daily (M-F) reflections
03/03/2021: recipe sharing II
I couldn’t remember if I’d written about recipe-sharing in a gratitude yet… or had just thought about it. A quick search reminded me that words were indeed committed to page in late January, when I mentioned wanting to figure out how to share some of my family favorites with others. No progress there but I don’t think I’m going to have any success with sharing from my Evernote-based recipe book… unless the recipient also has Evernote. Thinking about a means of recipe sharing has made me realize and appreciate how uniquely personal recipe keeping is for those most serious about cooking. This is nothing a software or app is likely to solve for, nor should it try to, imo.
While I love my template-based Evernote recipe library, many of the most prolific home chefs I know have similarly proprietary, oddly personal, and arguably efficient ways of keeping their recipes. For example, at the beginning of the COVID-19 quarantine, I was part of a recipe challenge. Here are how the recipes came to me:
- A link to a blog, which featured a recipe from a cookbook
- An image of a page from a cookbook
- An image of a photocopy of the hand-written recipe of a grandma
- A recipe presumably copy/pasted from somewhere (origin unknown) into an email in paragraph-form. No bullets, no numbers.
There’s a method to all our madness and should embrace/accept one another’s method as a feature, not a bug.
03/02/2021: apricot blossoms
Hard to believe we’re quickly coming back around to the spring season and another cycle of growth and beauty in the backyard. The fig was first to bud this year and the green pencil-eraser sized tips of the branches are already popping out to leaf. The apricot blossoms have begun and the only thing more satisfying than their appearance is when the tree is full of them. Still to come are the apple blossoms, which are sure to make an appearance here as soon as they appear on the tree.
03/01/2021: Minds over Matter
Every night immediately after dinner, my wife and I divvy up two relentless tasks of hygiene: bathing the kids and doing the dinner dishes. We do a good job of switching it up, but on Sunday nights, I always opt to be at the sink, closer to the radio, where I enjoy the weekend wind-down ritual of listening to the country’s longest-running radio quiz show, Minds over Matter on KALWfm. The hour-long show is hosted and moderated by smartypants moderator Dana Rodriguez who is joined by a rotating panel of cohosts. They challenge each other and the listeners with questions, then live calls are taken where listeners both ask and answer questions. It seems like the type of thing Howard Stern’s Wack Pack would love to know about but despite the show airing live every week with relatively little call screening, its ripeness for prank call abuse seems to go unnoticed. Maybe the many oddball callers are amusing enough. Last night, the same fella called twice and the second time wasn’t even a question or answer–it was a dumb joke that Rodriguez politely obliged. The most intriguing question last night asked How often in years do calendars repeat with the same day-date combinations? (answer at Quora, fyi)
02/26/2021: people
I made a mostly unconscious decision about a month ago to avoid specific people in these gratitudes, unless they’re outside my personal orbit (like musicians, YouTubers, or the inspirational heroes of lost-at-sea stories). Most of the time, the gratitude I feel for a person–or the reasons for which I’m grateful for that person–is something just a little more personal than I’d want to share. While I will now consciously keep to this, I have considered lately that my appreciate for the kindness of friends and neighbors should not go unrecognized, so similar to how I’m putting concerted energy into these gratitudes, I will figure out a way to regularly recognize the beautiful humans in my life, to make them know they’re far more appreciated than a good deal on cheese at the Grocery Outlet.
02/25/2021: the vaccination effort
A few weeks ago, a friend forwarded an email (twice forwarded already) originally written from the desk of the administrator of the California Disaster Healthcare Volunteers. What’s the DHV?
DHV is a program that registers and credentials health professionals who may wish to volunteer during disaster including doctors, nurses, paramedics, pharmacists, dentists, mental health practitioners, etc. DHV may be used by local officials to support a variety of local needs, including augmenting medical staff at healthcare facilities or supporting mass vaccination clinics. DHV is California’s Emergency System for the Advance Registration of Volunteer Health Professionals (ESAR-VHP).
The email explained that the new vaccination super sites popping up in Alameda are requiring a lot of medical and logisitical might and that volunteers are in high demand. I began to follow the steps outlined in the original email in mid-January and yesterday, I visited a county sherriff’s office in Dublin, CA to take a sworn oath, the last checkbox before being scheduled for volunteer service shifts.
Moving through the process to becoming a COVID response volunteer, while seemingly slow and highly bureaucratic, made me pause to consider the incredible amount of work that goes on in public health and disaster response. I don’t really understand the inter-relationships of the many moving parts and definitely wouldn’t want to be quizzed on the alphabet soup of acronyms belonging to the myriad municipal, state, and federal orgs. I do have incredible gratitude and appreciation, though, for how it’s all happening. It is really happening and it’s literally every day now that I’m hearing of a friend or family member getting their first or second vaccination and/or good news related to the vaccination effort. While I hope to have the opportunity to actively assist at one of the vax sites, my limited involvement has already been incredibly rewarding.
02/24/2021: Grocery Outlet and the thrill of the bargain
I can remember discovering the Grocery Outlet when I first arrived to California in 2009. Being as “cash sensitive” as I was, it was always exciting to find a premium product at a deeply reduced price. If one were to really drill down, there’s probably a lot of psychology that could correlate one’s interest in finding Cabot Sharp Cheddar Cheese for a quarter of its retail cost to one’s other interests like mushroom foraging or crate digging for vinyl. For now, I’ll just say that I’m grateful for 1) being able to afford the food we put on the table for our family and 2) enjoying over a decade of discounts from the most underestimated groceries in the west.
02/23/2021: seasonal warmth
There’s no reason to believe that winter’s over, especially when we see what’s going on with the extreme weather in Texas. Soon enough, Northern Californians will be back in our layers and condensation will be back on the windows. For these few days, though, there’s been a touch of spring–and even summer–to remind us of how nice and invigorating it is to welcome a new season. The days are getting longer and we’re trending towards warmth, gardens, and a few lest things to worry about.
02/22/2021: imissmybar.com
Throughout the pandemic, people have been finding such creative and inspirational ways to bring our old lives into our current reality. Yet another beautiful example is imissmybar.com, a simple single-page website that allows the visitor to create their own mix of noise. More specifically, the ambiance of a bar. Seven sliders control the volume of different sounds of bar atmosphere, from “bartender working” to “people talking” to “rain on window”. While I suppose the mix can be played on its own, it only seems appropriate for there to be a music accompaniment. A Spotify playlist is embedded on the page and users can use whatever they want from their desktop or device to create the soundscape of the bar they miss. So simple, so smart, so cool. So easily appreciated… even by those who haven’t been bar regulars for years.
02/19/2021: constant curiosity
Levi and Naomi will be 3 in a couple months and they are both entering into the Why phase, where almost everything out of their mouths is a question, and almost every question is a variation of “why“. Inverted statements of observation become interrogatives like “Daddy, you’re making oatmeal, Daddy?” and “Why are you making oatmeal?”
Over the past few years, I’ve likened many of the other more bothersome noises of parenting–crying, whining, banging incessantly on things with no rhythm–to the din of AM radio static, where there’s a constant competition of signal to noise… and signal is always losing.
The level of noise in a communications circuit is measured by the signal-to-noise ratio (S/N), the ratio of the average amplitude of the signal voltage to the average amplitude of the noise voltage. When this ratio is below one (0 dB) the noise is greater than the signal, requiring special processing to recover the information.
The persistence of monotonic questions can seem like just another form of noise, especially when a task at hand requires concentration and the answers to questions, simple as they are, require “special processing to recover the information”. Nevertheless, it is important to keep in mind that every single seemingly mindless question muttered comes from a nerve center that is processing the kid’s ever-expanding world. It’s a world that will be only as beautiful as I (and mom and Daniel Tiger) try to make it for them. In this way, I am grateful and privileged to own the responsibility of being their special processor and am committed to not losing my shit with all these damn questions.
02/18/2021: old tools
While tools are inherently useful, they vary in their quality and character. Most older tools seem to be of higher quality and greater character and some really old tools seem to transcend the plane of great character into the realm of extraordinary wonder. Only a few things I’ve picked up along the way have this quality and one is a set of 6 vintage L.S. Starrett jeweller screwdrivers. As I apply these tools to modern tasks like prying open electronics assembled by robots and changing the batteries of toy robots, I wonder what past lives they’ve lived. I daydream about where they’ve been and what they’ve done and how they were thought of by their previous owners, all of whom I picture being elderly tinkerers. It’s impossible not to admire their age and beauty and timeless utility and I hope they stay in our family for at least a couple generations before they’re passed on.
