However, a Trump/MAGA cap? Twice:
This sort of courage/cowardice is consistent with a couple of contradictory mindsets:
I’m posting this circa 2008 photo for no other reason than my looking damned good in it.
I’ve been doing interviews with a number of companies in the quest for my next gig, and since we’re still in a pandemic, they’ve all been online. I’ve done enough of them to get to the point where I’ve figured a system and setup that works well for me. The photo above shows me, just after this afternoon’s interview, complete with handy annotations.
Here’s a quick run-down of the setup:
I’ll let you know what happened as soon as I find out.
I’ve managed to not put on the “Quarantine Fifteen” by doing a 10K bike ride at least five days a week since March. In fact, I’ve lost a little weight over the past couple of months. I’m fortunate to be in a fantastic neighborhood for cycling — lots of tree-lined streets with interesting houses to look at, the Hillsborough River cutting an inverted “U” through the area, and parks all over the place.
The 2020 Saharan dust cloud has also made the weather a little drier than usual. Normally, during this time of year, we get either hurricanes, or the typical tropical “rainy season” weather where the day starts sunny, followed by a torrential rainstorm in the early afternoon, followed by sun. More than our fair share of days has been mostly sunny. It’s made for some pretty good cycling.
These photos are from a place I’ve written about before: Lake Roberta. I took them from its east side, looking west.
I think it’s a bad idea to ride with headphones on, but I sometimes like listening to podcasts while I bike. So I do the next best thing: I pop my phone in my backpack’s “iPod pouch” and just play it through the phone’s speaker.
I’m currently listening to Over the Road, a podcast where host “Long Haul Paul” Marhoefer, a trucker who’s also a musician and a great storyteller, tells the stories of his fellow long haul truckers, highlighting their experiences and explaining how they’re coping in a world that’s changing as a result of new technologies, new regulations, and changes in the way people live.
For the next five weeks, I’m teaching an online Python class from 6:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. on Mondays and Wednesdays. That means that on those days, I eat dinner a little earlier, which in turn means that I’ve got to have it prepped earlier.
Luckily, I have all sorts of tricks for this sort of schedule, one of which is the mid-afternoon veggie roast: Cut up some vegetables, drizzle with oil and seasonings, roast in the oven or turbo broiler for 45 minutes. It doesn’t take long to put together, and it doesn’t need to be attended to while in the over, allowing me to continue working.
Last night’s vegetable was a whole head of cauliflower in curry powder (I used Badia’s “Jamaican style” curry), truffle salt, and ghee.
While tasty, it doesn’t look pretty close up. It’s layogenic (pronounced “LIE-o-jennic”), a Filipino/English hybrid term that was BBC’s “Word of the Day” back in January. It means “attractive from a distance, but not close up,” — the “layo” part comes from the Filipino word for “far” or “distance”.
One of my favorite Chinese dishes is mapo tofu, a Sichuan dish whose name translates as “pockmarked grandma’s tofu”. It’s a nice, high-protein dish as it’s made from ground pork and cut-up firm tofu, and it’s also a high-octane dish thanks to its use of Sichuan peppercorns. It also calls for lots of garlic, ginger, and green onion.
I was out of that really red Chinese chili oil that always ends up on whatever white that I’m wearing. I replaced it with a mix of Chinese chili sauce (not sriracha — this is different stuff), Sichuan pepper flakes, and sesame oil, and it still came out pretty tasty.