March 272th

We're all on the same calendar these days. 

Chris-Laptop :: ~ » march

Fri Mar 272 14:48:43 PST 2020

My job hunt continues. I'm learning a lot about interviewing for management roles, but haven't found the right match yet. I have good friends helping me out with the learned wisdom of their own careers. I'm watching slightly less TV, getting my head back into books. It's hard to get out of my head to connect with humans.

I can approximately measure my emotional bandwidth by how much I practice the violin. Centered, resilient, adaptable, able to cope with failure? Practice. Twitchy, frustrated, just want to hide under blankets until it's all over? The couch chains my soul.

(I can't play the violin while lounging. I know some people can, like Doug Kershaw, which boggles me every time I see it. Mark O'Connor, while an amazing musician, holds his violin the way the rest of us do.)

We're having a Thanksgiving so low-key as to be non-observant: Anna is recovering from eye surgery (it went fine, and her vision is already considerably better than mine), and we're not going anywhere, because it's still a pandemic and other people's behavior is terrifying. Even in California, where the liberal Democratic governor violated his own rules about gatherings, and now he and his family are dealing with possible COVID exposure. And San Mateo County is doing okayish. We have a large basket of privilege that we're exercising: extraordinarily good Internet connectivity actively monitored by a professional (me), jobs that let us stay home, solid finances, and the fact that most silly services like Instacart start here, so the coverage is good.

(Instacart has been one of the bizarre reversals this year, being one of those Silicon Valley things that targets young techies with the fawning idea that their time is far too valuable to be spent doing the few things Facebook or Google doesn't do for them, like grocery shopping or putting gas in the car–or, in the case of Soylent, eating. Now it's a very important tool for anyone eager to reduce their exposure to the outside world. Except it's part of the gig economy created by hollowing out of the middle class, so we're paying someone, who needs the money, to put their health on the line instead of ours. But would shopping ourselves change anything about the broader social situation we disagree with? There are no good answers, but in the meantime we tip heavily.)

I made bread again, using a recipe from Artisan Bread In 5 Minutes A Day, which I highly recommend. I was hoping to make something sandwich-friendly, but so far we've just been eating it by the slice.

I also made yogurt. We've been boycotting Trader Joe's, because they're aggressively anti-union, and failing to address constant COVID outbreaks on their staff. Unfortunately many of our favorite things are only available at Trader Joe's, including goat-milk yogurt, which our bodies are happier about, and has also been really good for the dog.

I didn't want to use the actual goat milk for it, but I do have powdered goat milk as part of the emergency rations, so I thought I'd give that a try. I ordered freeze-dried yogurt culture, but didn't want to wait, so I used some cow yogurt as an inoculant. I used our smaller Instant Pot: nearly all models have a Yogurt button, which doesn't pressurize, just keeps the milk at a constant temperature for the hours and hours needed.

It...mostly worked? The yogurt-ish end product is very liquid, but more noticeably, incredibly tart or tangy or sour. Maybe all three?

• Salt helps, but I dunno if we'll eat it.
• The dog doesn't care.
• It tastes like soup, because I didn't swap out the gasket for a clean one. Everyone always says that, but this is the first thing I've ever had absorb flavors. I guess I could have cleaned the Instant Pot itself more thoroughly.

And that's sort of it. We had mostly declined to participate in the reopening of everything, which turns out to have been wise, and now that everything is supposed to be shuttered again, we're...not changing anything, except to resume grocery delivery.

On we go, then.