Over the years as web search has taken over, there’s been a lot of talk in the library community – of which I am a member – that even though the information in the systems that libraries provide, like library catalogs and research databases of scholarly articles, is higher quality than what’s on the open web, for most of the people most of the time the information they find in a web search is Good Enough. Especially since searching the web is usually much easier than searching library systems, although we are getting better there.
Since pandemic lots of stuff has been good enough, virtual instead of in-person, meetings and classes on the zoom, although in this third spring of pandemic I think we’re all feeling isolated and lonely and hungry for better.
On Monday we watched the second episode of The Gilded Age, and even though I thought it was much better than the first one, better dialog and the characters are starting to make sense, I fell asleep for a crucial about 10 minutes, so I was going to re-watch it Tuesday, after watching This Is Us live. But the roku wouldn’t load Spectrum, so even though I could’ve gone downstairs and watched This Is Us live on my computer, I settled for Gilded Age, since I could get to HBO. And thoroughly enjoyed both the parts that I had seen and the part I missed. Good Enough.
On Wednesday I was debating, I had a ticket for Robyn Hitchcock’s Live from Tubby’s (his house in Nashville although they’ve been in London a lot recently) virtual show, but also wanted to watch This Is Us on demand. And RH was playing Globe of Frogs, the LP record that was when I really got into Robyn Hitchcock, with Peter Buck on guitar, although I was aware of Hitchcock and my WORT colleagues like Harry Rag played Gotta Let this Hen Out. (I went back and familiarized myself later.) I decided to watch This Is Us and the cat joined me. When This Is Us wrapped up on the early side, I decided to login to the Robyn Hitchcock show on my phone. And spent a bit of time enduring Robyn goofing around with a gourd and Perry the (stuffed animal) lobster, but eventually Emma Swift and Tubby himself (a Scottish fold) joined him and they sang Chinese Bones, one of my faves from the record. Appropriate – I was on my couch with my cat watching them perform from their couch with a cat. Good Enough.
As usual I’m reading a couple of things at the same time, trying to cram into my brain. I find myself agreeing with John McWhorter, but not sure if, as a white person, I can say the things he says – although I think there’s an upcoming chapter on that. And, to my shame, I think I recycled the original 1619 Project issue of the NYT mag, when it came out in August of 2019. Which I feel even more dumb about since I do have a stack of other random saved NYT mags on the kitchen counter, that no doubt have less reason to be preserved. And as a librarian, I think it somewhere’s between ironic and criminal that this important publication of Black history came out originally in such an ephemeral form, an insert in a Sunday newspaper. So I bought the book.
And I loved All the Light We Cannot See, so trying to get into Cloud Cuckoo Land. The World War II setting for All the Light We Cannot See made it more accessible for me, history that I know, vs. Cuckoo Land which is 15th century Constantinople, and a made up far future, although there is a Midwestern library in the 21st century, that I should be able to relate to.
What I’m reading
I’ve also got William Gibson’s Agency in my phone, and liking it better than I thought I would – plus it’s got a lot of really short pages, 3-5 even on the phone, so perfect for reading with the phone propped up against the peanut butter jar while I eat.
I also checked out this Marge Piercy book from the library, more historical fiction, more history I know better, because I just read Octavia Butler’s Kindred, that I never read when it was published in 1979, and I’m hoping for a similar experience. And it’s Gilded Age, too. We’ll see if I get to it before it has to go back; it still has several renewals.
What I want to read
This week’s cooking adventures have been less disappointing than last week, although it’s been a lot of casseroles & leftovers. I’ve been tetris-ing the leftovers together to try to come up with new meals.
We had leftover taco pie on Monday, with the kale slaw, and Tuesday we had the last of it, and the last of the leaky quiche, which crisped up nicely reheated, and a big salad, since I grocery shopped on the way home from work and got salad ingredients. Wednesday I made a savory bread pudding, something I normally think I don’t like, but I guess you can call it a strata. Another Fine Cooking recipe, or actually a formula. It worked to use up the last of our odds & ends of bread, and some sandwich ham, and the veggies in it were onion, peppers, kale, and carrots. Thursday I made another thing I think I don’t usually like, a chicken and corn tortilla bake, the kind of dish that’s supposed to have a can of cream of mushroom soup and a can of cream of chicken soup. I used home made mushroom sauce that I had in the freezer, and some of the Thanksgiving turkey gravy that I had thawed to go with the mashed potatoes that accompanied last Saturday’s roast chicken. And the chicken meat in the bake came from the roast chicken too.
Tonight we’ll have chicken pot pie. With sourdough biscuits on top.
Some of the nice tetris-ing: since I used up the bread in the strata, I got out my sourdough and started feeding it. I used some of the discard in these sourdough spice cookies that have no white flour – buckwheat and rye and spelt. I mean, they pimp the cookies as a way to use your discard, but a 20-cookie batch of dough only uses 1/3 cup … The biscuits for our pot pie will use a whole cup. The dough is chilling now, and I’ll bake them tonight. The dough tastes great, the couple of licks I had last night. I’ll let you know how they come out. Tomorrow my starter will have been fed for three days, so I’ll mix up some sourdough bread, and after I use some of the chicken broth that’s currently in the downstairs fridge in a big bowl, in our chicken pot pie, and transfer the remaining broth to plastic containers to freeze, there’ll be room in that fridge for the bread to rise, because the tall container I use with room for rising only fits down there.
I’ve been having a vague feeling that the images in my posts look better on mobile than a computer; on the computer they seem not laid out well, plunked in, and wondering if I need to get a new Word Press theme – and I just noticed while writing this post, that somehow, WP is inserting all my images at medium rather than full size. So going back and correcting.
So I guess, although I still kinda feel like we’re living in end of days (see below, Planet of the Apes, the inspiration for UW-Madison’s Liberty), this week we’ve moved on to Good Enough, instead of disappointing. This was written (mostly) on Friday (yay!) maybe another reason for improved mood – and I promise more food pics over the weekend.
