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thick slab of jerk tofu
Wednesday, July 22 2020
The Ukranian outsourcers and I agreed to cancel this week's meeting because two of the most important people wouldn't be there. My boss Alex is taking the week off to spend it with his family in "down east" Maine, the place on the East Coast with the fewest cases of coronavirus. Meanwhile our main point man in Ukraine, Roman, was vacationing across the Black Sea in Turkey.
I took advantage of the lack of work-related stress to get more done on the upstairs bathtub replacement project. Most of this involved the fussy work of preparing the studs to accept Wonderboard (or the equivalent).
Later this evening, as thunderstorms gathered, I used my handheld hammer-drill to cleave pieces of Wonderboard off the tile I'd salvaged. This went much better than expected, with the Wonderboard coming away like toppings from a pizza, leaving me with nearly-pristine tile. What little Wonderboard and thinset remaining can be removed with a wirebrush drill attachment, like I did when preparing salvaged backsplash tile for use in filling gaps in the floor tiles after the kitchen remodel.
After work, Gretchen went to the Woodstock Farm Festival to see what the options are (now that Aba's Falafel is no longer there). To her delight, Gretchen discovered a new booth run by some young vegans from New Paltz. She told them she'd have some of each of the four things they had, and then she brought all that home to Powerful and me for dinner. The food was good but not great. The "jerk tofu" sandwich wasn't exactly bursting with flavor, probably because the slab of tofu was too thick and hadn't absorbed much of the "jerk." And while the pizza with homemade faux cheese had great crust, the faux cheese was a bit mealy. But these New Paltz vegans are young and still learning, so we'll just avoid their polenta in the future until they stop adding whatever sweet component they put in it this evening. As for the noodles, well, they just needed a little salt.
After a downpour passed through, I gathered up the dogs and drove the Leaf out to Lowes to get Wonderboard for the bathroom project. They didn't have Wonderboard, but they had a nearly-identical product called Durock, so I got three sheets of that as well as some grey grout and a new kind of supposedly amazing glue.
This evening after fixing myself a gin-and-orange-juice, I happened to notice a happy happening among the Mercy For Animals IT Department diaspora, so I joined. There was the usual talk: animal rights gossip, coronavirus (Allison has only left her apartment once since early March, and only to attend to a raging urinary tract infection), and Dan's life as a father. Normally parents gloss over the inconveniences and frustrations of caring for babies. But from the way he described things, it sounded like Dan was about to lose his mind. And, mind you, being a father is his full time job. It's not like he's having to balance that with the chore of working from home. As for Cameron, it seems arthritis in one of knees has sidelined his marathoning hobby. He'd recently cut his own hair with a pair of clippers, revealing a pronounced widow's peak. Dan unexpectedly interested in my home repair chores, asking me to take pictures and even encouraging me to start a YouTube channel.
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