At Last, The Back Yard!

      Tam and I have...mostly ignored the back yard since Spring 2020.  --Other than this year's tomato patch, for which I have hopes.

      Today, we started doing something about it and made a lot of progress before knocking off to grill steaks, foil-wrapped corn on the cob and a little pot of Brussels sprouts.  It all came out well, and with few dishes. 

Too Much Crazy

      Nothing to post.  Can't convince myself this awful world is real today.

Sauce For The Goose, Sauce For The Gander

      An interesting experiment for the amateur statistician would be graphing the overlap between people fighting mask mandates or avoiding the coronavirus vaccine and framing it as a matter of personal choice and personal responsibility, and people complaining about Simone Biles deciding not to fling herself through the air at risk to life and limb because she wasn't on her "A" game.

     Either individuals get to make their own choices about personal risk, or they don't -- and a gymnast who has a bad fall is a lot less likely to take a selection of onlookers along with her.

Strogan-what?

      It started with "boneless country pork ribs," a cheap and flavorful cut.  I scissored them into half-inch cubes with smoked paprika, Worcestershire sauce and garlic, and browned them well.  Next came a fancy mushroom assortment -- shitake, brown and white beech and golden oyster mushrooms.  Once all that was cooked well, I added a can of Amy's mushroom soup and small can of indulgence: black truffle sauce.  (About $10, I have the black or white truffle sauce about once a year).  That got a ten-minute simmer, covered.

      It's more-or-less pork stroganoff.

      Served over egg noodles with some parsley, it was darned good.  Italian (flat) green beans on side, and there's supper. 

Still Socially Distant

      Yeah, I did it.  I've gone back to wearing a mask at the store.  I'll be wearing a mask to interact with co-workers.  I'm limiting my shopping trips again.

      But why?  After all, I'm vaccinated.  The odds are incredibly good that if the SARS-CoV-2 virus hits me, it will amount to no more than sniffles.  Or I might get it and never notice.  I'm as protected as anyone could be.

      Thing is, a good many other people aren't.  I could infect them without even knowing I was sick.  And while I have no problem with other people deciding to roll those dice, I don't care to roll the dice for them.  If someone wants to skip the vaccine for whatever reason, it's not my job to argue them out of it.  I'm not the boss of them.  Nevertheless, I don't care to be their disease vector -- and that is under my control.  Nope, it's not noble or selfless and I'm not smugly congratulating myself over it: I don't want the guilt.  It's like not sweeping someone with the muzzle of a firearm, even one I just checked and found to be unloaded: why risk it?

      It's a small thing, and yet -- I don't want to kill someone because I was lazy.  I don't want someone to fall ill because I didn't care to breathe through a filter for half an hour.  (I have worked weeks of eight-hour days in a full-face APR -- that's a gas mask, close as it matters -- and a taped-up hazmat "moonsuit" with hood, gloves and overboots.  A dopey little paper/cloth mask is nothing.)

      YMMV.  Make your own choices.  I'm not the boss of you, either.  I am the boss of me, and this is what I have decided to do until we get this damn bug under better control.  We can still stomp it flatter than smallpox, but the clock is ticking.

One Week On

      ...Having hot and cold running water in the kitchen remains a delight and a marvel.  Even better, the new faucet has a longer spout, allowing it to swivel over the center of the bowls of the double sink, or almost to the center.  The old one was a stubby, apartment-sized unit that could be frustrating -- all the more so since it was apparently about half-blocked by lime scale when I first moved in!

      Most of Indiana has very hard water.  While this means our plumbing is sometimes "self-healing," it also means narrow channels will close up over time -- and the structural properties of lime scale are nowhere near as good as those of copper or galvanized iron water pipe.  When a "healed" leak fails, it can be dramatic.

      While the old spout hadn't done anything spectacular, it had started leaking along its length early in the pandemic (but after our furnace had to be replaced) and I'd made a series of temporary repairs by wrapping it with layers of self-amalgamating tape.  This was only partially successful.  So I was living with a less than ideal setup long before it start leaking down into the basement.  This has served to increase my pleasure at having an ordinary, modern faucet on the kitchen sink.

Why Not Again?

     Going through the freezer yesterday, I found a couple of nice little New York Strip steaks that needed to be cooked before they turned into bricks.

     There was still plenty of charcoal left in the grill -- the lovely thing about a covered grill is you can "turn it off" and save unused charcoal after grilling by shutting the vents and closing the lid.  I added a little more and built a tic-tac-toe grid of split pine and hardwood with crumpled newspaper in the bottom center, then piled up charcoal around it to form a chimney open at the bottom.  A match at the front and another at the back for luck soon had it roaring and I fed leftover small pieces into it until I was satisfied.*

     The meat had thawed overnight and was sitting out, seasoned (coarse togarishi salt, black pepper, a very little ginger and garlic) and covered, while I built the fire.

     Before the meat went on, I assembled another mushroom pilaf: oyster mushrooms, chopped carrot, celery and a couple of cherry tomatoes, chopped piparra peppers and capers, seasoned with garlic, parsley, rosemary, basil and thyme. (I think I have mentioned before that Simon and Garfunkel's similar list in song lyrics is what you use to season baked chicken.  Those wistful, romantic lyrics?  They're thinking about dinner!)  A teaspoon or two of butter and it sat on the back of the grill while the steaks cooked.

     Some water-soaked hickory chips and the steak followed -- mine first (medium) and Tam's later (very rare).

     While all that had been going on on, there was one more thing in the pipeline: water heating up in a big pot on the stove (and the electric teakettle, it's faster) with a dash of salt and a teaspoon or so of chorizo seasoning.  Corn on the cob takes about seven minutes in boiling water, and keeps for quite a while in the hot water.

     It all came together right on time and enjoyed a nice supper (hickory-grilled steak and corn on the cob is hard to beat!) while watching Turn: Washington's Spies, an espionage thriller set during the Revolutionary War (ours).
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* Charcoal-lighting fluid?  Just say no -- and say no to briquettes, too.  Hardwood lump charcoal will make you eager to grill, and the emotional reward of starting a fire with one or two matches is a nice mood-booster.

Grilling!

      Grilled a couple of little filet mignons for supper tonight,  Small because A) meat is so expensive now and B) it's better for us.

      They were very good quality, and cooked nicely over hardwood charcoal.

      On the side (literally!), I had a little pot bubbling over the coals with oyster mushooms, sliced carrots and celery, onion and garlic powder and parsley, and four shishito peppers on top.  This is a tasty side and takes just about zero effort other than prep -- you wash and slice the mushrooms and veggies (the peppers only need to have the tops cut off), put it in the pot and set it on a corner of the grill.  It's done when the steak is done.

      A couple of sliced and seasoned cherry tomatoes and (of course) baked potatoes finished on the grill, wrapped in foil rounded out the menu.  The potatoes are a conceit; most of the cooking takes place in the microwave.  But that last five or six minutes over the coals does seem to add a certain something.

      A good dinner calls for good entertainment.  Tam and I watched The Courier, a Cold War spy tale based on real events.  Well done and nicely told.

Screening Keeps The Bugs Out

      Yet another comment didn't get through the screening process this morning, due to partisan crap-stirring and an apparent misreading of what I wrote.

     Hey, fine, you only came here to dunk on The Other Party -- but I ain't your Other Party.  Not a Democrat, not a Republican and ever since many of them went nuts in 2020, not a Libertarian, either.  I do not consider "they make people I dislike boiling mad" to be adequate criteria for supporting any politician or party. 

      Right now, too many Republican politicians are whining and too many Democrat politicians are gloating, especially at the Federal level.  I'm not impressed by it.  I'm even less thrilled when other citizens do so.

      Crimes were committed by some of the protesters at the U. S. Capitol on 6 January 2020.  The Feds are busy rounding up the malefactors, who will be given fair trials and will face serious consequences if found guilty.  I have no problem with that, just as I have no problem when rioters and looters elsewhere are arrested, charged and brought to trial.  I don't care about any of their politics, it's their unlawful and destructive behaviors that matter.  We don't police opinions in this country, only actions.

      The nature of the incursion into the Capitol was almost unique.*  It merits careful investigation, with an eye to keeping protests outside (look, if you leave the keys in your car and someone steals it, they're the criminal -- but you still screwed up) and Congresspeople worrying about re-election rather than possible physical harm.  What it doesn't merit is any whining or gloating, not from Congressthings and not from my commentariat.  Twitter and Facebook is full of that sort of thing, any flavor you like; newer social media and the old blogosphere have even more.  I'm sick of it, heartsick over it.  Our political system only works if most of us are not trying to smash it up.  It's not perfect; it's clumsy and slow, but it does work, it does have mechanisms that tend (however crudely) to self-correct and it's supposed to aim for fairness.  Shoving a stick in the spokes as the wheels turn does not improve matters.
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* Our good, good friends the British did rather worse back on 24 August 1814.  I suppose subsequent history shows that even huge differences can eventually be reconciled. 

They'd Rather Fight Than Find Out

      ...And that's as much agreement as we're probably going to see over the House Select Committee to investigate the 6 January mass break-in at the U. S. Capitol.  The Dems got seven picks (and filled one with Republican Liz Cheney) while the GOP got five.  Speaker Pelosi rejected two of them.  She can do that, but it's something no speaker has done before and in response, Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy bowed out, removing all five of the Republicans he had chosen.

      Indiana's got a dog in this fight: our very own Representative Jim Banks was one of the two men the Speaker nixed.

      The GOP says they'll make their own committee -- presumably without Bender's "blackjack and hookers," and so anyone who was hoping for a single answer, however unsatisfactory, to "What happened?" is not going to be getting one from the House.

      Alas, the honorable Mr. Banks wasn't impressing me with his logic when he said, in part, the Speaker's refusal to seat him and Rep. Jim Jordan showed that, "...this was never a serious effort on their part, it’s all a political witch hunt. They want to make this all about Donald Trump, dragging Republican members of Congress through the mud and attacking 75 million people that voted for Donald Trump.” (Source here.)

      I was watching TV on 6 January with a kind of horrified fascination.  While there were quite a few people breaking doors and windows, it wasn't 75 million, and trying to drag them into the mob action -- which Speaker Pelosi has not done and Rep. Banks has -- strikes me as more than a little unfair.

      I'd like to see a fairly rancorous and fully bipartisan House or Senate committee investigate 6 January, in public view and with plenty of shouting and a long witness list.  It looks like that's not going to happen.  I'm far less interested in the Democrats and Republicans suiting up and playing press-conference ping-pong, more concerned with accusing one another of bad faith, ill-will and lousy tipping (not to mention their Moms dressed them funny) than unpacking the chain of events that led to an angry mob breaching the U. S. Capitol instead of merely milling around outside, waving signs, scaring passers-by and annoying Congress from a safe distance in the normal (and generally First Amendment-protected) manner of most protests. 

California Is Burning

      ...Again.  California catches fire every year, at least the parts they haven't paved.  I'm starting to think they might be better off if they just went ahead and finished the job; at least collecting and transporting water would be easier with a smooth surface.  But I'd miss the National Parks and other natural wonders.

Smooth

      Blue Origin's New Shepard flight today was very much within their engineering philosophy -- carefully planned, carefully engineered, and executed without a bobble.  If SpaceX is a "move fast and break things" company, Blue Origin believes in "never show unfinished work," and have exercised a great deal of control in both their experimental program and access to it.  When they're ready to pull back the curtain, they're ready.

      It paid off today.

      There are many paths to success and I am pleased to see a variety of successful approaches to the difficult work of spaceflight.

      Jeff Bezo's space program is not just an up-and-back outfit, either.  Blue Origin's orbital rocket, the New Glenn, may fly as soon as late next year.  Those rockets launch from Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, just down the road (and across the line between KSC and CCSFS) from SpaceX's current launch location, 39A, and very near (by spaceport standards) to LZ-1 and 2,* the SpaceX ground landing locations.

     Looks like the high frontier's finally opening up.
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* Not this LZ-1 and 2!