Author: pseudoisaac

I love my Instant Pot. I cannot believe how much utility I get out of this thing. I scored it on Amazon.com during a sale. The UPS guy said, “Are they giving these things away, or what?!” when he dropped it off. When I compare it to other things I have blown $70 on, it encourages me to be more clever with my money.

The device has revolutionized my meals and snacks.

– I eat vegetable and bean soups more often than I ever thought possible (total prep time: 15 minutes).

– I quickly hard boil eggs for a week’s supply of this convenient protein snack from nature’s cloaca. (The cloaca is a combination asshole and vagina, in the words of George Carlin. Although I should add, the male counterpart has one too.)

– I throw in a quarter of a thick beef steak with pepper, salt, oil and a bit of water and am eating it within 50 minutes. I keep these frozen so I never end up throwing out meat or eating more meat than I want to in a given week.

– I am still tweaking my whole chicken recipe but each one I’ve cooked so far has been tender, useful and delicious, for only $7 apiece.

– I very easily prepare beans, lentils, chickpeas, rice and pearled barley for all kinds of versatile purposes such as burritos, hummus and smoothies.

Outside of these uses – both creative and routine – I avoid stinking up my apartment which lamentably is carpeted. I use more of my raw materials and cut down on waste. For instance, I will cook up the steak and then use the broth remaining in the pot to immediately make a veggie soup. For the first time in my life I will buy those giant packages of carrots and celery and potatoes and use them all before they go bad. Finally, I use more whole foods and feel less and less need to buy pricey, shelf-stable canned mixes and broths.

Everyone should buy an Instant Pot! Or an equivalent electric pressure cooker of their choice! Also, everyone should know the term cloaca and insert it smoothly into everyday conversation!

There are three dense, transit-friendly developments proposed in my area that I see as really beneficial for housing, the environment, and quality of life:

http://riverviewcorridor.com/

http://www.ci.minneapolis.mn.us/www/groups/public/@cped/documents/webcontent/wcmsp-192028.pdf

https://www.stpaul.gov/departments/planning-economic-development/planning/ford-site-21st-century-community

One is for a transit corridor connecting people to the airport, the river, the Blue line (light rail) and downtown Saint Paul.

Another is a proposed apartment complex with a grocery store that would reopen Snelling Avenue south of 46th street so it is no longer a dead end. It would redevelop what is now a boxy warehouse-style building surrounded by a large parking lot.

The last is the redevelopment of the former Ford plant on Ford Parkway. This is a fantastic opportunity for dense, mixed development with a renewed connection to the river instead of a perimeter wall and a vast parking lot.

I’m thrilled about each of them. But already, the anti-everything crowd is organizing. At a recent community meeting I watched as a group shouted down the city planner and engineer as they asserted, based on actual studies, that the area can handle the projected traffic.

I read a letter to the editor in the Star Tribune that claimed grocery stores were not needed in the area and that the area’s traffic was already outrageous and intolerable.

I just walked by giant red signs opposing streetcars on the Riverview corridor on 46th street that homeowners had put up on their fences.

I guess they would prefer the status quo: four lanes of speeding traffic and the constant smell of exhaust fumes. The entrenched homeowners would like to deny people a place to live so that they wouldn’t personally experience more traffic. And the letter writer would deny a grocery store to a federally identified food desert because she doesn’t want to be inconvenienced.

Truly, some people are an awful combination of noisy and selfish. They see no problem with pulling up the ladder behind them. They think, “I got mine, fuck all the rest.”

The problem is, future residents have little voice in the process since they don’t know they might one day live in these neighborhoods. They are not as vocal as the entrenched homeowners who see every development as an infringement on their lives. To add to the hypocrisy, it is residents of single-family, detached homes who make the most car trips on average. I worry that the Ford site redevelopment will end up so watered down in zoning that only wealthy retirees can afford to live there. What if it turns out to be Saint Paul’s first gated retirement community?

I just hope local politicians have the sense to disregard the shrieking or at least take it with a great deal of skepticism.

For New Year’s I stayed with friends in a cabin in the Brainerd Lakes area. It was fantastic. We watched the bird feeders, hiked across the lake with the dog, made a fire in the pit, ate good food, stayed cozy, and celebrated.

Back in the Twin Cities, I did some birding along the trail that originates at the Sibley historic site in Mendota Heights and goes through seven miles of woods and wetlands to the old Cedar Avenue bridge and beyond. This area is part of Fort Snelling but is on the opposite side of the Minnesota River.

It is a great trail. The snow was fresh and powdery, allowing you to reconstruct animal events from the previous hours. The other trail users were almost all fat-bikers. One of them had an akita (dog) bounding along behind him. It looked like a lot of fun.

I was impressed with the hawks and eagles making a living in the snowy valley. I also enjoyed watching flocks of hundreds of robins forage, preen, and yeep, tuk and chirr to call to each other.

In Saint Paul, I once again watched a Cooper’s hawk picking apart a pigeon several feet from my window. It had dragged its prey under a cedar tree.

By the Mississippi bank, I found a reddish deer mouse or white-footed mouse devouring buckthorn berries. It was oblivious to my presence. I suppose they survive thanks to their camouflage and secretive habits and not on their wits alone.

Last week I underwent Lasik surgery. It went great.

While paying beforehand I had a brief frustration with the administrator of my health savings account. They seem to put up as many obstacles as they can to prevent you from spending your own money on your own medical expenses.

Ultimately the only consequence was that I paid a third of the $3000 bill with after-tax money. This is only an annoyance. Two thirds was paid with pre-tax money, which makes a big difference.

The surgery itself went great. I was horizontal, looking up into a lighted machine. Numbing eyedrops were instilled. I focused on a green dot. One eye was patched. My eyelashes were taped back. A flat device was placed on my eyeball. Some sort of cut was made, but all I felt was pressure. My vision smeared to one side and then turned to black with white starlike specks that brightened and then pulsed gently about, like powder suspended on a drop of dark oil.

For four to six seconds a computerized beep sounded during which, I assume, the lens was corrected by laser. A verbal ending message sounded but I am not sure if it was a computerized female voice or that of a technician.

My vision returned and I focused on the green dot, which was now large and blurry. It shrunk back almost to its original size, though it remained blurry.

Then came the other eye. I remained alert for the slightest twinge of pain but there was no pain at all, at any point. I listened for verbal instructions from the doctor and staff but there wasn’t much I had to do or remember to do.

I was driven home by my parents. I kept my eyes closed throughout most of Mr Show, Apocalypse Now, and Tremors. I napped because of the diazepam. I woke up while Colonel Kurtz was telling the story of the snail crawling along the razor. "This is my dream; this is my nightmare. Crawling, slithering, along the edge of a straight razor, and surviving."

Later I got up, continued my eyedrop regimen, and walked to get a coffee.

I really enjoyed my brief walks that day and the rest of the week. I indulged deliberately in the sense of sight, and I will continue to do so. I realized that winter in Minnesota is a good time for this procedure because I can look at the definition and crispness of my clean snowy surroundings (although less so with the recent rain).

I am truly grateful for this technology and for the skilled staff that provided me with sharp vision again.

Included: I trashed $250 in prescription eyewear that became junk overnight.

Tomorrow I go in for Lasik.

I will recline. I will focus on the MEDITATIVE music and GREEN ambient lighting I selected. A flap will be created on my eyeball with a physical blade. The flap will be opened. The laser will correct the single causative focus problem of my vision. I may smell an acrid smoke. The flap will be closed. Then I will sit up and recover as best I can.

Then I will have sharp vision again!

I seek balance. I am sometimes flung between an unquenchable optimism about the future, which makes me suspicious of my own elevated feelings; and an ill-humored desire for withdrawal, solitude and disavowal.

Oddly these polarized moments of clarity and heightening occur in the same context: when I am outside on a hike or a climb or a bike ride. Or sitting on a log by the riverside. Or trudging through snowy trails.

A divided self is not necessarily a problem. It might even have benefits that I can’t specify at the moment. But for my own well-being I’ll seek reconciliation and unity of the psyche.

I’ll make a project of it. I’ll call upon every loved one and liked one and upon the limitless capital of nature to solve this problem. I never do new year’s resolutions, but this seems like a good one for 2017.

Included: the same damn spot

I found out that Harriet Brewing has closed. I was going in to fill a growler and thought maybe the “permanently closed” icon in the info bar on my phone was a mistake or the result of a dirty tactic by a business rival. A quick search showed that their own announcement and the newspaper articles on the closure said they would shut down in January 2017.

But sure enough, when I poked my head in there was the sound of drills drilling and carts crashing around removing everything.

They were at their best as a community gathering place in summer when the grate doors were wide open and the live band was going. Their ethos was kindred to the neighboring Hub Bike Co-op and Gandhi Mahal.

I am sorry to see them go. However, this is not exactly a tragedy because:

• The quality and consistency of their beer was open to debate. A friend told me his bar dropped Harriet from the tap list when they couldn’t maintain consistency. I agreed.

• Each brew had kind of the same syrupy-sweet taste that filled your mouth and nose. Yes, they are Belgian-inspired. But no, they don’t all have to be syrupy.

• The dark and steamy interior went against the trend of bright, industrial spaces that people seek nowadays. I almost expected to step on a mouse or slip in a puddle of water in there in the winter.

A closure that did actually disappoint me was a couple of years ago when Mosaic restaurant across the street from Harriet suddenly closed. They had a great triangular patio with a fire pit, the best bathroom in Minneapolis, and a freckled beauty who served me the best garlic fries I’ve ever had (I think they won an award. For the fries, not for being pretty). I would rather spend an hour in Mosaic’s excellent bathroom than in Harriet.

I think Mosaic might have survived if it was around now, since Minnehaha has been resurfaced and some lethal features of the road have been mitigated. I bet in two years, the whole area will be improved just because of those bike and pedestrian improvements. Yes, this is an instance of tenants being pressured out. But Harriet in turn replaced some other tenant six years ago.

In the meantime I will go to Lake Monster Brewing for their excellent Empty Rowboat IPA and their spacious taproom and huge courtyard with cool giant sculptures. They are also in a transitioning industrial area, are the same distance from me, and will fill any clean growler, unlike certain stiffs who will remain unnamed (Northbound Brewpub).

I never meant to copy and paste internet links on this blog.

In fact today I was going to write about how some observations during a recent nature hike made me reflect on how the ruthless struggle for existence led equally to beauty and horror in living things and how this lent poignancy and meaning to a particular thing I am dealing with and blah blah blah.

But I just laughed so hard that my ribs hurt so here is this link, and it is much more fun than what I had in mind:

https://vimeo.com/channels/staffpicks/193729267

I appreciate that I can still be awed when I learn about science. At a nature center recently I flipped through the first pages of a children’s science book and read a short passage about how viruses are not considered living things but may be descended from a living thing that later became nonliving through evolution.

I have studied biology for many years but this is something I had never thought much about. Reading further online I encountered the following passage:

“They may represent genetic elements that gained the ability to move between cells. They may represent previously free-living organisms that became parasites. They may be the precursors of life as we know it.”

(http://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/the-origins-of-viruses-14398218)

Later I clicked on a blurb about “Planet Nine.” I thought it was more fake news (or hopelessly uninformed journalism) but it was from a reputable site. There may be a ninth planet, much more exciting than Pluto ever was, that is an ice giant orbiting 20 times the distance that Neptune is from the Sun. And its existence would help explain some anomalies that currently pose a problem.

Speculation over this planet, as well as all three viral origin possibilities and their implications, is mind-blowing! These topics have an inherent fascination. But somehow they are drowned out by the churn of the day’s news. Still, when they do break through, they remain absolutely gripping. Sometimes it just takes a children’s book to do it.

Included: Don’t end up like me. Never trust anyone. Read your olive oil label carefully. It may be mostly vegetable oil, and you may be a dupe.

I’ve made no secret of a burning wish to move to Pacific Northwest. For about three years now, I have talked about it casually. I even applied to a few jobs out there but never as part of a concerted search.

I don’t think my destination will be Seattle because the market there is gripped by a true housing crisis. I looked at smaller towns on the coast that have state natural resources jobs, but many of these are seasonal. Rents in Portland are going up but are not at crisis level yet. I could even settle for a suburb such as Hillsboro, or even Vancouver, WA. My job will almost certainly be a quality role in science/health/testing.

Once I begin the transplant effort in earnest, I know I will be successful within two or three months. I might even live in a car for a short time, judging from some extreme things I’ve done in the past to get what I want.

The question is: when to determine to go? When to begin? I have set and then passed by some arbitrary goals such as:

• “Once I have X in savings”
• “Spring of next year”
• “Once I get more experience in my current position”
• “Before another harsh winter happens”

Then I learned of the total solar eclipse of 2017:

https://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/SEgoogle/SEgoogle2001/SE2017Aug21Tgoogle.html

The path of totality passes just south of Portland, Oregon. Hotels are already booked. It will be an astronomical event that I will remember for a lifetime. And let’s be honest, I’d rather not go to Nebraska to view it.

The Total Solar Eclipse of 2017 Aug 21.

Why not let this be my goal for moving west? The alignment of three space bodies is a pretty good marker for this one vital ambition of mine.

 

 

Included: Amazon’s recommendations indicate I must be pretty gay. I kinda want to read “Velociraptor” on the right there…