I shared Father’s Day with Oldest Daughter’s birthday again, and I think we both enjoyed being able to celebrate them together. It feels like it’s been a long time since we could. Five out of eight kids were over for most of the day. There was cake and ice cream and a few gifts. #5 Son printed a fountain pen stand for me, feeding my fountain pen addiction. I’ve fallen way behind on journaling and letter-writing though.
I got my car back Monday. The non-starting was caused by a loose and corroded positive cable. We thought Oldest Daughter would her car back Wednesday after a new computer and six new coil packs. But half an hour after Middle Brother picked it up, the Check Engine light came on so back to the shop it went. That seemed to be a bad wiring harness that the mechanic said he usually replaces when he replaces the computer. Oldest Daughter and her mom and I were very grateful that we could front her the money for the repair. It wasn’t all that long ago that we’d have been scrambling to pull that money together from a bunch of different places.
My Ancestry gift subscription from last Christmas is up for renewal. I didn’t get nearly as much use out of it as I’d hoped, but part of that was because a lot of my research is on the local hard drive of Homestead, my primary computer, and that was out of service for most of two months. I may just let it go for now.
An Ohio friend is getting married in October and asked Diana to officiate, so we’ve started the planning process. Middle Son loves his road trips and he’s already figured out how many cars we’re going to take and how we’re going to convoy up. It’s about a 13.5-hour trip, not unlike the Wisconsin run I made for WPA. We’ve done it plenty of times in the past and it won’t bother me much because we’ve got plenty of drivers. I suggested renting a van so that we could all travel together, to save on gas. We’d be limited on who could drive because of rental regulations though. Some of the kids liked the throwback to their younger days, but there’s a logistical disadvantage to having just one vehicle on a destination trip like that. What do you do at the destination when different people want to go different places?
Fireworks season is upon us. We’re opening about a week later than we have the last two years, and we’re finding it a little difficult to staff the booth. There was a brief discussion about not even running it this year, but it’s a huge portion of the church’s budget, so here we are. Between Diana working her Day Job and me watching Grandson three days a week, we’re not as available as we used to be. I worked an overnight Thursday, then day shifts Friday and Saturday.
The overnight shifts aren’t all that terrible, even if they are twelve hours long. I sometimes get some writing done between visits by stray cats. It seems there’s always a stray or two that ventures around, and this year an older kitten has taken up residence in the bushes near the stand. Some of the employees of the big box store whose lot we use have taken the kitten under their wing, bringing food and water and even fashioning a shelter for her in the shrubbery.
What’s for Dinner?
Everhearth Inn showed up in my TikTok feed a while back and this recipe looked tempting. We finally got around to giving it a try this week.
Verdict: pretty tasty. Wereboar is difficult to source around here, so I substituted chicken thighs and pulled pork. I dialed back the chili powder in the barbecue sauce because most of the family isn’t a big fan of really hot and spicy. Skipped the lima beans too because no one really likes them. I used baby carrots because that’s what we had in the house. We don’t eat a lot of pork around here because of my gout, so I had to hunt around a bit. I ended up using a pre-cooked carnitas mix by Del Real Foods that seemed to work out well. This would be a nice way to use up leftovers, and I bet lamb or venison would be pretty good this way too.
They say that lycanthropy is only passed by being bitten, not by eating the animal, so we should be safe.
Welcome to the Strange New Worlds
When I was much younger, I was quite the Trekkie. I watched Star Trek—what’s now called The Original Series—on syndicated reruns weekday afternoons. When the first movie came out, I got a model of the Enterprise for my birthday or Christmas, as well as a model kit with the phaser, communicator, and tricorder. I think I had a model of the Galileo shuttle as well. I was a huge fan.
Over the years that interest waned. I watched The Next Generation when I could, but I didn’t make a huge effort to catch it. Deep Space Nine never really caught my interest, nor did the rest of the series that followed. I did try to stay caught up on the movies though.
I was moderately interested in Strange New Worlds when I heard about it because I thought that there would be some great stories to be told in the history of Enterprise and her first commander. I’m still trying to wrap my head around whatever timeline Strange New Worlds exists in though. I didn’t watch Discovery at all, so my knowledge of Christopher Pike is a mishmash of what I saw in the TOS pilot and the movie reboots. It feels like SNW is staying close to the TOS timeline as they tease Pike’s injuries.
I like the show well enough so far though I don’t love it. Mount is playing Pike the way Shatner played Kirk, I think, with just the right amount of camp. The rest of the crew does a pretty good job as well. I’m not sure I like the idea of Uhura being a cadet here, though Celia Rose Gooding does a great job bringing her to life. We never learned much about her in any of the other shows, it seemed. She was a great background character, but never more than that.
In a Mandela Effect moment, I feel like I’ve seen Dr. M’Benga in the animated Star Trek series, though he never appeared there. I also tried to connect him with the M5 computer, but that was Dr. Daystrom. I saw “Arena” several times, but I don’t remember M’Benga at all in that episode for some reason.
I like this version of Enterprise. It seems like they’ve learned a few things in this timeline, like how to stash weapons in case you might need them. No seatbelts though. I thought that problem got solved in the movie reboot, but I guess that’s a different timeline.
I will admit to one major peeve though. In a universe that mimics naval tradition so much, down to the bosun’s whistle when the captain comes on the bridge, why do they sound “Red alert” instead of “General Quarters?” I’m not a Navy guy, but I’ve always felt that General Quarters (or Battlestar Galactics’s “Action stations”) was a better (or cooler?) alert. And while I appreciate SNW’s use of TOS sound effects and music (especially during the lirpa fight in “Spock Amok”), do we really need the alert klaxon to sound continuously during the alert?
Like I said, I like it so far. I’ll keep watching for a while and see how it grows on me.
Reading & Writing
No new books this week. I took On Writing with me to my overnight shift but didn’t really get into it. Likewise, no real writing other than maintaining my blog streak. Several ideas that I’m making note of though.
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