Listen to the Rain

Not a ton to report, but I'm still haunted by how little I wrote here with I lived in Japan and how much I wish I had written more so I'd have an insight into my mind at the time. Memory is too fallible.

Autumn has finally come to Chicago. What's more, it's the end of autumn, since we seem to have completely skipped the fun part of autumn. It was warm enough on Halloween night that when Laila told us she wanted to see the decorations, we went out without coats and no one had to do the "put a coat on over their costume" thing I remember doing when I was younger. And now it's 10°C and was colder when I left this morning. Yesterday the wind bit enough that my autumn coat was almost not enough and it was only the exertion of carrying the CSA box that let me power through it. The weather report shows that it won't be warmer than 16°C for the next week, and it'll be cloudy and rainy the entire time. No good time to go look at the leaves, though I'll see if I can get at least one good picture soon.

My diet is slowly getting more and more vegetarian as I lean into keeping more kosher. The best way to prevent mixing milk and meat is to just not eat meat (plus, meat that hasn't been sheḥted isn't kosher anyway), so I'll often go weeks without eating any. I don't order meat from restaurants because I can't trust that there won't be any dairy in the surrounding ingredients--at least if I order a salad and there's bacon bits on it I can see the bacon. So, most of what I get now if we're eating out is fish or salads. I try not to eat too much fake meat because, unlike something like tofu, we don't have any idea what the long-term effects of eating a lot of it are. Plus, it's probably not that healthy--the same reason I don't eat tons of falafel, because sure it's vegetarian, but it's deep-fried so I shouldn't be eating it at every meal. So if I really want a hamburger I get a black bean or impossible patty and real cheese, but mostly I get fish.

I have not noticed any particular effects from this, either positive or negative. Now, I was already in good health before I did this and I still get tons of moderate exercise in--at least 75 minutes of tracked, dedicated walking per day, not counting the incidental walking I also do--so I don't know that I'm the best test case. But going 98% vegetarian has been pretty nice. It's actually quite easy to find tasty food...though not quite so easy when going out to eat.

Walking to get my CSA box yesterday, I ran into one half of 2hotcookieschicago on her way home and slowed down to talk with her. She hadn't realized that I lived nearby, though it turns out that a lot of people from Mishkan live in the neighborhood, including the director of programming, the music directory, and one of the people on the board of directors, and there's probably even more people that I don't recognize but would recognize me if they stopped to talk to me. We only had a few minutes to chat but I told her about the CSA that I get and how I go to pick it up every week, and she's probably going to look into it. I used to get another CSA back when True Nature was still a store before the Whole Foods moved in--this is how you know I've lived in the same place for a while--but the owner of that farm died and I guess there was no one to take it over. It's nice that we have another CSA and it's also nice that it stops for part of the year and the contents obviously changes--you can get it in January and February, but they said it's basically just root vegetables then.

We used to have local restaurants come to work occasionally to offer lunch, but after the Plague Years they stopped because there simply weren't enough people still in the office to make it worth their while. Well, they started offering it in the building restaurant down on the 16th floor, one restaurant on Tuesday and sushi (always sushi for some reason) on Wednesday, and just a few weeks ago they decided to expand it to separate restaurants each day. I decided that it might be nice to get food out once a week, since most of the meals were $10-$13, which is pretty good, and so far I've had mixed results. Last week I got vegetarian biryani from Taste of Assyria and it was tasteless--it was like they fried up some rice in olive oil for thirty seconds and then sprinkled on spices after it was already done frying. They didn't even have any hummus! On the other hand, I got a vegetarian paisa bowl from Arepa George today (rice, cabbage, beans, plaintain, avocado) and it was delicious. Tuesday is a soul food restaurant called Cook It Mama I'm probably going to skip--"soul food" and "kosher" generally don't exist in the same room--and the Wednesday restaurant isn't available yet, so we'll see what it is. A nice change of pace from the salads I bring to work and also usually eat at home on workdays for lunch.

Meeting Laila and sashagee after work for dinner, and after work is now.