Catching up weekend

I haven’t told you about what we’ve been up to since we got back from Denver and there’s been a bit, 2 trips to Chicago, Valentine’s Day, the spring primary election, Jasper coming over, and of course, the return to baking, now that I’m out of the cast.

Saturday (Feb 22) was my mom’s and the New Yorker magazine’s 100th birthday, although only the New Yorker is still here to see it.

His name is Eustace Tilley but when I heard Francois Mouly, the magazine’s art editor interviewed on NPR the other day, Mouly referred to him as simply “the dandy”. I do like Mouly’s explanation:

I’m glad at least the New Yorker is still fighting the good fight when so many others are kowtowing to the Trump & Elon shitshow. This weekend it’s seemed like for every slightly positive thing, like Republicans hearing Trump’s programs booed at town halls, and some stats showing people dissatisfied with the cheeto and his tech pal, there’s equally disturbing stuff, like all the CPAC nonsense, and conservatives set to win in Germany, although I guess it’s the center-right that’s winning and far-right (wackos) that JD Vance was scolding Germany to pay more attention to are still in 2nd place.

But, OK, musings on the state of the world are not documenting the activities I said I’d tell you about, so here goes.

We got back from Denver on a Tuesday night, the Tuesday before election day (like 12 days ago, as I write this on a Sunday). The next day I was supposed to have an eye doctor’s appointment but it got postponed a week, and we were also supposed to go out to Seven Acre Dairy for their valentine’s dinner, but we got a lot of snow so we moved our reservation to Thursday. All of which meant I got to do my first out-of-the-cast driving on a very snowy day, running errands. I got everything except the cat food. Then I came home and didn’t go any place else, not even to shovel snow, because that doesn’t seem like such a hot idea with my wrist still in recovery.

By Thursday morning things seemed pretty well shoveled out, so I went to the food pantry, my first time back since the broken wrist. I took some cream cheese & honey tea sandwiches made with slices from a Nigel Slater date oat bread I made before Denver, and people seemed to like them pretty well. Then I went to my volunteer gig sorting donated books at the library, where I had one of the tea sandwiches for lunch. Then on to a courier shift for early voting. I went out to Madison College and collected the ballots from the 4 people who voted that day, and took them to be held securely at the Clerk’s office until the election. Then home and changed for our valentine’s dinner, which was only so-so. The pacing was off – we didn’t get the welcome, amuse, cheese plate till after the entree, and none of our food was hot enough. It seemed like they had a very inexperienced crew that night. We’d been out there for special guest chef dinners and those were really nice, but this was much less so.

Friday, actual Valentine’s Day, we went to Ancora for breakfast.

A much better meal than our dinner the night before

Breakfast was after my video visit with the clinical pharmacy staff at my HMO about my blood pressure where we agreed that I could stop home monitoring for the time being because I’ve been doing really well; got my average well below 130 over 80. They also said I might want to buy a cuff of my own, just to have, because they had a promotion going were I could buy one for about $30 instead of the usual about $60. And of course now I’m confused because a few days later I got a MyChart message saying I should take 2 readings in the morning AND 2 at night for seven days and report those, even tho I was clearly told I could take a break. Which I am quite enjoying BTW, not have to take 15-20 minutes to do the reading every night when I go downstairs to brush my teeth. Oh well, I’m sure it’s just because several different people are talking to me. I need to get batteries to put in the new cuff, anyhow. I’ll get to it – eventually.

After valentine’s brekkie I had to be home for a zoom meeting for an alumni board for the iSchool I’m starting to serve on. Then a going away party for the iSchool library because it’s moving into a new building, where I was having too much fun talking to people and was slightly late for my courier shift. Same site as Thursday, but only three ballots Friday.

I started feeding my sourdough when we got back from Denver and since I hadn’t used it for awhile I fed it for a good three days, so had discard. After I started the sourdough bread rising on Friday night, I made some blueberry muffins with discard. They were good – I’m going to need to write down and adapt the recipe.

Sourdough discard muffins

I baked two loaves of sourdough bread on Saturday – in between going to get the election supply tote, another snowy drive, and watching the election official zoom training. And finally, another courier shift, but not so snowy.

Round sourdough

Oblong sourdough

And I still had discard so I made sourdough discard oat scones. Mine were too wet and cakey – see mine and originals below. Another recipe I have open in my phone to work on later.

Sourdough discard oat scones

Originals – Martin Phillip, Sassafras Curio on Substack

Sunday we went to Chicago and the symphony’s not till 3:00 so we met some friends for lunch. Another so-so meal (like Seven Acre) at Roanoke. We had a dinner there back when we had the apartment in Chicago, a pre-symphony dinner, even. And back then we thought Roanoke was OK but not great. The symphony was better than the food. I liked the soloist, Christian Tetzlaff. His wife, Giorgia Bertazzi, is a photographer so the photos of him are particularly good. This is the one they used on the CSO website.

Christian Tetzlaff, photograph by Giorgia Bertazzi

Coming home was a bit harrowing since it was still really cold and there were icy patches on Hwy 14. As soon as we got to I-90 of course it was clear saliing. Plus Mark drove.

Monday I had my first regular Jasper day since the broken wrist. Well sorta regular – daycare was closed for Presidents Day, so he came over Monday instead of Wednesday like really regular. Emma installed the new rotating car seat, but we didn’t go anywhere. It was really cold. We watched Cars shorts and played and baked cookies. It’s official – both grandsons are obsessed with Pixar Cars, and have a McQueen permanently affixed to their right hands. Megan in Denver sent Jasper a set of Cars bath toys so we have those here. 

NOT bath toy Mader & McQueen at home

Image 5 of 5

And Jasper does still like dinosaurs, too.

Dino hug

Dino hug 2

Night night dino

We made cookies, too. The only downside was that I was busy rolling the cookies out and should’ve changed his diaper sooner.

Belated valentine cookies & dinos

Dinos and hearts and Wisconsins and prairie dogs

I took a selection of cookies and muffins and scones to the polls for my workers on Tuesday. It was a slow and uneventful day, but a good chance to practice for busier elections.

Wednesday was supposed to be a catch up day too. I started by driving to the clinic to get a B12 blood test to see if the shots I’ve been getting have raised my B12 enough to make my Dr. happy. Follow-up: no, I have to go get 4 more shots. We walked to Ancora and had a coffee – no pics this time. Then a big hunk of the day was eaten up by one of my long eye doctor appointments. I’m in a clinical trial to see if they can treat people like me who have high eyeball pressure but no other glaucoma symptoms can be treated with lasers, which is what is done in Europe but is generally not fully covered by insurance here. I’ve had one zapping and it’s keeping my pressure nice and low. But once a year I have to have a looong appointment where I have to do a visual fields test, and they look at my optic nerve, and, and, and it take forever. I got there at 11:30 and didn’t get home till after 2:30. And my vision was all blurry until much later. I spent the afternoon getting the tax stuff together. It was too late to drop the taxes off by the time I was done, but I really needed cat food and wanted to return something at L.L. Bean, and we needed gas in the car to go to Chicago again on Friday. So Mark drove because I was still too blurry. All the car tailights looked like stars.

Thursday we had a meeting about renting a place to do a ’55 babies turn 70 party, since the one we threw when we were 50 was fun. More on that if it comes to pass. I took the bus there, and then caught a ride downtown to meet up with other UW Libraries Friends volunteers to pick out & pack up books at a used books store that’s going out of business. And then to a lecture about a manuscript that UW Libraries recently acquired that consists mostly of recipes for inks and dyes and glues and patterns for embroidery, compiled by nuns in the 18th century. The wreaths were some related items that the researchers who gave the talk put out. The researchers are approaching studying the manuscript by making things from the recipes in it.

Manuscript

Feather wreath

Yarn wreath

Friday’s trip to Chicago was easier than last Sunday. We tried out Schneider’s deli, and I forgot to take pictures of our food till we were done. Mark had the special sandwich, chopped cheese, chopped corn beef, onion, American cheese, hot Russian dressing, lettuce & tomato, and I had a regular egg and cheese bagel. And got introduced to Zab’s hot sauce. I guess the datil peppers it’s made from are native to St. Augustine, but even though the sauce was good, sweet and hot, I still don’t want to put one toe into Florida. I looked up St. Augustine’s voting record and it’s Republican as can be.

Another good concert, a woman conductor and soloist, and English classics, like Ralph Vaughan Williams, The Lark Ascending.

It was a sunny blue sky day, cold, and walking from Schneider Deli to the symphony we stopped to look at where they’re kind of peeling off the Thompson Center, to make it a home for Google.

And ice breaking up on the river.

There was a pretty sunset for driving home.

The kitties helped me start writing this yesterday. I did a bit more recipe experimentation today, Sunday, but this is long enough for now, so that’ll have to wait for another day.