Excuses, Excuses

Through the first, long, home-bound stretch of the pandemic, I was actually relatively productive. Despite the weirdness of the world, I at least had a ton of time to get things done. And so, for the most part, I did.

Then, in early September, we got a puppy. Also in early September, gyms re-opened in NYC. And also also in early September, Jess started on a second Master’s degree at Columbia. At which point, my productivity kind of went to shit.

With the option to do so, I decided to reboot in-person beta-testing for A3. But because our gym is in Midtown, and I still don’t really trust subways, that meant I’d be biking back and forth – about 20 minutes each way, if I crank hard. Further, though I’d previously spent stretches of time between clients working in my office there, I wanted to minimize any unnecessary time in public spaces. So, if I had more than an hour between sessions, I decided I’d bike back home. Finally, though Jess is at home throughout the day at the moment – Columbia’s grad programs are temporarily all-virtual – she’s largely stuck in front of the computer, classing in Zoom. Which also means, at least during the day, I serve as dog-walker-in-chief.

On particularly rough days, I’m out the door at 6:00am, and going nonstop until 7:30pm, with three separate trips to and from Midtown, twice as many poop loops around the block with an impatient puppy, and whatever work I do manage squeezed into odd 15 and 30-minute pockets of free time. As a result, a bunch of stuff has gotten pushed to the back burner. And, apparently, that includes blogging.

Nonetheless, I’d love to again wedge in at least intermittent posting, and will be doing my best over the weeks ahead. Though, as my calendar looks increasingly packed, and as there’s a small dog staring at me meaningfully even as I type this right now, it seems that may be a challenge indeed.

Birthday Bunny

Jess is amazing and wonderful and beautiful and smart and funny and kind and thoughtful and adventurous and wise, and I feel exceedingly lucky to be her partner, each and every day, but especially on the anniversary of the day that she was born.

Off to Dirt Candy for a vegetarian 10-course dinner extravaganza to celebrate.

🍅🍆🥑🥦🥬🥒🌶🌽🥕🥔🎂🎉❤️😍

Ambient Flora

Me: This music is nice! Who is it?

Jess: I’m not sure. It’s a playlist for plants.

Me:

Jess: Well, it’s been cloudy for days, and I was worried our window plants were feeling sad.

This Stinks

For years, Jess thought that she didn’t like fish. Turns out, what she actually doesn’t like is the taste (and, even more so, the smell) of oxidizing fat. Growing up, the primary fish her parents cooked was sautéed salmon. Which, especially when cooked skin-on, is about as oxidized-fat-heavy as food gets.

In more recent years, Jess has discovered that she in fact really likes pretty much all raw fish (sushi!), as well as less fatty fishes (ed. note: the correct plural for multiple species) even when cooked at moderate temperatures – Amelie‘s seared Atlantic cod was a recent hit.

But, at the same time, she’s equally sensitive to a slew of other theoretically inoffensive fats once sufficiently heated. Especially in a small NYC apartment, where kitchen smells quickly suffuse the entire place. Even vegetables pan-seared in olive oil, for example, will sometimes set off her disgust response.

To mask the smell, her fallback is to light a stick of traditional Nag Champa incense, which is strong enough to cover pretty much anything else. The only problems is, I kind of hate Nag Champa in turn.

So, cooking is a bit of a crap shoot. As a culinary nerd, I often spend far more time than reasonable shopping for, prepping, and cheffing up our meals. But I do so with caution. Sure, as the excellent Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat makes clear, fat and heat make up half the secret to tasty food. But, at least in my own home, too much of either is a sure road to pungent mutually-assured scent destruction. Browned butter with a side of ashram is a win for nobody at all.

Wax On, Wax Off

We rolled into this holiday weekend with grand plans. But, last weekend, I was down for the count with a summer cold. And, this one, Jess got hit by it in turn.

So, while we started off as intended – a dinner date, followed by the Met Opera Outdoors at Lincoln Center – we didn’t make it to the end of La Fille du Regiment before Jess had reached sufficient zonked-ness to warrant heading straight back home.

Thereafter, as she was feeling even worse, the day at the beach was scrapped. And then the hike down one of our favorite scrambling-required trails.

By this morning, Jess was feeling doubly down – still sick, and also sad to have let the weekend disappear.

Fortunately, however, I had a trick up my sleeve: Jess, an inveterate candle-lover, had for months and months been saving the mostly-empty carcasses of burned-down canister candles, and the piles of wax from melted pillars and tapers, in a giant bag under our sink. I found them piled there a week or so back, and popped onto Amazon to buy a cheap pack of cotton wicks.

So, this afternoon, we were in full chandler mode. And though it was extremely slow going (melting wax, in either the microwave or a double boiler, takes approximately forever), with a good handful of missteps along the way (helpful hint: hot wax is burn-ey), we managed to kick out an even dozen candles, all of which looked wildly more professional (and, really, just more candle-like) than I was honestly expecting when I sprung the idea.

A first few are already burning nearby. And Jess, in the end, is feeling much better about the weekend, and life.

J&J Candleworks, apparently est. 2019.

So Sous Me

Years back, I remember seeing a comedian do a bit about how he wanted to open a restaurant called I Don’t Care, You Choose, so he could finally eat at the place his wife kept requesting.

Which, in short, is how my dinner conversations with Jess tend to go. And while that’s sort of an issue on date nights when we’re headed out somewhere fun, it’s even more of a disaster on the majority of nights, when I instead cook at home.

Between Equinox and Composite, my schedule is already pretty nuts, and I often get home later than I’d like. So, frequently, I end up texting with Jess from the subway, then calling her from Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s, trying to coordinate a high-speed shopping and cooking plan.

Until, that is, two or three weeks ago, when I cribbed an idea from my old friend Helen Jane, and started planning out the entire next week of meals every Saturday afternoon. The secret, I discovered, was catching Jess late on Saturday afternoon. The rest of the time, she didn’t really have strong opinions on food. But sufficiently hungry pre-dinner, she’d suddenly come up with remarkably creative and impassioned ideas.

Mostly, I do the actual cooking in our house. But it turns out that Jess makes an excellent executive chef to my hands-on sous, dreaming up meals I’d never suggest on my own. This past week, she requested scallops with a cream drizzle and summer succotash; tacos al pastor; watermelon gazpacho with fancy grilled cheese; Chic-fil-a style chicken sandwiches; and a steakhouse wedge salad.

None of which I had made before, precisely. But, with her executive chef-ing complete, I could put on my sous chef hat and figure out how to execute. Anal retentive as ever, I could even bang out triaged shopping lists – what to grab at the Sunday UWS farmer’s market; what I could stock on an oversized weekend grocery run; and what I’d need to grab on the way home the day of, though far more quickly than I had previously on my undirected post-work passes.

And I could strategize over the span of the week, rather than just day by day. Tacos al pastor took three days of cooking, and achieving Chic-fil-a juiciness required brining the breasts overnight. By banging out a bunch of fried tenders at the same time as the sandwiches, I could serve the wedge the day after, with chicken as the protein (along with an excellent cucumber dill dressing). And I could put half-used veggies, herbs, and sauces to subsequent-day use, wildly reducing our food waste.

So, in short, there seems to be a partnership-inspired restaurant to be had after all. And all it takes is a little stomach-timing savvy along the way.

Beach Day

Somewhere along the way, Jess and I picked up the nicknames Cheddar Bunny and Mighty Mouse for each other. Which led to an unexpectedly discovered ‘talent’: drawing third-grade-level cartoons of a Bunny and Mouse adventuring in the world.

Previously, these masterworks have been mostly in colored pencil, but with a recent purchase of an Apple Pencil for work, it appears I’m branching into the digital medium. 🙃

💪🏻🐭❤️🧀🐰

Steel Trap, Rusted Shut

Recently, Jess has been reading Julia Cameron’s classic The Artist’s Way, and doing the twelve-week program of self-reflection and artistic exploration that it contains.  I had read the book myself, and done the program, back in 2001 or 2002.  But listening to Jess discuss her current experience with it, I realized that I no longer really remembered any of the book, at all.  I knew that I had picked up my longstanding Morning Pages habit from the program – three daily pages of free-write brain-dump journaling (though I’d since given up on the hand-written approach Cameron prescribes, defaulting to 750 typed words daily instead, for the sake of time).  Otherwise, though, not a clue.  So, I started re-reading the book myself.  And, honestly, I haven’t even really felt glimmers of remembrance or recognition; it’s like I’d never even read the book at all.

Recently, I was revising my long-term goals (including creating new 25-year ones that will carry me all the way to 65), and I spent some time thinking about books, along with plays and movies.  I first came up with some ways of trying to keep up with the best of the new releases in the years to come.  But then I decided I should maybe try to pull together a ‘cultural literacy list’ of all the older books and plays and movies that I’d never read but long meant to.  Starting with a slew of critics’ picks, the winners of various awards, and other people’s attempts at the same kind of list-making, I was able to concatenate a list I can then try to chip away at in the years ahead.

The resultant catalog is excellent for soothing the completist, OCD part of my brain: if I can just read and watch my way through, I’ll be ‘done!’  But my experience with The Artist’s Way, and several similar ones of late, has given me pause.  Recent conversations about movies I watched decades back, like Jurassic Park or Indiana Jones, made clear that I now only remember random snippets and iconic scenes, without more than a vague sense of their plots overall.  Or earlier this year, I re-read Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, and though there I did at least have rough memories of most of the anecdotes, it turned out I remembered only the contours (something with a racially-motivated police shooting in the Bronx?) and almost none of the useful detail or lessons Gladwell drew from them.

All of which is to say, even if I do manage to slog my way through my entire cultural literacy list, I’m not sure that will be much of an achievement.  Instead, I’ll just have to head back to the start, and begin going through it all again, as by then I’m sure I’ll have forgotten pretty much everything from my first pass.