An example of what you can accomplish with a sous vide wand: this is a cheap roast Rhonda picked up at ShopRite for around $25 bucks. Fed four with leftovers. I put it in the tank with salt and pepper for a few hours then finished it on the grill.

Here’s my top-five 10k rows:

Fairly linear trend in the desired direction, although slow going for sure. I am sure that my decline in performance in December and January was due to my second COVID infection, from which I did not suffer any serious or long-term symptoms, but nevertheless. Happy about this!

Here’s this week’s list of things to check out:

1. Logitech MX Master Mouse: I bought my first MX Master during Covid, when a solid and functional seated workspace became important. I still use my original MX Master at my desk at home, but after trying a few cheaper mice at the office, and seeing the gen 2 of this venerable mouse on sale on Amazon, I sprung for a second device. (There’s a third generation for sale now, hence the sale.) It’s really big and I thought that I wouldn’t like the first iteration, but it helped me realize that, for seated computing, a big arc in your palm is just the thing you need.
2. Tostones: Tostones are fried green plantains. Rhonda has been making these excellent (and cheap) pork roasts for taco nights, which even Joey eats. I started making refried beans from dried beans in my pressure cooker (Rhonda, perhaps rightfully, fears the quaking pot), and they have been a big hit. Aaron pulled a green plantain out of the pantry and asked about making it. The trick with these is to fry them in warm oil after cutting the plantain into one-inch slices, and then dropping them into cold water for a few minutes. Once your pan (and oil) is hot, you smash them and fry them a second time. I used the Blackstone, so these were less oily, and I was able to smash and fry at the same time. We only had one, but would have eaten more.
3. Portmanteau: This might actually just be a blend word, but in any event: I’ve been making sous vide egg bites every Sunday for the work week for Rhonda and me. I make ten bites, but we only have nine mason jars at this point. I put the rest of the egg mixture in a sandwich bag and sous vide it alongside the jelly jars. It has come to be called “eggbag,” and we always recognize it apart from the other bites. I always eat eggbag. Eggbag is not capitalized, outside of starting a sentence.

A typically dense read from The Marginalian:

…neuroscience affirms the body as the instrument of feeling that makes the symphony of consciousness possible: feelings, which arise from the dialogue between the body and the nervous system, are not a byproduct of consciousness but made consciousness emerge.

and

Consciousness… is a particular state of mind resulting from a biological process toward which multiple mental events make a contribution… These contributions converge, in a regimented way, to produce something quite complex and yet perfectly natural: the encompassing mental experience of a living organism caught, moment after moment, in the act of apprehending the world within itself and, wonder of wonders, the world around itself.

Organisms progress from “minding”: create images from sensory experience, to thoughts: rendering the internal world in the same way.

I Feel, Therefore I Am: Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio on Consciousness as a Full-Body Phenomenon

One app on the Mac that I love and use all the time is Yoink, a digital shelf for files. Example use case: I grab a screenshot, grab the thumbnail in the lower right corner of the screen, and then drag it into Yoink’s shelf. From there, I can drag the file into an email, iMessage, or MarsEdit.

There’s a Yoink-like app for Windows, it turns out: DropShelf. There are some differences between DropShelf and Yoink, but it is functionally equivalent. I do not, for example, like how DropShelf is activated: You select a file or files in File Explorer, and shake your cursor. The gesture requires a lot of “shaking” to the point that I think the invocation doesn’t work. It should work just by dragging, as does Yoink.

I took the ServSafe test for work; it was not at all a requirement of being a special education supervisor, but we opened a cafe at the local community college for our students to work in, and we (the leadership) team agreed it would be helpful for as many of us as possible to have the certification.

I will say that this test is much harder than I expected, and I wasn’t sure I’d passed it when walking out. Add to that that I had a class to attend that I forgot about and missed the first 45 minutes of the testing session.

Time to glove up!

Today I found myself about a mile-and-a-half from the Sly Fox brewery’s Malvern location, so I just had to stop in. The original Sly Fox was my college haunt back in the late 90’s; it was in nearby Phoenixville, and (usually) Mike Walter, Jeff Henning, and I would find ourselves extracting a sawbuck each from the nearby Mac machine, and having three pints (at three bucks a pop) and leaving a buck for the bartender. We didn’t do the noisy sports-bar, plastic-cup-of-Natty-light, ten-cents wing thing very much, if at all, and preferred the quiet peace of the Sly Fox.

Things have changed a fair bit for the Sly Fox since those days; they now distribute their beer in cans in the region, and have multiple locations. I mentioned that I used to hang out at the Phoenixville location to the bar tender who pulled my stout this afternoon, and he knew of the original location, and filled me in on the new building across the street from the original, as well as two locations in Pittsburgh.

I can’t say the food was terribly exciting, but it was neat to step into an evolved version of my history, when the Sly Fox was one of the newest options for discerning drinkers popping up on the East Coast.

Here’s this week’s things of check out:

1. Quick Accent in PowerToys: I’ve written about my love for PowerToys on Windows before, but necessity was the mother of discovery for me this week. While trying to type “café” a few times this week, I struggled to find the accented “e” character in Windows. A quick web search helped me discover that PowerToys has an affordance similar to that offered on the Mac: to find and enter an accented letter, hold down the letter key and tap the space bar. Presto: atop your screen appears a list of possible accented letters. You use the number key or the arrow keys to select your target. Pretty bueno.

2. Butter Steak: Rhonda and I had a neighbor who used to crow about this downmarket grocery store nearby and their “butter steaks.” I didn’t know what a butter steak was and suspected the name was an Orwellian trick to call the steak the opposite of what it was. Having seen them in our local butchers, I knew they were cheap and kinda homely. Turns out it’s a flat iron steak, which is a much sturdier sounding name. I’ve had exactly one flat iron steak before, at the now-defunct (pour one out) Winfield’s in Millville, NJ, site of many excellent meals shared with family and friends before it closed during the COVID pandemic. I purchased one butter steak alongside a more fanciful ribeye roast (two bones) for under four bucks, chucked it in the sous vide tanking along with the ribeye, and seared it off on the grill with the roast. I sliced it on the bias and served for everyone to try. I was excellent; more tender than a flank, more chew than a filet mignon. What a great, cheap, if ugly, cut of beef.

3. La Jolie Fleur Rosé: Rhonda and I nipped out Friday to the around-the-corner Greenview Inn. We have been sipping rosé regularly at local wineries, and taking a bottle along from said wineries to our favorite BYOBs in town. Greenview offering a full bar, we ordered off of the menu, and tried the only rosé on the list: la Jolie Fleur. It was more grapefruity than the Outer Coastal Plains varietals we’ve been enjoying, with some sediment at the bottom of the bottle. Very crisp. Would be nice to sip chilled by the pool this summer.

Barry Hess on blogging:

You don’t need to labor over your posts. You don’t need to have perfect grammar or spelling. You don’t need to leave a post in draft for seven months, pouring over research. (Though you can if you want!) You don’t really need to have an idea.

Just write. Then share.

You’re a Blogger, Not an Essayist

I’ve shared before that one of my rowing goals is to row a 10k in 40 minutes flat. I’ve gotten close but I still have some seconds to shave off my best time:

Today’s 7500 was a surprising jump, especially for a weekday row (fueled by nothing more than a cup of coffee and some pineapple). I managed to keep my pace at just about 2:00 and finished just over 30 minutes. That’s only 75% of the 10k total I’m shooting for, but I was pleased.

Here’s this week’s list of things to check out:

1. Notion Calendar: One of the development artifacts of macOS’s UNIX routes is a preference for single-purpose apps. Unlike Outlook, Apple includes separate mail, contact, and calendar apps. You can swap out your favorite software for any of those build-in apps; I use MailMate, MimeStream, and Fantastical on my Mac, and Fantastical and Spark on iOS and iPadOS. Microsoft touts Outlook as an integrated solution, and is deprecating its standalone apps in favor of it. I’ve been generally happy using Outlook on Windows, but I still search for good standalone options. Notion Calendar is no Fantastical, but it looks quite a lot like it, and works nicely on Windows (it is severely limited on iOS, though).

2. Blue Cork Winery: I recently visit the town of my soon-to-be employer, and stopped on the ride home to grab a bottle of wine to share with Rhonda. We’ve been drinking Rosé at most of the wineries we’ve visited, and while this was a solo mission, I was glad to find their Cab Franc Rosé in the fridge. We had it with sushi Friday night, and while it’s a bit more berry-forward than Sharrot or Bellview’s take on this wine, it was very Outer-Coastal-tasting and emblematic of the local style.

3. Dr. Martens Men’s 1460 in Cherry Red: A fit of nostalgia found me searching online for Doc Martens in blood red. I didn’t find that color, but the Cherry Red is, I suppose, the modern equivalent. I haven’t work Docs in over 20 years, but I started thinking they might not look bad with some of my officewear and especially my more casual selections (which I am prone to, at work, these days). They are pricey but I have really enjoyed wearing them since they came in, although they’re tough to break in. I imagine some black and brown Docs are in my future!

Blue Cork Rosé