Listen to the Rain

Finally went to bed on Tuesday night early and yet I still rolled out of bed at the last minute to make it to Wednesday morning prayers on time. I guess that means I need even more sleep. And the last night I stayed until 4 a.m. and woke up this morning at 11 a.m., so I'm not doing so hot on getting that sleep.

sashagee was here for most of last weekend but in the days since I haven't done that much, by design. I cleaned my home on Monday and Tuesday, vacuuming and mopping and cleaning the bathrooms and the oven and the kitchen, and just read some webcomics because I have a thousand articles sitting in my RSS waiting to be read and I need to get to them. Last night I watched more of 3月のライオン / March Comes in Like a Lion, which I've been watching slowly but steadily. It has an excellent depiction of mental illness and far less anime bullshit than 四月は君の嘘 / Your Lie in April, but that means that it's much harder to watch sometimes. Just last episode, after Rei suffered a major setback, he said:

落ち込みまで下手だって
ochikomi made heta datte
"I'm even bad at being depressed."

I've felt like that before--that not only am I so awful that I can't even get my life right, I'm not "really" depressed because I can still go to work, or get out of bed, or cook myself food--so I know what that's like. I'm really glad that I don't feel like that now. At the moment, I'm bad at being depressed in a good way.

I'm still annoyed at work, though, because I've spent most of today churning through records that don't exist. Were they already resolved somewhere else? Do we not have information on the physician other than the license I'm looking at? Who knows!


Dinner this week with sashagee, who I promised I'd make a farmer's market dinner for. Promise fulfilled.


Chicken tikka sausage from Sausage König with curried carrot pickles and pickled red onions from Twidley Bits, along with the leftover sautéed veggies from dinner last week, with the addition of sun-dried tomatoes from the Middle Eastern Grocery Store (added after I took the picture). Meat and vegetables, the foundation of a delicious dinner. The pita in the back is also from the Middle Eastern Grocery Store, as is the non-visible spicy hummus I had with it.

The sausage with the pickled onions together was excellent. sashagee suggested that it probably would have been too dry without the addition of the onions to provide some moisture. The pickled carrots were also good, but they didn't mix with the sausage quite as well, and the curry flavor wasn't as noticeable. The tikka flavor on the sausage was faint, but it was there. All in all, an excellent combination.


Lingonberry almond cake from Lost Larson. Back at my first Farmer's Market Dinner post, I wrote about Andersonville's Swedish heritage and the lost Swedish Bakery. That's why I keep getting Lost Larson desserts, because I remember the toscakaka ("almond cake") that they used to sell and I feel nostalgic for it.

This tasted almost exactly the same as that toscakaka, so I think I've found a replacement! It was light and airy, with that sweet almond flavor that I've been missing for years since the Swedish Bakery closed. It didn't have the layer of almonds over the top of it that the Swedish Bakery toscakaka did, but also I can still get it and it's a five minute walk from my home. That counts for a lot.


Last night, sashagee and I went over to britshlez's place to watch The Last Unicorn cartoon, which I hadn't seen even though I had read the book. I remember that greyselke loved the movie so much, but back when we were university students it was a lot harder to get a hold of. Nowadays multiple versions are on streaming services, so I got to hear Schmendrick call himself the "last of the red-hot swamis," Molly Grue scream at the unicorn for finally coming to her too late, and Christopher Lee Christopher Lee-ing it up as King Haggard. The animation took a bit to get used to, since it's been a long time since I've seen a Rankin/Bass film, but they did an excellent job with the otherworldly nature of the unicorn and Lady Amalthea's ethereal presence. And I had forgotten the best line in the film:

" I am no longer like the others, for no unicorn was ever born who could regret, but I now I do. I regret."

What a good movie.

We drank wine and chatted until it became a Youtube party, and when we realized it, sashagee and I said our goodbyes and went home, finally falling asleep at 4 a.m. The next morning, we woke up multiple times but finally got out of bed at 11 a.m. so we could meet maptekar for lunch at Sea Ranch up in Evanston. maptekar has been talking up Sea Ranch to me for close to a month, even despite my skepticism of Midwestern sushi, and since she was so adamant that it was good I decided to trust her. My trust was well-placed--the food was delicious. sashagee and I split a spicy salmon roll, tornado roll, and zarusoba while we sat at one table all by itself on the sidewalk and it was just They even had a small grocery section inside, so I got some hontsuyu and muscat gummies, and then after we stopped for gelato, we all walked over the lakefront. The beaches in Evanston are mostly paid--something fortunately illegal in Chicago--so once we hit the lake we turned around and went back home, but we passed a bunch of huge houses in a variety of architectural styles, including one Spanish villa looking house and several early-American red-brick buildings. After a stop at the actual Bennison's Bakery, who repeatedly shows up at the Andersonville Farmer's Market and which apparently dates back to 1938, maptekar drove us back and told us she'd have us over for dinner, since she promised to make borscht for me.

Now sashagee is taking a nap out in the living room and I'm in the office, but daniella.titone invited us to the beach with karolina.gabriele, and we're probably going to eat a big salad and some ochazuke for dinner later. Then, well, we'll see.