Listen to the Rain

sashagee is feeling much better now and has taken to domesticity--to wit, she has acquired a sourdough starter and now is baking every day. Well, baking is a little bit of a misnomer. She certainly has baked several breads, apple bread and banana bread, but a lot of the sourdough starter goes into making flatbreads. She takes the discard, fries it up in a pan in butter and puts Trader Joe's everything bagel seasoning on it, and then we eat it. I put labneh from the Middle Eastern Grocery Store on it, which goes perfectly with the extra sourness of the discard. I'd honestly never thought of sourdough flatbread before, which is a little weird because of course it was the original flatbread.

Tonight begins the holiday of Sukkot, the eight-day end of the High Holy Days where we are told to dwell in a temporary structure. There's a huge variety of laws about how to build this structure--the roof must be made of plants that are disconnected from the ground, and they must be thick enough that the inside is shaded but thin enough that rain can get through, and there must be walls on three sides (but not the fourth side), but none of it applies to me because living in a fourth-floor condo there's no way I can build a kosher one. It's common to put sukkot out on a balcony but that requires a balcony that's open to the sky, since a kosher sukkah may not have a roof over it, and the balcony out back is completely roofed over. As such, tonight we're going to a picnic in Wicker Park where Mishkan is going to have a sukkah set up, so Laila and I can go into the sukkah and perform the ancient ritual of shaking the lulav and the etrog. Last year when we went Laila really charmed a older couple that was there, and I'll bet she'll do the same thing again.

I went to a wedding but haven't had the time to really write about it, so there'll probably be a backdated post showing up in a few days.

I started playing Hollow Knight again as well, and in an hour and a half or so over the last two nights I've beaten the Enraged Guardian and finished off the Crystal Peak and then gone back to the City of Tears, climbed the Watcher's Tower past the guardian knights and found the last of the Dreamers. I think that means I could technically go beat the game, but I still haven't found whatever lets me pass through those black smoke pillars or done any of the DLC stuff. I haven't even beaten the Mantis Lords! I wanted to finish this before October but I guess it is technically a spooky October game so if I finish it in the first week, that'll be good enough.

Alright, it's almost dinner time. We're going to a picnic but for Laila-related reasons we're eating first and only bringing dessert. It'll still be a lovely time.