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One of these days, I will get around to making myself a bike icon or three. I've only been biking for transportation as an adult for 18 years now!

( recent bike rides: coffee ride, bike party, Kidical Mass, and biking to the library to get a Star Trek-themed library card )

Still, I did take this most recent Sunday off from running because of the higher-than-normal activity, and squeezed a quick jog in this morning before the heatwave really set in. It should not be this close to 90F in the Bay Area in March, but at least I still have otter pops in the freezer. Worth noting: I'm finally at a point in my fitness where I can consistently jog 20 minutes in a row. I'm still slow af, but one of my fitness goals this year is to be able to jog a 5k without a significant walk break. I've done races in the past with run-walk intervals, I just want to broaden my toolset. And the cardio is good for breath control, key to singing, so I'm trying to encourage this virtuous feedback loop :)

Despite the heat, I had already defrosted the corned beef for boiled dinner for St. Patrick's Day dinner tonight, and it's one of hyounpark's faves from our Boston era, so tradition upheld. I also baked soda bread, or at least a slightly nontrad version that called for yogurt instead of the buttermilk we never have on hand. And of course I modded that; we do raisins or currants in ours, not nuts, and for once, I even had caraway seeds on hand thanks to a recent Buy Nothing spice exchange), and that came out so well we've already finished half the loaf. So I got that all on the stove as early as possible to not overheat the house.

In between all the biking and baking, we managed to sneak in brunch on the patio at Oceanview Diner with CJ and Chung and their kids. I ordered the souffle pancake, knowing it was going to show up as dessert, and it was worth the wait (and the looks on everyone's faces 😁 ). Their souffle pancake is really more of a Dutch baby, which their predecessor called a Dutch bunny when I would order it as a kid decades ago, fluffy and just a bit eggy and perfect.

It's too hot to sleep; I think I'll have another otter pop.

Stuck in my head this week: the CHVRCHES cover of Such Great Heights. Lauren Mayberry was the opener for the Northeastern leg of the Postal Service anniversary tour, and I have been enjoyably earwormed with her band's version of this song. It's making me want to do a ukelele cover of it, somehow.

( YT video within )

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I don't usually pay that much attention to celebrity news, nor am I a fan of horror movies (I tend to run screaming the other direction), but it feels right to rewatch Army of Darkness upon hearing the news that whatever cancer Bruce Campbell's just announced that he's got is "treatable, but not curable." But jeez, that's like two major ones of these "fuck cancer" announcements in just a few weeks now. Le sigh.

Of course, this means I'll need to figure out how to get ahold of a copy of said movie, and I'm feeling just cantankerous enough about the state of media preservation that I'm wondering where I can pick up a physical copy on DVD (yes, DVD, we don't have a BluRay player). And it turns out there's apparently fifty bajillion editions, heh.

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This year's hamantaschen flavors: vanilla dough with cherry preserves, vanilla dough with apricot hot pepper jelly, chocolate dough with raspberry preserves, chocolate dough with peanut butter. I tried out Smitten Kitchen's dough recipe this year to see how a buttery dough behaved compared to the oil-based recipe I usually use from noghri, with mixed success. The chocolate dough options remained intact, probably partly because I didn't roll it out to 1/8" thin, partly because I froze the peanut butter balls before folding them into the dough, and partly because the raspberry preserves were thick enough to not spread. I think it came out a little dry relative to the fillings, probably two minutes too long in the oven. The vanilla dough behaved with the apricot hot pepper jelly because it wasn't really a jelly, definitely more of a preserves texture. But with the cherry "preserves," it was another story, because the texture of that was much closer to an improperly-set jam, which I only realized starting to scoop it into the cookies. If you think all of the blowouts were the cherry ones, you'd be right!

Had friends over for dinner to help eat the hamantaschen, and I also made chicken adobo and rice and a mizuna salad with seaweed dressing. K brought fancy fruity sodas from TJ's, and we didn't remotely realize how late it had gotten until one of us looked at our watches and gasped that it was after midnight, heh. I really ought to do that more often; I like hosting my friends and us gossiping around a table until all hours. Plus, it's good motivation to keep things a bit tidier around here!

And it felt good to show off progress in the library/my office. Still need to figure out the desk situation; still need to frame the art I want to hang up in there; still want this rug to drape over the back of the glider chair. And I need to figure out a good reading lamp. But now that we've been here almost five years, figuring out how to make things the way we want; what we want to change, what we want to keep.

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I never did post about our Super Bowl menu, but we made:

- Seattle: Teriyaki Wings, because it's a thing; every Seattle local friend I've ever visited there has taken me out for teriyaki there.
- Boston: Miso Clam Chowder. Used the Saveur recipe as a base, then to get it closer to Oga-style, added an assortment of Japanese mushrooms. Subbed out the cream for coconut milk, but that swung the flavor profile significantly more Thai, so I may need to consider other options if I want it to taste like Oga's. And I'll go ahead and pick up some ume next time for a topping, I think it needs just a bit of that fermented sourness to taste right.

I ran out of steam before making it to the Boston Cream Pie (Joanne Chang's, of course), but I did also make a smoked salmon dip: cream cheese, lemon juice, dill, onion powder, green onions, garlic, chili crisp, and smoked salmon on top.