Pies, illness, and conferences

I've just recovered from a long illness. It was either a delightfully light case of COVID, or a proper case of the flu. The doctor thinks it was the latter, but either way I am left wondering how I managed to catch something after suspending all contact with humans (except rare groceries trips) for four weeks. I am feeling better now, and congratulating myself that I had stocked the freezer with so many ready-to-microwave meals. I have more meals left, in case COVID is yet to come.

I missed over a week of work, but my workplace has been amazing throughout this whole stay-at-home thing. They closed down before most other companies, gave us a stipend to buy work-from-home supplies, communicate extremely frequently about how decisions are being made, and have given us two bonus days off as mental health days. They also made the news twice. The first time, they cancelled our largest conference hours before it was supposed to start, in early March. This caused great consternation in the community and I heard a lot of criticism for exactly a week, until the rest of the world imploded and they simply looked prescient. They then ran our next big conference virtually, arranging it in less than two weeks, and it went really well. I am sad that I was too sick to attend any of it.

Part of my freezer stocking this week is making savory pies. (This is the sort of inspiration you get from reading lots of British mysteries that feature meat pies, tea, and sherry.) I was reminded of my friends in graduate school, who would get together for "filled food parties," producing delicious but labor-intensive food like Chinese dumplings, German Maustaschen, or gnocchi. Generally the output was amazing, but once we attempted Cornish pasties and the dry, sawdust-like lumps we produced haunt me to this day.

I have fonder memories of the savory pies I ate in Australia and the UK, and I set out to make mushroom, spinach, and cheddar pies. Somehow I ended up choose a more open-faced recipe with an all-butter crust so it's certainly not the same as a meat pie that you'd eat at the footy. They were fiddly to make and didn't photograph well, but are buttery and delicious and make me glad I'm well enough to cook again.

Spring

My very good friend M has been quarantined in one room of her house all week, separated from her spouse and kid. I knew she'd be missing getting outside, so I sent her a picture or video from my morning walk each day. If you are quarantined, or just stuck in a state that is still experiencing winter, here's a taste of spring for you.

Violets grow wild in my yard. If you pick enough of them, you can discern that they actually have a lovely scent; it is not just something invented for soaps that Victorian ladies used.

These are my possibly-not-quite-legal pink tulips. They were a gift from my brother's family while they were traveling in the Netherlands, and I didn't remember that I was supposed to declare them when I brought them into the country.

Pansies and tulips. Last year's extra work in establishing a perennial cottage garden has really paid off. Almost everything is already coming up, and I seemed to have planned well to have bits of color even this early in the year. Experienced gardeners will know that pansies are not actually perennials, but they can live (and bloom) through entire DC winter, so I planted them anyway.

Making stuff

Everything is all Coronavirus all the time, so you don't need to really hear any news from that here. I'll just say that everyone in my house (my roommate the fire engineering graduate student, me, and the grumpy cat) is healthy and we are probably doing better than most since we're all introverts. I just finished my second week of working from home and for the first time am enjoying having such a big house.

To distract us all with happier thoughts, here are some things I've been working on. 

Okay, so this is before we all had to stay at home.  I visited my beloved Uncle M and Aunt G in Albuquerque. We now have a routine for these visits: my uncle cooks very good food, my aunt and I do some very complicated baking, I go on a hike with my uncle, and we eat at a traditional New Mexican restaurant.

This is the complicated chocolate bombe glacee, the making of which is delightfully recounted here. It was super fun to make, but actually far too sweet to eat so I was glad we could donate it to a group of hungry Rotarians.

As a minimalist, I avoid having too much furniture, but I needed a desk now that I am working from home. I had exacting requirements about size and lack of drawers (because I usually sit cross-legged while working), so I made one. It's really pretty as long as you don't look too closely, at which point you realize that I will never get a job as a professional furniture maker.

A random aside on another blog alerted me to the existence of dandelion jelly. I had all the ingredients (sugar, pectin, canning jars) and my yard and neighborhood are brimming with dandelions right now. It was a fair bit of work to pick 10 cups of dandelions, but at the end I was surprised that the jelly really did taste like honey, as advertised.

I hope you are staying healthy and as sane as possible in these surreal times.

Memories

The decluttering fairy has worked her magic again. I decided to do something about the box of photo albums and scrapbooks gathering dust in the basement. I don't look at them very often, and when I move again, I don't want to take that much stuff. So I spent the last two weekends turning a two-foot-high stack of albums into a 2" stack of photos. I am throwing out 90% of the photos, scanning a representative sample, and keeping a select few for non-digital viewing. If you are a collector, this news will give you heart palpitations, and I apologize for that, but it's turned out to be a delightful project. The photos span my life age 0-31, when digital cameras became commonplace. It reminded me of many people who were treasured friends during a time when our lives intersected. I have lost touch with many of them, but that doesn't negate all the wonderful experiences we had.

A few of memories, in reverse chronological order...

One of the biggest Star Trek conventions is held in Las Vegas each year. in 2007, I attended with Andrew (my new boyfriend) and Tom, a friend from my research group. I didn't tell my advisor I was going, because I was scheduled to take my physics qualifying exam the week after I returned and I didn't want him to think I wasn't serious about studying.

My cousin S got married in one of Liberace's houses, and the dress code was something like film star. I chose to come as a 1920's film star.

A momento of the year I worked as a chef. It's the hardest physical labor I've ever done, and they paid me a whopping $7.25 per hour. In comparison, I thought my physics graduate school stipend of $18k annual was a king's ransom. I would never return to professional cooking, but I am still pleased with how confident I am in the kitchen as a result.

During high school, I studied abroad in Germany. At the end of the year, my parents and brother came to visit. Here, my host father introduces my mother to many European liquors. My brother was a junior in high school, so I vaguely remember him being continually annoyed with being away from his friends and wanting to eat a lot of McDonald's. This is a far cry from his current life.

 I lived with three families during my year in Braunschweig, but my favorite was the W Family. They tolerated my vegetarianism,although my host father repeatedly admonished me that "Vom Schwein kommt die Kraft", i.e. strength comes from eating pork.

The first day of school. My brother broke his arm a lot. This was probably fourth grade for me, and was the last year we lived in Illinois before moving to Georgia, then Ohio. Boy, we were both really blond back then.

A very long story about a new floor

The real headline on this post ought to read, "I hired someone to do work on my house!" Because, for basically the first time ever, I paid someone to fix something in my house. I have this amazing 1960's vinyl sheet flooring. When I first moved in, I started ripping it out because I thought there was hardwood under it. When I discovered that wasn't the case, I stapled down the edge and decided to deal with it later. The line of gigantic staples made this 1960's floor look even better, let me tell you.

Fast forward three years. I am convinced that when I try to sell the house in the future, a real estate agent will tell me I have to make the floor less offensive, and I decided to do it now so I could enjoy it as well. as well Furthermore, I decided that I would hire someone to do the work, because cutting flooring to exact measurements does not play to my strengths. (I am a persistent DIYer, but I am not always an accurate DIYer.)

I chose my new flooring, arranged to hire someone, and then scheduled the measurement, delivery, etc. This involved many phone calls to different subcontractors, and every time I talked to a new person, I realized that there was part of this I could do myself. I'm paying $200 to remove the old floor? Cancel it, I can do that myself. I'm paying $100 to have the materials delivered? Cancel it, I can do that too. Eventually I reduced the price by 50%, and I was only paying for installation and materials.

So, getting ready for installation, I rip out the yellow, 1960's floor and the underlayment, which is attached by approximately eleventy hundred nails that have to be pried out. This exposes the next layer, the 1950's floor...

 ...which is actually kind of beautiful and vintage but the eleventy hundred nail holes mean I can't save it. So I remove that.

Now I'm down to the subfloor covered in some black gooey tarpaper stuff. For context, subfloor is the wood underneath your main flooring (whether that is carpet or hardwood or vinyl flooring). It's just there to support your floor, and therefore is not pretty. It's usually made of plywood these days, but when my house was built, subfloor was made of actual wood boards.

I'm ready for the installation. I arrange to work from home, move the appliances, and then the installation guy arrives to tell me that actually, he can't install the flooring I've chosen. My floor is too unstable and the new vinyl wood planks will not attach well. He does, however, tell me that the boards I have exposed are not subfloor, but actual wood flooring from the 1940's.

Quickly changing the plan, I get some quotes, find a floor refinisher, and have him refinish the softwood floor. It's got a farmhouse feel, because there are lots of sealed nail holes and different colored wood, but I'm pleased with it. It's warm looking, I was able to use what I already had instead of buying a bunch of new plastic flooring, and hopefully it will attract, rather than repel, future buyers some day.

All in all, a happy end. But hiring people turns out to be much more work than I expected. So I guess I'll keep DIYing as much as I can.

O Canada

Every January I come to Canada, and every January I get hit with a blizzard or blinding cold. The Canadians then look at me and earnestly proclaim, “It’s been such a mild winter until now” and “This weather is unusual.” I haven’t decided if this attitude is a country-wide effort to convince the gullible American that Canada has a temperate climate, or if they are just eternal optimists.

So here I am in Toronto, and it’s -14C (that’s 7F). I helped out with running a conference this weekend, then tacked on an extra day to visit Andrew’s cousin, who lives nearby. I arranged for a late flight this afternoon so I’d have time to do a bit of touristing. This hasn’t worked out quite as I planned, as it turns out the city is closed on Mondays. My cousin-in-law and her husband spent last evening suggesting a dozen or so tourist attractions, and then discovering that each was closed closed today. I completely support the right for every worker to have days off, I just wish they’d stagger them a bit. Toronto is the fourth-largest city in North America, but my sight-seeing options basically came down to shopping malls or a shoe museum.

For the record, the shoe museum was much better than you might expect. They had reconstructed shoes from prehistoric times, and lots of indigenous footwear, so it was the history of the world through shoes. Did you know you can make shoes from fish skin?

Catching my breath

My holiday season was super low-key this year. During Thanksgiving, my parents came to visit and we bought takeout from Whole Foods, and for Christmas I visit my parents and cooked a very simple meal - grilled steak for them, mushroom and goat tart for me. I didn't hold my annual Christmas party, and I minimized giving gifts. This was a well-needed break, because writing grant proposals used up all of my energy in October through December.

Now things are back to normal at work, and I'm doing a bunch of home projects. I'm working on three simultaneously, and they are all about 90% done. I seem to be following my father's example, where you complete one project to not-quite-done, then move on to the next. Maybe we have a fear of success? I jest, of course. For me, at least, the last tiny details are usually cosmetic and I'm always more interested in making things work than making the pretty. I love *having* pretty things, but I'm not very good at *constructing* pretty things. In any case, as soon as I complete any of the projects, they'll end up on the blog.

On a totally separate note, for the first time ever, an animal at my house received mail. I was so tickled I read the entire postcard  from Taiwan out loud to Wesley the cat.