It’s a nice long post this week. You’re really getting your money’s worth with this one.
I’m starting off with a rant, if I may.
I just graduated from college but my girlfriend still has another year. What do I do?
I read that on a forum early this week, and it was all I could do to not scream at the poor soul through the computer. OP was wondering if he should move back to his parents’ place two hours away. He can live rent-free there, or he could stay in college town with his girlfriend, pay rent, and put off his job search.
This is a conversation he and his girlfriend should have been having throughout his senior year. They needed to be talking long before graduation about big city vs metro area vs small town, and mountains vs coast vs Midwestern Plains. What’s his ideal city? What’s hers? Does her ideal place support his career? Does his support hers?
Oy.
I’m not angry with the poor kid. I mean, good on him for finally starting to think about this stuff. But one of the foundational building blocks for any relationship is communication, especially about major issues. This kind of decision is a Big Thing™, and a couple needs to be talking about them. It’s rarely going to be a simple or brief conversation, too.
It doesn’t have to be a single discussion, either. Hopefully a couple learns about each other during the quiet moments, during the long walks, during dinner chats. Take those bits and pieces you discovered about your partner and see how they mesh with your thoughts about life.
Learn how to communicate early on. It’ll save you a lot of pain later.
Trust me on this one.
Pens
I spent Tuesday afternoon cleaning my fountain pens. I haven’t written with them since late last year, so the inks had all dried up. That sucked on one, a red that I really liked, because it’s been discontinued. There was a controversy last year surrounding Noodler’s Inks and the names/bottle imagery on several of the inks. This red that I liked was called Tiananmen, and the bottle image was “Tank Man.” I’d hoped it was just renamed, but it looks like it’s gone for good. Ah well. I’ve got several other reds to choose from.
I’ve been meaning to get back to journaling for a while. I haven’t written anything there since June of last year, telling myself in part that it was because the pens had dried up. But I cleaned and refilled/refreshed at least a couple of them back in September and never wrote any. Here’s hoping I can get back to that. I feel like I wrote more and better fiction when I was journaling.
Of course, I cleaned them Tuesday but didn’t get around to re-inking any of them until Saturday night.
Cooking Stuff
I smoked my first meal this week. Picked up a five-pound chicken at the beginning of the month and smoked it Saturday. I got myself all kinds of nervous about it, really. Spent most of the month deciding on how to brine it and what rub to put on it. My mindset about things like this is that I’ve got to get it exactly right the first time; I’m not allowed to make any mistakes. It’s my executive dysfunction kicking in.
I ordered a Thermoworks Smoke thermometer to help in the cooking. I’ve got a quick-read thermometer, and the grill has one built into the lid. But those are notoriously inaccurate, and I need to open the lid to use the quick-read, and “If you’re lookin’, you ain’t cookin’.” That’s a reminder that every time you open the lid, you’re letting heat and smoke out, and messing with your cook time. The Smoke has one sensor for the cook chamber and another for the meat, and they both feed a remote unit that you can carry with you.
I spent a bunch of time sweating the thermometer, too. The Thermoworks Smoke is well-thought-of over at /r/smoking, as is the ThermoPro line. ThermoPro has several that use Bluetooth to talk to your phone which was tempting. But I kind of didn’t want another app on my phone, and I’d read comments about the BT signal being limited by the metal grill body. The Thermoworks Smoke uses a regular RF signal, and apparently that frequency pushes past the steel better.
I brined it about 18 or so hours. My brine recipe, modified from this one, was
- 4 cups water
- 4 cups apple cider vinegar
- ¼ cup table salt. Most brine recipes call for kosher salt, but I couldn’t find any in time so I used table. I read that table salt tends to be saltier than kosher, so it’s recommended that if you use table salt, you use half of the amount of kosher salt you were going to use.
- 1 cup brown sugar
- 1/3 cup minced garlic
- 2-3 ish tablespoons dried minced onion
For the rub I used Super Bird Poultry Blend from Fire and Smoke Society which turned out to be a great choice. I worried at first that it was going to be too spicy, but it came out just fine, with a nice lemon kick to it. I probably could have used the Dolly Parton’s Stampede Chicken Rub my girls bought me a while back. It’s tasty, but I wasn’t sure I actually had enough. Turns out I probably did. Maybe next time.
One of the toughest things for me to learn, way back when I was a short-order cook, was to leave the food alone as it cooks. I was proud of myself for not opening the cook chamber until the thermometer hit 160.
I think it turned out pretty well.
Things I’ve Read This Week
I read several blog posts this week, as I usually do. It occurred to me that you might appreciate them as well.
The Short Life of Baby Milo – A heartbreaking account at WaPo of a Florida family forced by new abortion restrictions to deliver a baby they knew wouldn’t survive. We allow parents to control their baby’s healthcare after birth. Indeed, there was no law forcing Milo’s parents to do anything to help him. What’s so special about the time before birth then, that we can’t allow parents to control the baby’s healthcare then?
Here’s What We Can Do Now About Gun Violence – An NYT op-ed with a surprising admission. “Since assault weapons bans aren’t coming back and AR-15-style rifles are here to stay, the most important thing we can do is modernize the background check system, around which there’s a modicum of bipartisan consensus.” (Emphasis added.) There are some basic problems with the piece, like where it says that the Air Force’s failure to forward information to NICS allowed a man to illegally buy a rifle, which he then used in the Sutherland Springs massacre. The writer says “That conviction…should have prevented his being able to buy the guns he used in the attack.” To be clear: the purchase was illegal, even if NICS allowed it. If laws stopped people from doing wrong things, he never would have tried to buy the rifle in the first place.
Later, the writer says, “In 2023, are we really going to continue to allow purchasers to show only a driver’s license, an easily and regularly forged document?” Has the writer not heard of REAL ID? For that matter, there are laws in every state against forging or altering your driver’s license. And if there’s a conflict between the presented government ID and the data checked via NICS, the sale will be denied.
I was really impressed though that someone who’s basically anti-gun seemed to understand the part I bolded. I know several states have passed or tried to pass bans, but those are rapidly getting tied up in court, and I don’t see them holding up.
The Parents Saying No to Smartphones – Via The Free Press on Substack. An interesting piece about families that are not letting their kids have cellphones. We held out as long as we could, for the most part, though the kids had DSs early on. I kind of twitched at the phrase “internet-free smartphones” though. By definition doesn’t a smartphone have internet? I also question the use of the word “fatwa.” Free Press claims to be “built on the ideals that once were the bedrock of great journalism: honesty, doggedness, and fierce independence.” I think another one of those ideals was impartiality, and fatwa is hardly an impartial term. Founder Bari Weiss calls herself “a liberal uncomfortable with the excesses of left-wing culture” and a “left-leaning centrist.” But the few articles I’ve read at the site other than the one I linked seem to have a strong right-wing emphasis.
As governors, we oversaw executions. We’ve lived to regret it. – An op-ed at WaPo from two former Alabama governors. I’m glad they bring up the horror of judicial overrides and non-unanimous decisions. But I would rather have had them condemn the entire process. 167 people on death row is 167 too many.
Christian Government: A Fallacy – A piece over at Patheos from Democratic Socialist and Methodist past C. Don Jones. It rambles a fair amount, but at the end, he comes really close to something I’ve been saying for a while.
Christianity and Christian love can’t be spread at gunpoint. And I mention gunpoint because whether we like to admit it or not, government power ultimately comes from a gun. Every law a State passes is eventually enforced by people with guns. Lethal force. And I can’t find anything in the Bible about using lethal force to love your neighbor. Jesus taught to respect authority, but he also taught to love your neighbor. He didn’t equate paying into the welfare system with helping others. I think if he’s real and were to pop back in for a visit these days, he’d be appalled at how Christians seem to crave political power at the expense of loving others.
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