also Election Day often has bake sales

Lots of people go stand in line for early voting. I understand it if you can't vote on Election Day, but Election Day is better staffed at more locations and I've never had to wait in line, so I find it weird that so many people find early voting more convenient.

no, MY bacon

I found "MyBacon" at the fod co-op, a mycelium-based bacon substitute I wanted to try on my BLTs. It's fine, but not $9/ 6 ounces good, especially since I don't care as much about texture as a lot of people do. I'll stick with my usual tofu marinated in liquid smoke.

More specifically:

⅓ cup soy sauce

3 tablespoons nutritional yeast

2 tablespoons olive oil

2 tablespoons maple syrup

1 tablespoon vegan Worcestershire sauce

2 teaspoons smoked paprika

1 teaspoon liquid smoke

1 teaspoon garlic powder

1 teaspoon onion powder

Mix all. Marinate 16oz thinly sliced tofu in it. Bake, air fry, or saute until the tofu is the desired consistency.

PMJ

Partner A and I went to see Postmodern Jukebox, and it was a fun show. I've discovered that box seats are the key for me to enjoy concerts; more space to move around, more breathing room, and in the case of this Gilded Age theater, much more comfortable seats. 

leaves

Since breaking my feet, I have mostly stopped raking leaves in the fall. I rake part of the front yard but the rest waits until spring, when I haul away the piles blown against the fences, mow over the rest, and hope for the best. 

When I was a kid though I made raking a game (though not a super effective one so far as leaf removal goes). I cleared the leaves to make floorplans- generally a not terribly well designed house with long hallways and lots of bedrooms. I coerced the neighbor kids into doing this with me and we would visit each other's houses, giving tours and describing the rooms. Perhaps I should have been an architect after all!

mmm, umami

A couple years ago I ordered mushroom Better Than Bouillon directly from the manufacturer because the co-op didn't reliably have it and it's awesome for cream of mushroom soup. While I was at it I also got other flavors I don't see in stores. The sofritos one is great for rehydrating soy TVP taco "meat." And I'm finding all sorts of uses for the sauteed onion one, mostly because I like onions but do not like to chop them. Today was just that, red beans, and beet greens, and it was delicious. At the co-op last week they didn't even have the vegetarian "chicken" and "beef" options they used to keep in stock, so I may need to put in another order and see if they have new fun flavors.

(Also, I need to find a creamy mushroom soup recipe without cream.)

(Also also, I have onion goggles so I can look super sexy when I do chop them.)

books

Circumstances recently led to me reading several books at once:

-Priestdaddy (Patricia Lockwood) because while each chapter was fun enough, they all tended to feel like more of the same. (And "the same" was typically an anecdote about how her father was a useless misogynistic piece of shit, and it started to feel disturbing how she was still trying to play it for laughs instead of disgust or "and this is why I never spoke to him again.") So I wasn't psyched to read more than a couple dozen pages a day. I finished it because I was holding out hope that it would turn out to have an arc in which she realized she was actually writing a horror story, but alas.

-Pale Fire because I did not want to spend too much time at a stretch inside the narrator's head. Clever book, though it has been 30 years since I read Lolita and think it will be at least 30 more before I pick up another Nabakov. Are ALL of them about unreliable narrators, one-sided obsessions, and unethical sex? I think I would have appreciated this more reading it as part of a class with good discussions.

-Palaces of the Crow (Ray Nayler) because I needed something other than those two. While I think we already had enough WWII books in the world, I enjoyed this one because it was focused on refugee mutual aid and also crows. (In addition it had diversions into the Finnish Winter War; I had to look that up to remind myself of its background.)

-Family of Spies (Christine Kuehn) because I realized my book group was coming up more quickly than I realized. It's a compelling story about a woman who realizes decades later that her family were all Nazi spies (see, there's no escaping WWII). Its writing was much less sophisticated than everything else I was reading though and it suffered by comparison. (It could be incredible in the hands of Lockwood or Nayler! But definitely NOT NABAKOV; we would never know what was going on.)

(Sidenote: my great uncle's last name was Kuhn. He was deployed by the US to India during WWII; the family theorized so he couldn't do much damage if he happened to be a German spy. I think they worried about the wrong guy!)

(Side-sidenote: I have no idea what the US was doing in India; maybe supplying China against Japan? But I refuse to become a WWII guy and get a book on THAT.)

-The Game Master's Guide to Fantasy Mapmaking (Cody King) because it was sitting on my coffee table and easy to look at while waiting for my dog to come inside. I picked it up from the library on a whim because I thought it would be about making maps which made logical sense based on the worlds in which they were supposed to take place. Alas, it was about drawing; I guess I should pick up books about settlement patterns and geology instead. (NOT WWII.)

more freakin' Zembla

I had a bad run of luck with audiobooks and returned three unfinished (one for misogynistic writing, one for bickering twentysomethings and what I was confident would become an enemies to lovers romance, one for being boring). I did stick with Notes from a Regicide (Isaac Fellman) but it perhaps did not benefit from being read alongside Pale Fire. That made me suspect the entire time that the bizarre city shown in the "past" timeline did not actually exist and was all in the heads of two of the characters. Upon finishing it I don't think that was the author's intent, but he didn't do a good job helping me believe in the worldbuilding. It's supposed to be far-future, but too much (particularly the trans experience and language/slang) felt identical to our time for that to be believable. It seemed like a family study with a few fantasy elements tacked on for no obvious reason. I did enjoy it overall though because the family was sweet.

there's supposed to be TOO MUCH

I don't garden much since I lost much of the sun in my yard, but occasionally plant a few things if I'm in the mood. This year I put in a couple zucchini plants, which started producing beautiful flowers in July... but no zucchinis. Finally, RIGHT before the first frost, I got ONE. A reminder of why I buy produce instead!

touristing

Partner A has been wanting to go to "The Great Jack o'Lantern Blaze" for years, so we went on an adventure there, with a detour via Metro North to Sleepy Hollow.

-While I don't know if it was worth the price, it exceeded expectations. There were a lot of interesting carved real pumpkins, and they did imaginative things with fake pumpkins as well. (There were some sculptures where animal flesh had inexplicably turned into pumpkin flesh, and it did not seem by their arrangement that this was supposed to be a horror element, but it was creepy AF.)

-We suspect it would be a mind-blowing experience while high. 

-If you live in Sleepy Hollow you may be required to decorate for Halloween. We got off the train in the fancy part of town and the houses and decorations were fun.

-But there is no real reason to visit Sleepy Hollow. There is a neat Headless Horseman sculpture, and the town works hard to draw in tourists, but it's skippable. We went on a cemetery tour which was well done, but we have more interesting local cemeteries. There was a wildly crowded street fair, but the booths were not unique.

-Every restaurant was absolutely packed, with lines of people waiting to go in. We lucked out in finding a fancy grocery store with a rooftop bar. They'd pared their menu for efficiency during tourist season, and we had a quite good pizza within 20 minutes of ordering via the QR code at our table. (Why are most businesses so bad at proactive event management? I appreciated this exception!)

-I wish everywhere had cheap, frequent trains!

TV

 * Continuing my exploration of decades-old TV, I started watching Damages, believing it to be a courtroom drama. Turns out it's really a conspiracy/ thriller/ manipulation thing and much more fun than expected.

* For All Mankind is one of the most wholesome shows I've ever watched (at least the first few episodes), and I'm really enjoying it despite not being able to tell all the white men apart. So far it's an alternate history of the space program with a lot more women and a lot more moon bases. I was unaware of how tiny and flimsy the lunar landing modules were; astronauts are insane.

I'm never lonely however

 * Statistics on the huge drop in how often people socialize, and in particular host parties.

I'm personally part of this trend. When I was married we hosted a party at least once a month; I'd guess we averaged 20 events a year (many more if you count kid playdates). I lacked the energy to manage that post-divorce but still had quarterly potlucks and miscellaneous other get-togethers- maybe eight events a year. The pandemic dramatically changed my social circle while my health continued to decline so I only host three or four things a year now, and I've been thinking of reducing that even further (since having people to the Adirondack cabin has become so hard on my body). And not only am I invited to fewer things, but I attend a smaller percentage than I used to- socializing is more work and less fun than in the past. I think this is terrible for all of us but find it really hard to fight when my bed is so comfortable.

Since I listen to a lot of audiobooks, I appreciated this article about how one is produced. However, I do wish the article made clear that this may be how high profile audiobooks are made, but not ALL of them. It's pretty clear to me that many that I listen to are from a performer who is reading the book for the first time, and definitely do not have anyone else listening to and correcting it afterwards. They still do a remarkably good job but I don't think this big budget version is the norm (and apparently even the well known performer who's profiled is often doing this in his hotel room closet while touring with a musical!)

From what I'm seeing online, some people didn't know that getting gang raped at fraternity houses while drunk is not unusual. It happened to my college roommate in fact (and may have contributed to her flunking out her first semester). The only things that are surprising about the Cornell case are that (a) she reported it- most of us don't because it'd be likely to expose us to a lot of crap for no reward, and (b) the University actually punished any of the perpetrators at all and shut down the fraternity.

My roommate's experience led to me making a rule that I wouldn't have sex with anyone under the influence unless we'd had sex before and I could more reasonably presume consent. This baffled the drunk men I rejected; I told them to get in touch when they were sober but they rarely did. I still never drink on first dates because I want to keep my wits about me. (I wish I could use it to make awkward first dates more fun and less stressful, but not only is it unsafe, I wouldn't be able to accurately assess whether I wanted a second date.)

bestest boy

My life revolves around my aging dog a lot more than it used to. He's never been chill, but since he lost his hearing he worries more about where I am. If I leave the room for more than two minutes, he goes looking for me, and I feel terrible if he subjects his aching hips to the stairs unnecessarily. Sometimes he doesn't realize I'm behind him while he's looking so I tap him to let him know. He also seems more stressed about being left home alone, especially after dinner, so I try not to do it.

He sleeps much more deeply. Sometimes when I have a short errand I'm torn about whether to sneak off and hope to get home before he wakes up, or have him watch me go and be sad. (I think disappearing on him gives him more reason to be anxious than making sure he knows I left.)

Like most of us as we get older, he gives fewer f's about doing what he's supposed to. He's trained to come to me on walks when a car or person is coming, but he's stopped doing that and just stands inconveniently in the middle of the road. He's also trained to come to me at the point in the walk when his leash is supposed to come back on, but he's not having that anymore either.

I changed my morning routine a couple years ago when he started taking pain meds. Instead of going for a walk as soon as I wake up, I want to let his meds kick in, so I deliver his breakfast in bed and then get back in bed myself for an hour before we go. Which can be a cozy respite, but it's harder to get to work on time.

He turns around much earlier on walks than he used to, even though he's still eager to set off. Sometimes it's because something worries him (a truck goes by; he smells the dogs that attacked us a few years ago) but sometimes I'm not sure of the reason. We need to go at least a quarter mile before I can safely let him off leash. So occasionally I put him in the car (even though he doesn't like that, and has trouble jumping into it these days but, like my mother, refuses disability aids) and drive a half mile to a hiking path. I'd do this every day, but sometimes he acts like he doesn't enjoy that walk either. 

Today though was glorious. He ran around like a puppy, and the golden hour sun was burning the fog off the field while we watched, and the leaves are turning, and the sky was blue. I'm so grateful to have this time with him and to know he's not done yet.

not much of a eulogy

The mother of my closest friends growing up died recently. They lived across the street from me and I spent a huge amount of time at their house. She was kind to the weird neighbor kid, including me in family dinners and getting me a bank teller job when I was in high school. This despite the fact that she frankly didn't care for children much: here, too, there was kindness and community along with exhaustion and frustration. 

I felt a lot of nostalgia going through old photos of my extended family at our Adirondack cabin, yet there was a lot of abuse and simmering resentment underneath those scenes. I didn't know any of that as a child, and there was love and beauty there too. I wonder if my current tendency to leave relationships which include significant irritations means I miss out on the potential for net positives? Without anything like the family ties which forced everyone to find ways to spend time together, maybe I give up too quickly. But then, the line between abuse and annoyance can be hard to see when you're living it, and some of the things I know now permanently twisted some of my family members' lives.