Inputs
A bit of a dry spell to be honest. Here are some recent things I didn’t finish:
Eve by Cat Bohannon: Is about the evolution of several key traits of the female body. What a blessing we have evolved from lactating by sweating milk out of our stomachs! It wasn’t uninteresting but I wasn’t up for 400 pages of it (plus notes).
Wild Life by Opal Wei: An m/f romance. Premise looked cute but way too earnest, not enough sex.
The Art of Scandal by Regina Black: Another m/f. A few clever bits and DMV specific color, but too angsty.
China’s World View by David Daokui Li: I thought CWV would be an interesting follow-up to The Prince, the podcast from the Economist about Xi Jinping which I really enjoyed last year. Unfortunately, if you have listened to The Prince or have read the news ever, you will be mentally yelling “OH COME ON” every five to seven sentences as you read CWV and I could only take so much of that.
Metropole by Feranc Karinthy: I think what happened here is that I read the part of the description saying that the protagonist is on his way to a conference in Helsinki and thought “Oh, Finland! Relevant to me!” If I had read a little more carefully, I would have caught words like “surreal”, “Kafkaesque”, and “nightmare”, which are not relevant to me.
Outputs
If your partner is a physicist, sitting out a total solar eclipse will just never be on the table. T was at Fermilab outside of Chicago during the last one, so I went out to visit him and we drove to Indiana with an undergrad and the other post-doc from his group in one of the rickety communal lab cars. The only stressful moment on my part was when T, driving, could not resist sneaking a peek through his eclipse glasses at the early stages and the panicking French post-doc barked “Fukus! Fukus!” as he snatched the wheel from the passenger seat. We found a place to pull over at an intersection surrounded by fields of soy beans, pairing our totality experience with lungfuls of Roundup. Then we ate lunch, and repeated the six hour drive back to the lab.
This time we left for Vermont at 5:30 am in tandem with the family next door. We made great time, leaving us with six hours to kill with five children between the ages of two and eight in a small town sodden with melting snow and understandably stressed by the sudden decupling of its population. Reality scoffed contemptuously at the list of nearby restaurants T and the neighbor dad had compiled the night before, although we did manage to get creemees and a very reasonably priced jug of maple syrup at the hardware store. Minutes before totality one of the children announced that they had to go to the bathroom. We just made it, stepping out of the cider tasting room in to queasy gray brightness. Then it was time for us and about 100,000 other people to go home. Our 2017 journey through the bread basket of America had not prepared me for the greater remoteness and lesser availability of cell service and gas stations open later than 9 pm of northern Vermont. We creaked home about twenty hour of our departure, and now that we’re a few days out and I am reasonably confident that no one has gotten sick from the goose shit and Lord knows what else they were rolling around in all day I can say that it was a success.
Condiment Corner
Another Italian vegetable paste. I didn’t pick up much tuna, although that could be due to it being moderately expired. It was fine, nice spreadable texture, decent amount of heat. Good mixed with chickpeas and pasta for a simple dinner that felt thrown together in the fun way instead of the despairing way, and I expect that is how I will use it henceforth.