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Today was alright! Work was actually pretty great, which is nice --it is satisfying to have a ~good day~ at the workplace every once in a while (and slightly surprising to occur in this, the last full week of the year).

Not the last week, mind. I have a day and a half of work next week. It's not great!

But yeah, classes 1 and 4 went well-as-expected, class 2 was just fine, despite my co-teacher having meetings literally every class 2 this week, my circle idea went really really well (well enough that I forwarded it off to the circles team and assistant principal to be all ~hey look at this~), I spent class 3 prep hanging in the break room with three other math teachers I like...all good things!

It was the annual "professional development the week before break" PD, which is never very serious. It could be a better meeting: they could give us a longer time to just....hang out and eat cookies and chat with coworkers. But we did a cute little "family feud" style game, which was fun ("what excuse do students give for cutting class? survey says....."), and I won one of the raffle gift baskets for the scholarship fund. It is...uh, the third time in like....four years that I have gotten one of these. I am only putting in $20 worth of tickets, which I feel is a very reasonable and normal donation to the scholarship fund! I am just very lucky!!!

In actuality, the real trick is that my policy is to look at the ~13 baskets, say "no booze, no gift cards (boring!)" and that both focuses my tickets marvelously, and means I'm not going for the "high value" items. Look, I can't help it that all my coworkers like booze and amazon, I will be over here squeeing over my backstage pass to the school play and several chocolate bars and little leather handmade notebook and set of keen gel pens! It's still not as sweet as the year I got homemade cookies every month for the rest of the year, but it's pretty good.

After, I managed to make it to the holiday show rehearsal, which means that I've made it to one rehearsal this year, which might be more than last year. I got to see all the dances we're doing, and throw my name a couple places in the script. Just have to figure out what to wear or whatever (bonus points for something I can rush home and not change before darting off to the train).

After, I spent a bunch of time rifling through email and YouTube to try and put together a bookmarks collection of all the holiday shows I've been in (every year I've taught, including 2020, when we did a socially distanced one over zoom). Eventually copies, and home again home again, where my Getting Things Done kinda ran out in favour of playing video games.

But I did help get the dishwasher emptied and a bit of kitchen task, and I ran my last load of laundry --I haven't put any of it away yet, but it's clean at least. I did a bunch of closing and organizing tabs, and a very little bit of other like, electronic organization. Not, like, dealing with emails or anything (don't be ridiculous) but at least some brain management.

Now I'm upstairs to write my words and listen to music and do some Chrimbo-present-pre-planning. It is....uh....the holiday is quite soon actually, and if I'm going to contribute to my family's usual wretched excess, I should get on that. I wonder if it's too late to just use the heifer international catalog I got sent to buy everyone goats...

~Sor
MOOP!

Entry tags:

farm share

Winter share, 5 of 11

Apparently, it was much colder in western MA: the shares were boxed this week. More than half the people who picked up while I was there decanted their veggies immediately (I suspect it correlates to whether people had cars with them or not).

a big bag of spinach
2 heads of cabbage
2 biggish white daikon
5(ish?) pounds of carrots
3(ish?) pounds of sweet potatoes
3(ish?) pounds of white potatoes

First thoughts: no alliums, so I’ll have to fill those in. I have three weeks before the next distribution, so hopefully I’ll catch up; all of these are pretty easy to fit in. The daikon is trickiest for me: carrot daikon slaws in a variety of dressings, or with cabbage in okonomiyaki, or pickled (with or without carrots).

Entry tags:

transit

101 Summer St.

This morning I stopped by the credit union ATM to get some cash. I did not think about denominations, which is how I ended up with a $100 bill when I’d expected $20s. Ack.

This gave me an excuse to buy lunch out (in addition to not having brought more than breakfast with me), which, now that Bakey has lost kosher certification, meant I headed to Milk Street Cafe to grab one of today’s specials (tuna-noodle casserole will always be comfort food for me, which I know is definitely not a universal opinion).

Previously, I had a great default route from the Downtown Crossing station to the restaurant through the 101 Arch St. lobby. Recent construction has closed that option off permanently, alas (the atrium is really pretty, with a multi-story internal spiral staircase (that I suspect is no longer used, but looks great)).

On the way back, I decided to avoid the exit I’d used on the way out, which had a bunch of pigeons fighting over chicken bones (I don’t really want to think too much about that…), so went through the non-Arch St. part of the lobby at 101 Summer St., which still has an entrance to Downtown Crossing. Except that the down escalator was blocked off for maintenance, and there weren’t any obvious stairs, which is how I found out that there’s an elevator. You know how when you get into a new-to-you elevator, you do a quick scan for which side has the buttons? Well, both sides had buttons, L for the floor we were on, and… different buttons for the lower level. I pressed M (I’m guessing for MBTA?), while the other guy who got in the elevator pressed L2 on his side. Why L2? why not just L, or L1? These are mysteries. Were there not enough L2 or M buttons to go around? Is this an office plagued with Borrowers? Was there previously an L1 level that aliens sucked out and wiped from our memories except for this one slip? Inquiring minds want to know!

Also, the long-closed Charlie Card Store at Downtown Crossing is no longer empty, but not open to the public, either: it seems to be a supplies depot for cleaners and possibly other workers?

(no subject)

I survived MCing a party!

My program was a little too hard, which was partially my fault for being...challenging, and partly my fault for not being totally up on what dances are actually currently in the Cambridge Class repertoire. I thought Bampton Strathspey was going to be an easier one, sorry y'all!

But I got several compliments from various people, and I genuinely think I did a very good job briefing. I made a couple of stumbles, but I think I redeemed myself out of them nicely, and I think I was quite clear overall. I'm happy about it! Next priority: well, okay, figure out what I'm teaching on Thursday for my class, and THEN my next priority is writing my Pinewoods program. Which is due on the 22nd, so gotta get on it, yipes!

The past weekend with SamSam was lovely! We had mostly very lazy days (which is to say, huddling inside and avoiding the cold) but also walked four miles round trip in the softly falling snow to visit Gather Here. Did you know there's a big lovely (kinda bougie) crafts store in Inman Square? It had so much beautiful fabric! It was nice to be able to show off cool things about my city to Sam, and also to discover them for myself.

Work today was...a lot. I mostly managed to do the things? Which is good --it's like, the first day since September where I actually had all my lessons prepped before I left the building. And I did a little grading. And I am very very tired and all the students are both tired and off the wall and we have five and a half more school days to get through before I can just get on a train and gooooo.

Of course, getting on a train and gooooing will be made more complicated by the fact that there is exactly one weekend left before chrimbo, so if I'm gonna manage to go shopping for any presents, I need to do it like _now_. Maybe it would be nice to buy my mother a chrimbo present? I think they would enjoy that??

(note to self, actually go to bells at least once this weekend so you can a) return your BPL library books and b) go to Q's nuts in the Boston Public Market and buy a bunch of those for stocking stuffers).

Dunno what else there is to say. [CW: gun violence] I am fucking livid at the parts of the universe that are contrasting my lovely weekend at home with, like, multiple major shooting incidents. Can we fucking not? (says only country where this regularly happens). [/CW]

hope you have love and wholeness in your heart and that you are taking care of everyone you meet as much as you can handle doing so.

~Sor
MOOP!

(no subject)

I am having a lovely day!

SamSam is in town, and I elected to play hooky from work (more accurately, use one of my increased number of personal days THANK YOU UNION I LOVE YOU) so that we could hang out today and also because my work-brain is _fried_ and so it's a very very nice concept to just...not be there for a day. Here's some of the things we did:

*We went to Amanda's house quite early to watch the biathalon, since Amanda and Sam are in the same biathalon group chat. I find this extremely pleasantly baffling, but it was very very good to hang out on the couch with some friends and enjoy them being very excited about a thing. Occasionally they would give me context, or I would ask a question, but mostly I just got to watch people be excited about something, which I find splendid. We also watched the kittens be doofuses and just generally chatted, which was splendid!

*Home for a bit of lunch, and then we grabbed our ice skates and headed off to the rink near the school, which has open skate for a couple hours on Friday afternoons. We skated for a little over an hour and it was pretty grand! Sam likes ice skating _immensely_, which makes it a delightful sort of thing to do together, even if I'm not particularly good at it. (I don't really regret that I've fallen out of Tech Squares, but I do miss that particular part of Easthill. I want more dancing on skates!)

*After skating, we walked on to Make&Mend, which I only really went to the first time like six weeks ago. I think going at least every month or two is probably a really good idea for me, in terms of getting to see interesting crafty things and also to support something that I want my neighborhood to be.

*We walked home, which was...not as pleasant as it could be, since cold and windy, but we did swing by Saus in Bow-Street-Market on the way. So cold and windy but also french fries!

*Once home, we collapsed for a while and had good nap. Woke up enough so that they could read me some book and I could eventually make dinner, and this is all a really nice precursor to another couple days of hanging out together.

Currently I am writing words and they are brushing my hair out and we're listening to music and that's all reeeeeeally good. I am happy for this!

~Sor
MOOP!

Trigger Warning

From an Amazon page:

Warning: This audiobook contains very explicit sex, including first-time anal sex, oral sex in public, anal sex in public, and sex with a librarian.

(no subject)

Puttin' away boxen do doo

Okay, well, it's not _done_ but my room is a damn sight _better_ and that's pretty cool.

And by "damn sight better" I actually mean "I got rid of two of the boxen that've just been sitting around taking up space all over my room since I moved in in 2020". Which is...fantastic. I'm not remotely done cleaning, either up or out, but progress is happening! That's quite grand! Someday maybe I will have everything tucked away in a place it belongs, having gotten rid of all the things that shouldn't actually be in here. What a good fantasy.

(I am being sharp and salty to cover up the fact that I am actually quite happy to have regained a little bit of space, and irritated at how long it takes me sometimes.)

I am nowhere near finished, of course. My desk is the biggest disaster area (although I've definitely made progress on it, we're like, eight inches deep of shit instead of sixteen). And there's an endless number of papers that want sorting, but that's like, a longterm plan. Not something I expect to get done anytime soon, not even if I'm procrastinating on my grading real good!

That being said, I had a point somewhere in the span of time I've lived in this room where I was trying to sort papers for about twenty minutes a day. Do that for two months and I'd have everything done, I expect. Just....you know. Consistency is hard.

The surface reason I am cleaning is that SamSam is visiting this weekend, but the real weekend is that having my room be a catastrophe is a pretty strong Blues Clue¹, and also _definitely_ one of the ones that chickeneggs² me. So, having latched onto the slight mania of "you have no idea how badly I do not want to do my grading" means actually trying to get my roomspace tolerable?

We're through the long dark November. I made a note in my calendar for November first, next year and all subsequents, telling me that my brain's about to turn into shit and I might want to do something about it. What should I do? No one knows the answer to that.

I mucked with my phone so that it goes into "focus mode" for two hours each afternoon. No games, no internet. Chat is okay, because I almost never am _mindless_ and stuck about chat. So far I haven't broken it, which means that it ~cannot be broken~. Unlike, say, the timers on my various phone games that theoretically say I can only play like 15 minutes unless I go make it longer which is very easy to do. Sigh.

And I'm trying to crawl myself out of the work hellhole --the above is theoretically helpful for this. Man though, I'm looking forward to it being solstice real bad. Arise fair sun, and slay the envious moon³

I hope you are finding the ability to do the things that bring you comfort and joy. I love you!

~Sor
MOOP!

^{1: "what idiot called them depression symptoms instead of..."

2: Did you know that you can just say things? It's ridiculous that language works in any capacity whatsoever! I say so much entirely impenetrable nonsense, and yes, lots of the time it's partly that I'm quoting things, but sometimes it's that, like, I'm just making up weird things that maybe only make sense to me.

So, instead of finding the term "negative feedback loop" my brain decided to hand me "chickenegg", as in "which came first". Am I depressed because my room is a catastrophe or is my room a catastrophe because yadda yadda

3: Case in point, this is a reference! It's a Kate Nyx song lyric.}

(no subject)

Thought to myself "I should go make a dreamwidth post", and holy shit, I knew it had been a while when I posted the anniversary post, but I hadn't realized it's been basically a _month_. Blugh. Blugh!

(we just figured out Blues Clues, y'all. :P)

Here's some stuff that's happened between Racheline and Patty's wedding and now:

*I have been struggling pretty hard with brain stuff, which is okay and happens, but is annoying! It's all the usual culprits come out to play --don't wanna do any grading or actual work, just want to burrow and hibernate because that's the correct way to do things when the sun goes away.

*I am real sad about living in the world I live in in 2025. I am sad that capitalism. I am sad that transphobia. I am sad that rampant xenophobia that's fucking up the lives of my students. I am sad, and it's hard and weird to just go on as normal.

*Tonight the polycool went out to see Club Drosselmeyer! I've been vaguely aware of this weird little Boston tradition since 2017, when I saw their unrelated show Save the Munbax, but never actually managed to try this one. It was fun! It's a lightweight puzzle hunt mixed with immersive theatre mixed with a dance floor. We had a very nice time, I think, and appreciated that we could sorta split up in ways that let those of us who wanted to just chill and work on puzzles do that, and those that wanted to go chat up all the characters do *that*.

*Thanksgiving was really good --Tuesday and I did it jointly with our collective families, down at my parents house. It worked out unsurprisingly well to have Cameron be in charge of the kitchen, with me providing big-sibling-bossiness as backup to their decisive understanding of what needed to happen. The driving from here and back was much less good, and I'm excessively grateful that I have train tickets for the next big trip.

*I don't know what else I've had in the way of ~adventures~ it's mostly just been the everyday. I liked the snow this morning, that greeted me when I went to bells. I've been trying to work on some projects, like actually getting the downstairs closet resorted and bringing some stuff I don't need to the school for coat drives and clothing swaps and the like. I'm teaching SCD this month at Cambridge class, so that's exciting! My weird tiny dance that I run is also really exciting, even if it's not as flashy --I feel good about it though!

My life is mostly good, but the ADHD and the seasonal stuff have been harder than usual. Millions of little ways to improve on that, I suppose. I picked up Habitica again, and that was helping for a time, but has maybe slipped out of grasp some. Hopefully tomorrow (don't look at the time, I mean Sunday when I say that) will be a good chance to catch up on a little bit of that.

Goodnight, I love you

~Sor
MOOP!

Entry tags:

food

A day’s worth of food prep

Yesterday afternoon I was invited to a last-minute Shabbat dinner. Given the contents of the farm share, my offer was to bring roasted root veggies or a slaw. They chose the former, so I roasted two trays of diced veggies, one with Hakurei turnip*, carrot*, and purple-top turnip*, while the other was beets* and sweet potatoes*.

I thought about a grocery run, but decided in the end to make do with what’s around (I’ll need to go next week, because I’m now out of non-garlic alliums). After all the turkey, the thought of pareve food was pretty appealing. I thought about beans and greens, and a vegetable pie. Chef Google brought me to some blog posts about Deeper ’n Ever Turnip ’n Tater ’n Beetroot Pie, and the idea of trying my first hot water pastry crust (inspired by The Great British Baking Show) came to me as well. All good, but then I had to figure out the correct order of operations: I have only one pareve soup pot, and I needed to do six things before the soup that would stay in the pot.

I figured it out overnight, in a way to minimize potential waste.
Make a half-batch of seitan dough using umami seasoning, smoked paprika, and shepherd’s herb mix.
Boil some water. Dice then parboil some purple-top turnips*. Dice some potatoes*. Take out the turnips. Parboil the potatoes. Dice some carrots*. Take out the potatoes. Parboil the carrots. Dice the beets* (a mix of golden and red). Take out the carrots. Parboil the beets. Take out the beets.
Add some soy sauce and umami seasoning to the boiling water in the pot, then add pieces of seitan and boil for half an hour.
Once the seitan cooled in its liquid, move everything to other containers.
Clean the pot.
Start plain water boiling with some Earth Balance, then use that to make a hot water dough. Set the dough aside to rest.
Clean the pot.
Start sauteing the last two (elderly) leeks*, in a mix of olive oil and Earth Balance. Once that looked nice, add flour and cook it a while, then add some of the excess seitan liquid to make a not-at-all-white sauce; it’s more pink, due to the beets’ turn boiling.
Next up was to assemble the pies: roll out the dough, add veggies, minced seitan, and the pink sauce, then a top crust, and into the oven to bake. I didn’t have a particular recipe, so guessed 375F would be ok for a while, then down to 350F until golden. They look nice (albeit matte, not glossy, lacking an egg wash before baking) but I haven’t tasted them yet.

While they were baking, time to make breakfast: saute the rest of the parboiled veggies with some shredded cabbage*, then add an egg and some umami powder. Yum.

Then I started the soup, using the rest of the excess seitan liquid, defrosted vegetable* stock, and the end of a bottle of white wine (Givon Chardonnay 2021), with some soaked pinto and Great Northern beans (bean soaking liquid went to water the plants). Once the beans were cooked, I added a diced onion, diced lemon, a lot of chopped spinach*, chopped garlic*, dried thyme, a bit of fermented hot sauce*, and some pureed garlic scapes*.

* locally sourced

Entry tags:

links,
transit

Review of the MBTA

More than a decade ago, a Cambridge teen started reviewing the MBTA, including stations and bus routes, then branched out to other local transit he could get to by commuter rail. He’s no longer updating the site (so the new Green Line extension stations aren’t included, and the 109 route is still Sullivan to Linden Square, for example), but I love the enthusiasm of it all:
https://milesintransit.com/miles-on-the-mbta/