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uselessness of conventional taco shells
Wednesday, September 21 2022
Some guy would be coming by to collect a dented rim from the Chevy Bolt "this afternoon," and there was to be a "town hall" for the group I work with within the corporate behemoth during the lunch hour, so I ran the errand that I wanted to run a little after 11:00am. This was mostly to get gin and top-shelf scotch for the laboratory, though I also paid a visit to the Tibetan Center thrift store, where I picked up a big three-gallon water thermos (for potable water storage at the dock), an old Netgear Nighthawk router, and a used polyethylene cutting board (for use in a shop, not a kitchen, as it is likely tainted with meat juice in a way that would trouble Gretchen if not me). All that stuff was mine for just $3.25, and this was after being rung up by the cranky cashier woman, not Rob.
It was a beautiful sunny day with perfect temperatures, and I was little high on both pseudoephedrine and kratom tea, so I was enjoying driving around. But when I got back home almost exactly at noon, I saw a van in the process of leaving. It was the rim repair guy, and I'd thought he'd be coming this afternoon. No problem, he was willing to wait do whatever he was there to do now that I was back. But then it turned out he didn't have information on what the problem wheel was, and there was nothing visibly wrong with any of the wheels. I called Gretchen at the bookstore, and she was all stressed out dealing with thousands of books signed by Neil Gaiman, but she didn't know what wheel needed fixing either, so she told me to call VanKleeck Tire, the people who had reported the problem originally. Since they couldn't give me an immediate answer, I sent the rim repair guy on his way. Eventually VanKleeck told me that both wheels that had been on the front and that were now rotated to the back needing fixing. But at that point Gretchen had decided that if we couldn't see or feel problems with the wheels, it didn't make any sense to undertake any repairs.
I wanted to do some drinking today, so I bought myself the ability to do so by painting a tiny painting of a baby black bear using, as a canvas, a square piece of wood I'd chiseled off the top of one of the railing newels at the cabin. (An earlier painting on another piece of chiseled-off newel wood depicted a loon.)
At 5:00pm, I made another simple chili using mostly just a tomato reduction (from all the good tomatoes I could find in the garden), black beans, kidney beans, a single garden-fresh jalapeño pepper, nutritional yeast, a little vegetable oil, and a lot of paprika. When Gretchen came home, she made herself some couscous to serve the place of rice. I used the chili to fill hard taco shells. I couldn't find stand & stuff shells at the Hannaford last time I'd gone, so I'd gotten larger taco shells that weren't stand & stuff, and this reminded me of how useless conventional taco shells are. Without the widened spine, they rarely open up enough to contain sufficient material to make a satisfying taco.
While we were eating our dinner in front of 2.1 episodes of Severance, Gretchen noted that I smelled like a still, even though I hadn't drunk anything in hours. That was somewhat dispiriting, as I felt like I'd controlled myself today. I ended up drinking a little more down in the greenhouse as I waited for a dose of diphenhydramine to kick in.
Today's painting of a baby black bear.
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