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a soup is bigger than the sum of its parts
Monday, February 17 2025
Overnight temperatures plunged and all the slushy snow from last night flash-froze into something resembling obsidian. It covered all surfaces with whatever shape had last been imprinted in it, which, in our driveway, was two-to-four-inch-deep tire tracks. Our Chevy Bolt found itself in a pool whose walls were made of this stuff. Ground water burbling in from uphill was still liquid, gradually buoying up a layer of ice until it was two inches above the pavement. We had our cleaner coming this morning, so I went to do the impossible and make a place for her to park. This involved moving the Forester forward a little, removing the Bolt entirely, and removing anything I could break up with a snow shovel. It wasn't easy driving the Bolt up over the sides of the glass-walled pool it was trapped in, but with a little inertia I managed to do so. I then parked it at the entrance to the Farm Road, where someone else had parked a car as well (it had Illinois plates). In the end the cleaner didn't come because she couldn't get her car out of wherever she'd parked it due to similar circumstances (which she likened to a "tundra").
Early this afternoon when the dogs were both eager for a walk, I took them up the Farm Road and back, since walking anywhere else would've been difficult. Its surface was covered with that same glassy material, which in some places was slick enough for Charlotte to lose traction and slide around when trying to accelerate or decelerate. Mostly, though, it had been roughened slightly with tire tracks. Still, someone equipped with ice skates could've skated the length of the Farm Road and back (a total distance of a mile).
Last week while shopping after making an Ethiopian-style wot, I'd bought the vegetables I'd wished I'd had, which included celery, carrots, and a bag of yellow potatoes. This evening I loosely-followed a recipe I found online to make a potato-kale soup, though I made two big modifications: I didn't blend it at all (since I prefer the components of my soup to be identifiable chunks) and I didn't add any sort of milk (which would've been soy or oat milk) because I didn't want it to be creamy or otherwise chowdery. The two most important cooking lessons I've learned in recent months is that things that are otherwise uncookable are best cooked in broth and the key to cooking some things is to cook the hell out of them. This applies particularly to kale and potatoes. I should mention that I've only started liking potatoes in soup relatively recently, and I was never a fan of kale until Gretchen started cooking the hell out of it in broth. As for carrots (which I also used), I've disliked them in cooked form for my entirely life and only recently decided they're not all that bad. This might've been only the second time in my life that I'd ever cooked with them (same with the potatoes). But a soup is always more than the sum of its parts, so I was pretty sure I was going to like what I was making. I also added fun ingredients like a can of kidney beans, half a lemon, a lot of paprika, soy sauce, and a fair amount of nutritional yeast. I was done making the soup well before 5:00pm and left it to simmer on low for awhile after that.
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In parallel with other things I worked on today, I finally stopped procrastinating essential repairs to the pet door in our front door, which has been beaten apart multiple times in recent months by Charlotte flying out through it to attack Crazy Dave's dog Brigitte whenever she barges into our yard. I've tried gluing it back together using superglue or Gorilla Glue, and this used to work back when our dogs were lower-energy. But, since we got Charlotte, it no longer does. The door consists of a mitred aluminum frame similar to a picture frame sandwiched between two pieces of plexiglass, all originally held together with adhesives. The door is suspended from a steel rod piercing it horizontally parallel to (and an inch from) its top edge. While I was recently in Virginia, the top piece of the aluminum frame broke free, leaving a half-inch gap at the top. The door still worked, but now cold winter air could get in. I'd been stopping up that gap with fabric or foam rubber, but every time the dogs would use the door, that material would fall out and I'd have to stuff it in again.
Over the past week or so, I'd come up with a plan to permanently fix the pet door. I would cut two sticks of wood about the width of the door and sand their thickness down until they fit tightly inside the voids in the pieces of aluminum frame. Since this thickness was exactly an inch, I could use 5/4 inch stock, which was only slightly thicker than an inch, as the basis for these pieces. This evening I cut two such pieces and then only worried about fixing the top part of the frame for now. To get the new wooden piece into the top of the door, I first had to sand it down to the correct thickness and then use a power saw to cut two parallel grooves an inch deep on either side of the center of one of the wooden piece's long dimensions. Then I used a pair of needle-nosed pliers to break out the narrow strip of wood remaining, opening up a slot for the steel rod that the door hangs from. The resulting groove wasn't quite wide enough and was a little out of center, so then I used a Dremel to enlarge the groove at the bottom. This took a few attempts and didn't really fit right until I used a blow torch to burn out the bottom of the slot, which I then filed with a cylindrical rasp. This eventually opened up enough space for the steel rod that the pet door swings on. Once I had the new wooden piece in place, I could snap the top part of the aluminum frame on and the door once more worked as it had. It's not perfect yet, of course. I still need to seal it to the plexiglass using silicone caulk and connect everything together with screws. Once I do that, though, the pet door should last for decades.
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