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Watching my soprano section shrink in real time the week of a concert due to the germ soup we're all swimming around in out there: augh. (People. This is why most of your section leaders and certain choir elders have decided to continue singing masked, even if we can't make it policy again for the whole choir for various bureaucratic reasons. Seriously, 3M, where are those black N95s we've been politely requesting for four years now?)

Still, glad to be singing with a group whose music is meeting the moment; check program notes, well worth a read for background. Keeping in mind the timelines for performing classical music are scheduled well over a year in advance. A program replete with music from immigrants, combining disparate musical traditions in the best ways.

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We almost had snow in the Bay Area again last week - well, okay, the actual 2500' peaks like Mount Diablo and Mount Hamilton got snow and it looked pretty, and of course the much higher Sierras to our east got feet of snow and "no you can't fucking travel today" warnings and avalanche deaths - and now we're missing the first real snow in Boston in years, and it's pretty, but I'm okay with that.

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I dropped my phone awhile back, and while it was still technically functional, the back had enough spiderwebbing and flaking glass revealing the motherboard structure below that I got it replaced. It has literally taken most of the day since it arrived to get things swapped over. Mostly because this also involved a forced upgrade to Liquid Glass, which I'd been ducking, sigh.

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A few months ago, hyounpark and I were getting on the freeway when a billboard flashed "LOCAL BIRRIA BALLS" at us. For, like, half a second, just long enough for H to read the phrase aloud, and go, "Birria *balls*?"
Me: "That's like, bringing up ancient catchphrases in my brain. Remember 'I wanna dip my balls in it'?"
H: "... I don't want to know, do I."
Me: "MTV in the '90s. For what it's worth, they were golf balls."
H: "I suspect birria balls are going to be quite different, but I'm driving so I can't find out right now."
Me: "I'm on it!"
Me, five minutes later: "Well, I can't find a local option for whatever these are, and Google keeps asking me if I'm looking for 'birria bombs.' But apparently a Mexican food truck in Kentucky says they're meatballs made of birria? With Hot Cheetos dust on the outside for crunch? ... and there's a restaurant in West Virginia that agrees with them."
H: "... I mean, that sounds like uber-American stoner kid food mashup culture, but why aren't there more local search results if there's literally a freeway billboard promoting it?"
Me: "Or we can buy them frozen. From an Italian specialty food shop. In Denmark."
H: "Google, you have utterly lost the plot."

We finally saw that particular billboard again (it's one of those electronic billboards with a rotating stash of ads), and this time, it had a URL attached, so we discovered that the local birria balls are literally just flavor packs, you have to provide your own birria in ball form.

Twenty-plus years of loving each other, cooking together, and building upon our mutual disdain of dealing with crowds and reservations for Valentine's Day means hyounpark and I made a dinner worth remembering tonight.

By default, when we have pork belly around in the winter, we usually braise it in apple cider, along with a chopped onion, garlic, a little soy sauce, fish sauce, and fivespice. But we didn't have apple cider in the fridge, so I thought about what else we could use for a braising liquid, and while pondering, found a recipe on the McCormick website for a Thai Tea-Spiced Pork Belly with Condensed Milk Sauce, and my eyes lit up, because I knew we had Thai tea packets on hand.

We riffed heavily off that recipe, mostly treating it as taste profile suggestions. I started steeping a liter of Thai tea while H chopped an onion, then I sauteed the onions with garlic and ginger paste (an incredible convenience courtesy the Indian grocery store in our neighborhood), and then added some fivespice powder. H crosshatched the pork belly skin, then cut it into small enough slabs to fit in our Instant Pot. I added a few tablespoons of soy sauce and fish sauce to the stuff in the skillet, then dumped that in the bottom of the Instant Pot; laid the pork belly slabs on top of the rack in the IP, and poured the tea over everything, and then closed it up and let it go on high for 20 minutes.

While that went, H tried to turn our rice into the suggested rice cakes, but we should've used sushi rice instead of brown rice which was what we had ready. Even using the musubi mold didn't get it to stick together enough, alas. Everything still tasted delicious in the end, though, so no fuss.

Meanwhile, I made the condensed milk sauce in the recipe - we had condensed coconut milk on hand, I subbed in peanut butter for the tahini and chile crisp for the sambal - and then turned my attention to the salad. What did we have in the fridge? Half a head of butter lettuce, some shiso leaves, scallions; enough for at least a little greenery on the plate. Chopped the leafy greens and scallion up, and then, inspired, ran an apple through the mandolin. Whisked together a dressing of peanut oil, lime juice, fish sauce, a little galangal and garlic. Topped it off with peanuts.

The IP finished releasing pressure just as we finished the rest of the plating; we each pulled out a small slab of pork belly, drizzled the condensed milk sauce over it, and utterly freaking devoured our dinner. Everything just came together, building on decades of experience and familiarity with each others' taste, and we will absolutely do this again.

And it's not Valentine's for us without chocolate, so I pulled a log of our favorite chocolate toffee cookies out of the freezer, sliced and baked and ate. (Along with the last crumbs of the gargantuan king cake slice ladyjax bestowed upon me yesterday! Many thanks to her A for the baking thereof :) )

Somehow we will both get up in the morning and go for a digestive run and continue appreciating how we grow together, even as things around us are so very different from how we imagined when we began.

I have plenty of half-drafted posts on tap, but right now, all I can think is DAWSON'S DEAD?!

It's as if invoking Dawson's Creek in my last post for the first time in forever caused it, sigh. Definitely feeling my age today since he was only nine months older than me.

(Cancer, apparently; I don't tend to keep up with celebrity news, but I found out because phamos818 posted about it on FB. And apparently he's, like, only nine months older than me and has six kids.)