Women in leadership positions face a lot of unwonted and unwanted bullshit. Self care’s important, both physically and mentally. Here, for your weekend, is some music. This is some of the playlist I listen to when walking.
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"(On the writing F&SF workshop) Wanted to crow and say thanks: the first story I wrote after taking your class was my very first sale. Coincidence? nah….thanks so much."
The high ceilings here make the place feel enormous, as does the extra 300 square feet we’ve picked up. We’ve also got substantially more closet and cupboard space. The view from the kitchen window remains a thing of wonder; every night it gives me a beautiful sunset with sound and mountains. Yesterday there was sunlight coming in through the leaves and flickering on the cabinet so beautifully that I had to call Wayne to come and look. The cats like the new place, particularly the carpet in the study.
Downsides are small so far — we’ll definitely need to get a portable AC for at least one room next summer in order to survive. We certainly can hear the restaurant — but the hours are such that it’s hasn’t been bothersome at all and it means we never need to worry that our TV or music is too loud in turn. There are raccoons who like to come up the back stairs and trip the motion detector driven light. Garbage is much more complicated than it was in Redmond: here we have to separate out food waste and there’s no handy dumpster.
Saturday we finished up cleaning the condo. A friend just moved to the area, so we’re happy to be able to have him staying there and making sure no one sets up a meth lab or tiger breeding facility or something like that while we’re gone.
Recent writing news:
That’s all for now! Looking forward to an October spent exploring this new space and finally finishing up this goddamn book.
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Within the last few years, an industry has sprung up aimed at people who don’t know how to cook but yearn to do so. The basic model of such companies is that they deliver kits for making a homemade meal: the ingredients, with any pre-work like peeling or trimming already done, and a set of instructions that includes step by step photographs pretty enough to be in a food magazine.
I tried one of these services a year or two ago, lured by a good coupon deal, and did get some value out of it, but cancelled the subscription before they could start hitting me with the non-coupon costs. For someone utterly foreign to the idea of cooking, these might be useful to show how easy it is to create a tasty meal, or for someone scared of failure, they might build confidence. But the amount of wasteful packaging was striking, and that seems a bad thing to me. I don’t like creating garbage, because among other things, it means I must expend effort taking it out, but also because it’s bad for the planet.
The average American generates 4.3 pounds of garbage per day. That’s over a pound and a half over what the figure was in 1960. So we’ve gotten, overall, less efficient rather than more, while at the same time depending on resources that are diminishing.
Every one of the kits came in cardboard packaging around a styrofoam box with two large ice packs. I stuck a few of those ice packs away for re-use but there are only so many ice packs any household can use and they’re not recyclable because they’re filled with some sort of chemical solution. Every ingredient was packaged separately, down to tiny plastic bottles holding approximately a teaspoon of soy sauce. If I had weighed the garbage against the end result, I would have found the garbage far in excess of the end result.
I think people should know how to cook, because it’s a skill that helps them make their life better in a number of ways. I freely acknowledge that people with few resources will have a harder time cooking, yet be in a position where the practice would benefit them tremendously. Some low-cost appliances can be of much use here, like a rice cooker, hot plate, or toaster oven, but using those efficiently takes skill and knowledge. These kits aren’t going to teach people some important basics, such as how to shop economically/efficiently, how to store ingredients, or how to prepare food.
My grade school taught home economics in 6th grade, in a time benighted enough that girls weren’t allowed to take shop class, because that teacher claimed he was too worried about long hair getting caught in machinery. It was useful stuff: how to plan and cook a meal and how to sew things, mainly. We did have a few boys in there, mainly ones who were there for eating part of cooking practice.
Most of what I learned about the kitchen, though, I learned at home, from my mother, who was and continues to be a skilled and adventurous cook, my maternal grandmother, who provided farmhand meals for decades and was a master cake decorator, and my paternal grandmother, who had only a few dishes down, but made them well.
It wasn’t until graduate school, though, that I realized that I really loved to cook and was pretty good at it, particularly after two years of catering to a household that included two vegetarians, a lactose-intolerant, someone testing for food allergies, and a follower of the Pritikin no-fat whatsoever diet. I hosted dinners and potlucks, fed a houseful of boarders, and created a backyard garden that supplied fresh ingredients. I learned to love tiny ethnic grocery stores as well as how to make some of my own staples, began to bake bread on a regular basis, and began to accumulate what’s currently two shelves of cookbooks (and books about cooking), despite frequent culling.
Why do I think the skill is so important? Here’s what it has brought to my life over the years.
How does one acquire the skill? DIY kitchen kits are not the way to go. Pick a simple dish: scrambled eggs, a grilled cheese sandwich, a basic soup. Start smaller if you’re totally new and learn how to hard-boil an egg. That’s a useful skill, because not only have you learned how to make pre-packaged protein-rich snacks that you can take with you to work, but you’ve learned a basic ingredient for recipes ranging from egg salad to eggs Vindaloo.
Or pick a basic appliance and start experimenting. A rice cooker is one of the most versatile things you can own; throw a handful of lentils and some spices in with your rice and you’ve got a cheap, one-pot meal, for example. A toaster oven performs a multitude of tasks, and a slow cooker has many of the uses a rice cooker does.
One of the great things about the Internet is that it throws up so much of this stuff online. When I started making my own tamales, I went to Youtube to watch techniques and learned by seeing the demonstration in a way I would have never absorbed from a textual recipe. It was a bit of a challenge, which learning new things should be (IMO) in order for them to really sink in. Opening a package and putting preassembled bits together doesn’t give you the knowledge you need in order to assemble those things on your own.
Like so many things in life. Right now we’re at a time when plenty of people are ready to provide you with pre-assembled mindsets, lists of talking points, ingredients measured and tailored so they can be assembled only into a single recipe. Question your mental ingredients, know where they come from, and taste as you go.
And remember the universe loves you (along with everybody else).
Peace, out.
#sfwapro
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(horror, flash fiction) Grandma always said, “Don’t yawn with your mouth open, a ghost will fly in.” I didn’t believe her until it happened.
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