win, because they're always dealing with clients.

My boss said that one of the higher-ups had been hearing grumblings from our division about how they're not recognized as much and asked for ideas and feedback, and so I gave my feedback--there's nothing we can do, external praise from clients is always going to outweigh any internal "Say, [Division A]'s data was pretty useful in the latest project" thoughts, and what's more, the nature of our data work is that we don't have any big projects we can point to and be like "We have completed this milestone," it's all small work that takes max two weeks to do, it's just a dozen of those at a time and they constantly keep coming in. So we're at an insurmountable disadvantage.

It is what it is, but I saw the teams that were nominated I was like, "[Division C] is going to win" without hesitation and wouldn't you know it, I was right.

I wrote about it here, but the kerfuffle over the latest management obsession continues to unfold. One of the people who volunteered to help roll it out ("ambassadors", they're called) was over here talking about how painful the whole process apparently was. When it was first proposed, the idea was that everyone would memorize the standardized elevator pitch and be able to repeat the buzzwords. This got a ton of rightful pushback in the initial meetings, because it was pointed out that no one is going to use a canned recitation if they're actually trying to be convincing (because canned speeches sound canned) and it's insulting to make a bunch of people memorize a slogan like they're schoolkids. So after that, management came back with the idea that oh, you just need to use some of underlined buzzwords and apply them to your job. But lately people are coming in with stories about being asked follow-up questions in the meeting sessions, or on specific words that they missed, or they're going to ambassadors in a panic that they're not going to get all the words right, and it's become a huge pain for everyone involved. Except senior management, probably, because they're insulated from the effects of their dumb ideas as always.

My session is next week. We'll see what happens.

Got an email for a training that we have to take at work about bystander intervention. Okay, fair enough, the Bystander Effect is fake but it's still worth reinforcing the urge to intervene, but I'm writing this post due to the note listed on the email:

Note: Given the 1-hour time requirement by law, you cannot skip ahead in this eLearning module; you are asked to spend 60 minutes consuming the information. We appreciate your understanding.

The law requires that everyone receive one hour of instruction, therefore you will be instructed for one hour. Do not resist, citizen.

I wonder if this is the actual law or just corporate idiocy.

...is when someone hits the "Ruin the entire data set" button, which is conveniently set right next to the "continue your work" button and has no confirmation dialogue after you hit it.

(At least we caught it right away this time! Last time the process went a lot further along before I noticed something was wrong and it took a week to fix. The problems with large data sets)

sashagee wasn't feeling well on Tuesday, so she didn't go to the grocery store like she usually does. That means that my scavenged lunch, made of leftovers on Tuesday, didn't exist at all on Wednesday. We still had a few leftovers but I wanted to save them for sashagee and Laila, so I went to work with the idea that I'd find a restaurant nearby and go there. My first thought was go down and get avocado toast from the coffee bar in the building lobby, but the more I thought about it the less interested I was in that, so I looked online and found a restaurant nearby called Ēma (from אמא, "mother") and another restaurant called Aba (from אבא, "father"). Aba was only open for dinner but Ēma had a nice-looking falafel sandwich that I set my eyes on. Halfway there, though, I walked by the corner where the old Imperial Lamian dim sum place was before the Plague Years doomed it, and saw that it had been replaced by a ramen shop called Kyuramen 九湯ラーメン. I took a moment to deliberate, and then went inside.

There's only so many choices for me at a ramen restaurant, and here there were two. I got the chicken ramen:


The noodles were great and the broth was okay, which is my usual experience with Chicago ramen. Yesterday, though, I realized that it's probably because I usually get non-standard ramen. Ramen broth normally has pig bones and all kinds of stuff in it, and for obvious reasons I'm not going to eat that. When they make veggie or chicken ramen, I imagine they don't put in all the effort to make sure a broth that's as rich and tasty is included, especially when it's obviously that pork ramen is the showcase (as it is here) and other ramen is offered merely as a concession to people like me. All of that said, the chicken in the ramen was also good, very fatty as it should be and sliced like the chāshū is. Not bad.

I'm still a little leery though. They were advertising omurice, which I made at a party for people before the Plague Years, for twenty American dollars. This is a food that is made of 1) egg 2) rice and 3) sauce. There are instructions in that post I linked. Charging more for it than an omelet is straight-up thievery.

That said, when I looked up an article on Kyuramen I found this quote:

Lin has significant ambitions for the company and told reporters in 2020 that he hopes it will become the “Starbucks of ramen in the U.S.”

So, be warned.

The matcha pudding I got to-go and ate later was pretty good, though.

We spent most of this weekend at the grandparents' houses, at my parents' house on Shabbat and then at sashagee's parents' house on Saturday night and Sunday. sashagee went out with my parents around noon on Friday, and I stayed behind to finish the workday, vacuumed, did the laundry, wiped down the counters, emptied the dishwasher, and otherwise did all the pre-Shabbat cleaning, then I got on the train, went downtown, and took the express Metra out to the suburbs and arrived just in time for dinner. Pot roast. Delicious!

We didn't go anywhere or do anything particularly special while we were there except hang out with the grandparents and give them Laila time, but Laila had a lovely time! She was so excited that she had a hard time taking her naps but then didn't want to go to sleep because she would have missed out on the excitement. That meant that she spent a bunch of the visit tired, and when we finally got home on Sunday she fell asleep for an hour and then woke up and cried for two hours because she absolutely did not want to be alone. When I went into sing to her, she clung to me like I was a sinking ship and cried when I tried to hold her prone in my arms instead of letting her hug my neck. She finally consented to be put down in the crib but demanded I keep a hand on her head, and if I tried to move it away she reached up to grab it back After fifteen minutes of singing בשם השם to her she calmed down...or so I thought, because she started crying basically as soon as I closed the door. sashagee went in there after a bit and that did the trick--Laila fell into an exhausted sleep around midnight and sashagee wasn't long after her. On Monday she had a much better time.

I'm nearly done with my psychic powers mod for Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead and currently having to deal with more bugs. The ones that I can't solve myself are:

• I'm trying to make a teleporter power that warps space so that enemies' movements draw them toward a central point, but the function to move monsters is bugged. My current idea is to make a fake 'enemy' that will pull everything nearby toward it, but that's reliant on being able to make a summoned monster that other monsters will ignore.


• Telepathic powers work on zombies because there's a whitelist for which targets spells can affect, but no blacklist. That means when I set HUMAN as a possible target for telepathic attack, formerly-human zombies--who are tagged both HUMAN and ZOMBIE--are eligible. This is unfixable without me personally adding a blacklist function to the game.

On the other hand, I was playing last night and discovered a feral psychic in the wild, so I know that my attempt to add them to monster spawn list worked! It was a pyrokinetic who proceeded to throw fire everywhere and set the hospital I was trying to loot on fire, so that was exciting! I'm also in the boring numbers-adjusting part of the game. "Oh, I think [Ψ]Fountain of Flames does ten percent more damage than I want, and [Ψ]Stutterstep lasts too long" blah blah blah. The boring-but-necessary part of game design.

Yesterday, I went out to lunch with aaronhparker, who's taking a trip to Japan in April and wanted some suggestions of where to go. Unfortunately, his group's itinerary isn't set in stone beyond being in Japan yet, so I really could only provide the most general advice. I told him that if he had to go three places, he should go to Tōkyō, Kyōto, and (of course) Hiroshima, especially talking up Miyajima. I mentioned Kiyomizu-dera and Arashiyama in Kyōto, too, and when he talked about hiking I told him about Matsumoto. We only met for a bit over lunch because we both had meetings to go back to and I feel like I didn't provide much actionable advice, but I did suggest that we meet up again when he has a better idea of exactly where he'll be. I should be have more advice then.

Alright, back to this unknown physician project. At least I can tell right away that "Dr. Sages Webmaster" and "Dr. Northwest Hospital" are not real people.

It's back after a long hiatus! At least for this week

sashagee and Laila are out in the suburbs right now, so that Laila's grandparents and great-grandmother can see her, so when I got back from this office it was just me. And since I was just going to the farmer's market by myself, I decided to try to assemble an old-style farmer's market dinner. I haven't posted one in a while because we kind of fell into a pattern of always eating Peking Order on weeks when she was there and getting some other prepared food on off weeks--sashagee's illness has meant that she very rarely felt well enough to actually cook, or sometimes even come to the farmer's market. Now that I'm back in the office on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, though, and she's feeling better, she'll be the main one to be going to the farmer's market if we want to get things before they're all sold out. I'll have to meet her there.

Speaking of being back in the office, it's been okay! The office is even more empty than before, which makes me wonder exactly how things are going to go--my division is only in on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, and quite a few people are permanent work from home. The entire member services division is now work from home, which is a quarter of the floor. We paid for the naming rights on the building, and I expect that the upper management are going to want to keep going into the office as often as they can, but the rest of us? I don't know. Two days in/three days out is my preferred schedule, so I'm happy that's what we settled on--it lets me spend most of my time with my family while also giving me a couple days to go downtown and really buckle down and get work done. Today I went for a walk on the riverwalk and found that the overpriced gelato place I thought had closed forever was still open! The gelateo was still overpriced, but it was definitely delicious.

( Food pictures! )

Slow rest of the week, hopefully. I started reading an actual book on the train to work--Andrzej Sapkowski's The Last Wish--something I've sadly been neglecting for most of the pandemic. The beginning was really good, to the point that I'm probably going to finish it within the week. I used to read eighty books a year before the Plague Years! I don't think I'll get back to that again until I'm retired, what with a daughter to look after and sixty-percent-fewer train rides during the week, but maybe I can do half that. We can hope.