By The Way

     I ordered a bottle of Castlevetrano olives from a popular online retailer and I admit, I didn't pay much attention.  Hey, Castlevetrano olives, delicious, buttery, what more is there to say, right?   True enough; it's too bad about the pits, but that's the only way you can get 'em.  There was supposedly some reason why they wouldn't make it through the machinery without bad bruising.

     About that...

     What I ordered turned out to be pitted Castlevetrano olives!  Every bit as delicious and about five times as handy for cooking. 

     The day they arrived, I used a few in salmon patties* in celebration.  They worked wonderfully well.

     This morning's omelet included two strips of bacon, a couple of slices of Manchego cheese and five Castlevetranos. It was every bit as good as you might think.
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* Salmon patties are a Depression-era treat which, now that I am grown up, I have realized was one of my mother's "backup" foods.  Canned salmon has a relatively long shelf life, and the basic recipe is just one 14.5 oz. can of salmon, drained (but save that liquid until the patties are formed), a half-cup of crushed saltines and an egg.  You mix it all up, add some of the can juice if needed to keep the patties from being too dry, and brown them in a little olive oil, bacon fat or whatever.  You can add seasoning (pepper, sage, parsley, a little garlic, whatever), chopped onion, celery and/or olives, or replace the fresh onion or celery with onion powder, dried celery or celery seed, and a little Worcestershire sauce or lemon/lime juice isn't remiss.  Other than the can of salmon, it's all staples, stuff you should normally have in the larder all the time.  If your meal planning comes up short, there it is, ready to be the main dish.

Heigh-ho, Heigh-ho, It's Off To [Undisclosed Location] I Go

     Gotta say, I'm not looking forward to this.  There's a lot of paperwork and proving of bona fides involved and there will be even more at the test site -- all contactless until the last step, which is the part that I am told isn't fun. 

     The telephone screener/intake person was interesting.  Obviously working from home and struggling a little bit with the software, she apologized for being a slow typist.  "I'm not very quick at this.  Normally I do research," she said.  "I'm a scientist."

     My screener was a Ph.D.

     There's a whole knot of biomedical research, manufacturing, support and hospitals downtown, in a broad arc that sweeps from the granddaddy of them all, the vast Eli Lilly* complex, and curves northwest to the hospitals and related establishments on and around the IUPUI campus and then swings northeast to the collection of huge buildings that comprise Methodist hospital.  The hospitals are busy and crowded; Lilly's got one division working on COVI-19 treatments and their insulin section is obviously essential.  But everybody else, if their work wasn't essential, got sent home and their PPE was given to be used by people working with the infected and possibly infected.

     That leaves a huge pool of talent trying to work from home; if the bulk of your work is in a lab somewhere, there's a finite amount of paperwork to do, and after that--  Well, after that, it seems, there's still work to be done, even if it's not in one's usual line.  I wouldn't be surprised to learn a lot of the people collecting and collating data for the Indiana State Department of Health are drawn from that same group.

     Meanwhile, several local distillers and a hairspray manufacturer are turning out home-grown hand sanitizer for first responders; that leaves more of the usual commercial product available for you and me, and keeps the people in the police department, the fire department, paramedics and others a little safer.  Their exposure is higher than just about anyone's (except that nice person running the cash register at your local grocer's or big-box five-and-dime, don't forget him or her) and they need that alcohol-laden goo.

     This is how a city functions when things go sideways; this is how all our cities are functioning, as best as they can.
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* Lilly, it should be noted, is to the patent protection of medicines what Disney is to copyright.  And that's something to ponder.

Telemedicine

     The doctor -- my doctor -- saw me over the phone this morning.  She called in some prescriptions and put me on the list to get a letter that will let me, as an essential worker (and people thought I'd never amount to anything!), get tested.

     Haven't seen the letter yet, which should trigger an e-mail notification when they file it online; her office staff is mostly working from home, too, so they're not as quick as usual.

     If the test is positive, then I'll be essentially out sick for a couple of weeks.

     Meanwhile, I'm in bed, with the cats and the TV and computers.  I had to dig out the Microsoft Surface Pro that usually lives in my briefcase for the doctor's appointment: according to their website the digital doc stuff is only tested and known to run on Firefox or Chrome and I didn't feel like being a test case for Safari.  My desktop machine is cameraless; I don't routinely use one and it would just be another point of vulnerability.  But they're handy on the portable devices and a fat rubber band blindfolds them if needed.

Sadly Plausible

     Online ad seen today:

     Yeah.  And in the right order, too.

Still Home

     Felt better when I first woke up but it didn't last.  Still coughing.  Moving too quickly makes me dizzy.  Sat down at the computer to try to do some work e-mails and I kept nodding off.

     So I made breakfast instead.  Omelettes don't call for much of a rush, especially if you assemble all the ingredients ahead of time.

     I started by putting some cornmeal (maybe two tablespoons, or two and a half), a pinch of salt, some fresh ground pepper and Italian seasoning in a 2-cup measuring cup and added about as much warm water as there was cornmeal; gave it a quick stir and set it on the back of the stove to soak and ponder.   I chopped up some carrots and celery, then fried a strip of bacon, planning to set aside half the bacon for Tam.  While the bacon was sizzling, I chopped up a bit of the cooked brisket from Liter House ad added it to the vegetables.

     Once the bacon was done, I set it on paper towel to drain, poured off most of the bacon fat, and added the vegetables and brisket to the skillet.  We just opened up a wedge of Manchego cheese yesterday* and it seemed like a good idea, so I cut a couple of slices from it and diced them, giving the veggies and meat a stir from time time.

There's a half-strip of bacon at the left, hiding under the vegetables and brisket.

     Next up, how 'bout that batter?  I cracked a couple of eggs into the cornmeal and water, and beat it with a fork until it was a consistent lemony color, then beat it a little more (it's difficult to go too far with this; you really want to agitate it and make it ready form new bonds).  The vegetables were translucent and the brisket was nicely recooked by then, so they went on the paper towel and the omelette batter went into the skillet.

All the light-yellow spots are Manchego, in various stages of melting.

     I offset the pan over the fire for the first part of cooking when I make omelettes.  That ensures the half I'm going to flip up gets cooked, the "hinge" stays flexible and the down side doesn't get over-cooked.  I sprinted about half the cheese on the batter once it was underway, skipping a strip across the middle.

     Once it looked about right -- starting to get a little dry on the top of the half over the fire, or just shy of that -- I added the meat and vegetables to the less cooked side along with the rest of the cheese, flipped the cooked side over it, pressed down along the join, and centered the pan up.  I put a lid over it and let it go for three or four minutes, flipped and did the same, flipped again and gave it a couple of minutes uncovered to get both sides equally done.  (I don't like 'em wet.  YMMV.)

     It was delicious.  I'd show a photograph of the finished omelette, cut in half so you could see the filling, but I was pretty hungry by the time it was done and it didn't last that long.
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* I opened up the Manchego the previous day as a topping for brisket hash, which was about as good a version as I have made: dice Liter House brisket and a couple of nice Yukon Gold potatoes diced to match, topped with Manchego and a fried egg: tasty!  

Out Today

     Wasn't feeling so great this morning, so I called in in sick.  I'm working alone in a locked building in secure enclosure in the middle of nowhere, and I'm not going to take any chances.

     Yesterday morning, I was getting ready for work and my pajamas fell on the floor right inside the (closed) door of my room.  I looked down and realized they were vanishing through the gap under the door!  The new cat Holden had been in the hallway, noticed motion, and decided the thing to do was grab whatever that thing was.  I laughed and laughed -- and then realized I was starting to black out.  Managed a soft landing on my knees, got my head down and was only out for a flash, but it was startling.

Running Late

     You see, we ordered out for Sunday dinner, and our order (a whole smoked beef brisket: food for several days!) included green beans -- and something called "hash browns casserole."  (Liter House has converted to carryout, with as good a contactless pickup system as I've seen and including some basic groceries and household supplies.)

     The casserole is hash browns with onion and a little this and that, baked slowly with milk and a dab of butter: you end up with something akin to mashed potatoes and very tasty it was, too.

     We ate a little less than half, which meant this morning, there was a bit over a cup of cold mashed potatoes in the fridge.

     Waste not, want not: the recipe for mashed potato cakes take two and a half tablespoons of flour and one egg per cup of potato mixture.  I mixed it together, made a batch of four, added more flour and made two more batches.

     It takes time and the cooking is kind of fiddly -- you can't flip them until they've browned.  But oh, so good, especially with a slice of bacon on the side!  (Of course I had a little bacon fat in the skillet to fry the potato cakes.)

     But now I've got to run to catch up.

What I Did Today

     Today and yesterday, in fact: I messed around setting up my ham station.  Having decided I need a 1:1 balun -- a kind of RF transformer, used to connect unbalanced (ground-referenced) equipment to a balanced device (like my G5RV antenna) -- I found a ferrite toroid core that seemed likely, wound two interwoven 12-turn coils of #14 house wire on it (as much as would fit), and looked around for an enclosure.

     I didn't have much, and then I found my collection of old tea canisters.  That worked.

     The coil is sandwiched between two 1/8" Garolite* plates held by brass screws (one headless) into a ceramic insulator; another, shorter insulator is threaded onto one end and fastened to the bottom of the box.  The lower plate has two corners clipped so the wires from that side can get to the terminals.

     There's a trick to working with such thin metal.  You can drill it, but it's risky -- even with a backing, it can catch and tear.  A better bet is to mark hole centers with a sharp awl and use a Roper-Whitney punch,† which will center up on the awl-made dimples.  Careful work with a hand reamer or chassis punch will enlarge the holes if necessary.  Small holes can just be punched with the awl, especially in places the punch wont reach.  (The lid does fit square, when properly seated.)



     My little SWR analyzer says it's not terrible on  the 80 meter ham band and not bad on 40 -- the ferrite I used was supposed to be good through 30 MHz, but the match starts getting worse and worse by the 20 meter band.

     Checked it with the RME-45 receiver and Millen "Junior" transmatch and it works okay, slightly better signals with it between the antenna and the matcher.  80 meters was a jumble of noise this afternoon.  Just went down (10:20 p.m.) and turned on the receiver; as I tuned past 3885 kHz, a voice came out of the speaker: "Hello, Bobbi!  C'mon Bobbi..." 

     That got my attention, as you might expect.  I dodged the slow-rate tuning back and forth a little, and he came back on, "[callsign], this is [other callsign], c'mon, Bobby, if you're not there I'll just call CQ, CQ, CQ , this is [othercallsign] and remember, people, don't buy coax jumpers, you build your own.  CQ, CQ, from [other callsign], c'mon..."

     So I wasn't hallucinating.  And I was certainly glad I'd made my own coaxial jumpers!

     Next step, rebuilding the transmit/receive switch and moving the DX-60 transmitter over to the new shelves.
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* As close to Bakelite as you can get now.  McMaster-Carr stocks it in a variety of sizes and shapes.
 
† Mine is actually a Whitney-Jensen, an earlier model with a few minor differences.  These useful little devices are widely available used. Plugging the name into a search engine brings up a lot of listings at online auction sites.

Cooped Up? Vacation From Your Desk!

     BBC has a delightful collection of "Places That Don't Belong," geopolitical anomalies all around the globe.  Many of them were hard to find or difficult to get to even before we were all staying home -- but you can visit them online!

     I may have to plug my Raspberry Pi into one of the big TVs and go on a tour.

Friday!

     I don't have much for today.  Just try to be nice -- socially distant doesn't need to mean socially rude.

     Supposed to rain here this weekend.  I hope they're wrong about that.

And It Keeps On

     Being poor sucks.  I've been poor.  A couple of times, I have been so flat broke, I didn't know what I was going to do next.  You get through it, but I lived on a diet of ramen and hot dogs, of store-brand canned soup, where the occasional can of corned beef hash is a treat and restaurant food, even drive-through junk, is reserved for holidays.  I learned to mend jeans and to keep work clothes just for work; at home, old jeans and a T-shirt or a nightgown and robe was good enough.  There were better times, too; but they never lasted and there was no counting on them.

     When I first went to work at my present job over thirty years ago, the improvement in food I could afford was an unbelievable bounty; they handed out $30 grocery-store gift certificates at Thanksgiving and every Christmas, the company parked a freezer truck at the back door and handed out boxes of hard-frozen meat: two or three steaks, a nice ham, over five pounds of high-grade goodness.  It was remarkable; I started cooking again and slowly got to where I didn't feel as if going out to a dinner where someone else wasn't picking up the check was a frivolous waste of money

     Dealing with what coronavirus worries are doing to grocery-store shelves feels like being poor again.  I tend to focus on what's available, what I can make work for multiple meals, what I can safely store for later.  Just like decades ago, I worry about next week and next month.

     Of course, I'm not alone.  Most people are feeling this, and a lot of them didn't start with the stock of food and supplies Tam and I have on hand. 

     It's normal to fret a bit in times like these.  That doesn't make it better but maybe it makes it a little easier to bear.

So, It Occurred To Me...

     ...All over the First World, children who have been picky, fussy eaters are being told, "Well, that's what we've got, so eat it or go hungry."

     I take this with the slightly malicious glee of a spinster aunt, reminded of my mother's story of  staying with one of her much-older sisters for a couple of weeks one summer.  This would have been some time between 1938 and 1941; Mom was grade-school age and her sister was out of college, working, and not yet married. 

     Times were hard, money was tight, and if you think the wage differential between men and women is significant now, it was far more so then.  Mom was the very youngest, and accustomed to having her own way.  Her sister lived in a small apartment, downtown in a fair-to-middling southern Indiana city

     One day, lunch was chicken noodle soup, bread and butter, and milk.  Mom had decided after a few spoonfuls that the soup was not to her liking.  She ate her bread, drank about half her milk, and looked around, complaining that she was hungry.

     "Well, then, finish your soup."

     "It's awful."

     "I see."  A streetcar bell clanged outside the window.  "Oh, there's the trolley!  Go have a look!"

     Thrilled as only a child can be by such a connection to the wider world, Mom rushed over to the window and watched as the trolley car stopped, passengers got off and other got on, and the motorman dinged the bell and sent it trundling away away.

     Her sister said, "Come back and have your milk, and you can go play."

     Mom returned to the table, picked up her suddenly-full milk glass, and chugged it -- realizing, too late, that the glass was now half-milk, half chicken noodle soup.  Raised too polite to spit it out, she finished her "milk," and took the lesson to heart -- or at least well enough to heart that when she had children of her own, she made sure we knew what might happen.

     My siblings and I all learned to finish our soup.

     Perhaps a new generation of children is learning to eat what's set before them -- a lesson that may have wider implications than just at mealtime.