Weather?

     So....now it's 41 degrees and climbing, and we've got fog so thick that when I heard a loud snorting and groaning and felt the house shake a little, I was looking for a dinosaur rather than the garbage truck with its fancy hydraulic can-grabbing claw.

     But it was a truck that emerged from the mists and just as well -- I'm pretty sure my insurance doesn't cover thunder lizards.

Well, It's Warmer Today

     It's much warmer today.  In the upper twenties to low thirties, in fact.  What an improvement!  --Except for the freezing drizzle, of course.

     Yeah.  Here in town, at least so far, it's still just wet, though I won't be surprised if there are patches of ice.  Out where things begin to thin out, it's worse, including my current worry at the North Campus, where some things that shouldn't ice up probably are, while I try to coordinate specialists to help us do something about that.

    

The Wind Chill Is Nine

     Nine degrees above zero, mind you; I wouldn't want people to think I was exaggerating.   The thermometer sits at nineteen, which is plenty cold enough.

     Over the weekend, the weather did call for a cold snap followed by gradual warming late in the week and a return to seasonal temperatures over the weekend -- but not this cold.  On the other hand, the early forecast missed the snow, too, and we've had plenty enough to make streets and sidewalks slick.

     Not much to be done except remember August.  And think of the Spring.  Three months and a few days to go!

What Did Happen At the Border?

     It's yet another incident where you'll see what you brought to it -- some people I know were horrified that the U.S. used tear gas on refugees while others were concerned about an attempted invasion.

     There is an actual procedure for people seeking asylum in the United States.  It doesn't include climbing a border fence.  It is slow -- a few hundred a week at the San Ysidro port of entry where many of the marchers have gathered and where the attempted illegal crossing and tear-gassing took place.  This is a governmental process, a bit more involved than getting a driver's license, and those wheels turn slowly.

     The miracle is that they turn at all.  The MS St. Louis -- carrying over 600 refugees fleeing Nazi Germany -- was refused by Cuba and the United States in 1939; about a third of the passengers were eventually allowed into Great Britain, and as for the rest, "Two hundred fifty-four passengers in Belgium, France, and the Netherlands after that date died during the Holocaust. Most of these people were murdered in the killing centers of Auschwitz and Sobibór; the rest died in internment camps, in hiding or attempting to evade the Nazis."

     Things like that are why there are laws and international treaties on the granting of asylum to refugees. Those laws aren't perfect but they're a good-faith effort, a balancing act between national security and helping innocents get out of trouble.

     NPR has a fairly neutral round-up (if you make allowance for labels: are these self-described asylum-seekers "migrants?") of what did happen at the border, what led up to it and what might happen in the future.

It's Monday In Indianapolis

     The TV news just reported part of the ring-freeway around town is closed due to a bus fire.  And it's snowing.

     Definitely Monday.

Oh, Blogging!

     I admit it -- I've been goofing off most of the last four days.  I really should have done more.  But I did make some headway on the fallen leaves today, and got a lot of laundry done yesterday.

     What I didn't do, and should have, was winterize my scooter.  That's pretty much a must this week.

When Life Gives You Leftover Mashed Potatoes

     Fry 'em!

     Pretty good with bacon and eggs.  Mashed potato patties with a little seasoned flour on them, fried in a mixture of bacon fat, butter and sesame oil.

Friday After Turkey

     I slept late, rushed the leaf bags out to the curb in my housecoat when I heard the truck come grunting down the road, checked the mail and found a pretty big check from an interesting retirement realignment.

     It was properly made out (to my bank, for me) to, knock wood, not impact my taxable income.  I'm not going to leave a piece of paper like that in the house any longer than necessary, so I got cleaned up quickly and ran to the bank to get it where it belonged, in my very own IRA, already set up.

     After that, Tam and I had a light meal at Marco's, a nice and dependably-good local place that has withstood Broad Ripple's foodie avalanche by keeping on keeping on: their menu always includes well-executed classics and the service is always friendly.  You can go in there for a meal and know what to expect.

     Came home, messed around a bit and had a nap.  I have been short on sleep for a week and a half.  Time to work on remedying that.

Bacon-Wrapped Turducken

     Every Thanksgiving, I cook a small Turducken. Even a small one is good-sized -- four and a half pounds of turkey, duck, chicken, stuffing and sausage. Typically 30 to 45 minutes per pound at 350, which is a long time in the rarely-used oven--

      The weather was supposed to be clear and not too cold, so I looked into the idea of charcoal grilling in my closed-top grill instead. It turns out that this is a thing people do. You use indirect heat, which means there's no fire directly under the pan; and you do use a pan. Many people that had tried it, liked it. I bought some disposable foil pans, and made sure there was still some charcoal left.

      This morning, I emptied the grill's grate (saving the big lumps of charcoal for reuse), cleaned the grill bars, and pondered what to do. The turducken has a kind of stretch cord netting around it to hold it together, and it's always awkward taking it off afterward. Tam and I had a nice morning walk and stopped by the grocer's to see if they were open. They were. So I bought extra bacon. Who needs a net when you've got smoked pork?

     It worked!

TAMARA KEEL PHOTO

      Here's how it went: Back home, I started the grill with a little pyramid of six fatwood sticks filled by two pages of newsprint, a loose cairn of lump charcoal piled over it. It was larger than usual and I used a couple of matches to light the newsprint in several places.

      Once the flames had slowed down, I closed the lid (vents open) and went inside, where I wove a 4x3 mat of bacon, un-netted the turducken and laid it on top of the bacon. Then I wove another bacon mat on top of the turducken, pinned it in place with several toothpicks, then went around the circumference, bending the lower mat up and pinning under to the top one and to the meat. I added a few more toothpicks for good measure. Went back outside, spread the glowing coals to the sides, added some soaked hickory chips to them, set the grill bars in place and put the pan in the middle with an oven thermometer next to it. Closed it up, set Alexa to time an hour and did other things.
An hour later, the back yard smelled wonderful and the pan was sizzling. Checked the thermometer -- 340°F, though you lose heat fast with the lid up -- dropped in some small pieces of charcoal and more smoking chips, and set timers for one hour and two and a quarter.

      After another hour (and more charcoal and smoking chips), I made skin-on mashed potatoes and oyster mushroom/bacon gravy (fry a few strips of bacon, set it aside, saute oyster mushrooms in the bacon fat, set them aside and drain liquid from them back into the pan, then make a roux with the mushroom-flavored bacon grease and once it's cooked medium-brown, add water to make gravy. Add back mushrooms and as much of the bacon as you like. Other than a little pepper on the bacon, it needs no seasoning). I prepped asparagus for sauteing and the last timer went off.
Outside, a meat thermometer told me the turducken was done. The bacon was nicely browned and the pan held lots of drippings (next year, I'll add a small cookie rack inside the pan). I added some of the more interesting stuff from the drippings to the gravy and sauteed "popcorn" asparagus while the turducken rested on a cutting board. The asparagus takes less than five minutes, then it was time to take a taste and load up plates.

TAMARA KEEL PHOTO

            The gravy and potatoes were great (if I do say so myself). Popcorn asparagus is always good, The turducken was ambrosial! Moist and flavorful. Sure, it's utterly crazy -- but it worked.

Thanksgiving

     Thanksgiving morning.  First one without my Mom.  Planning to concentrate on cooking and crafts.

     Perhaps an essay later.

Homecoming

     Homecoming is a TV series on Amazon Prime Video,  based on a podcast of the same name, written by Eli Horowitz and Micah Bloomberg (who wrote the original podcast) and directed by Sam (Mr. Robot) Esmail. 

     It is billed as a "psychological thriller," which is true enough, though with a strong science-fictional element and a background of corporate greed that probably caught Esmail's attention -- on some levels, Mr. Robot is more or less Atlas Shrugged retold for anarcho-anticapitalists.*  Homecoming is a different kind of story, with far more light in its darkness, very much "in the Gothic mode," which is to say there's a good guy or two, a bad guy or two, we come to know which is which, and the story works out to an entirely satisfactory and nearly complete conclusion.  --Nearly complete; there's another season yet to come.  Nevertheless, the first season stands very well on its own and I recommend it to my readers. 

     If you like Theodore Sturgeon's science fiction, I think you'll like this series.  Unusually for modern television programs, each episode is a half-hour long and they often end with something unresolved; not (usually) quite a cliffhanger but close enough.  Having only a half-hour to work in -- fifteen minutes less than a commercially-interrupted "hour" of drama -- forces the writing, acting and direction to be remarkably efficient and Horowitz, Bloomberg and Esmail manage it with skill and unexpected touches.
________________________________
* Albeit with a side order of Chinese cyber-warfare and a hero with severe social anxiety.

Geekery For Girls

     Don't do it girls.  Just don't.  Avoid geekery and find something else to do.  It's too frustrating, climbing over walls that aren't there for the boys, over and over and over.

     In my work, I have both general and specific skills, and both general and specific duties and responsibilities.  Any more, the general stuff -- working as one of a half-dozen electronics techs at a communications facility -- makes up the bulk of my work.   Connect this, install that, unsnarl some bit of legacy improvising, work out and build interface gadgets, respond to user problems (often under considerable time pressure), assist managers in long-range planning -- that's most of what I do.  It's the basic skill set of my line of work.  But on top of that, I have considerable experience and training in the installation, maintenance and operation of high-power radiofrequency equipment, including cooling requirements.   I've been doing that for nearly forty years.

     It doesn't make any difference in terms of trust.  Time and again, I diagnose a problem and propose a solution, only to have to explain and justify the entirely predictable and understandable behavior of that specialized equipment at great length, unless I can get a man to tell management exactly the same diagnosis and propose the same solution, at which point it is accepted without question.

     The impression I get -- from several different managers over the years -- is that at some barely-conscious level, they just can't convince themselves that some woman could possibly know what I know.  And yet many of them have resented my attempting to explain in detail so they can follow the observed symptoms and my reasoning as to the cause and remedy.  There's no way around it.  When I can, I'll use factory support engineers or consultants as cut-outs to short-circuit the cycle of skepticism and cautious explanation, which wastes time and effort.  It works.

     But I reach a point where it's all I can do to keep myself from saying, "I told you so, I've been telling you so and how I can fix it, but you won't believe me," clearing out my desk and going home. Who needs it?

     Edited To Add: Things went better than I had expected.  I was able to explain the particular problem that I was concerned about with sufficient clarity that my bosses were confident about the nature of it and my proposed remedy.  The new guys are not the old guys -- there's still the problem of always having to prove myself in a way the boys do not, but it helps considerably to be working for people who are not impervious to reason.