More News and Updates

1. We’re in something of a Swedish lull as our friends have gone off for a few days to visit with their youngest as she finishes up her foreign exchange year. They’ll come back next week for a few more days and at some point I’ll have a whole post about our visit. It has been a lovely time, which has been sorely needed of late.

2. While I’m on the “foreshadowing future posts” theme, at some point I will have managed to tamp down the incandescent rage that every intelligent American with morals feels at the recent right-wing extremism of the Dobbs decision that the Republican Party’s Judicial Agenda Machine dropped on us like a turd in a swimming pool, and perhaps at that point I will be able to write something about it without attracting visits from humorless men in black suits. This may take a while. All I will say for the moment is that everyone who finds any redeeming qualities at all in that soulless and actively evil decision should fuck off immediately, and when they have done so they can fuck off another time, and then they can keep fucking off until they have fucked all the way around back to here. And then they can fuck off again.

3. And that was just the most evil (a word I employ with no hyperbole whatsoever) of the decisions handed down last week. There were several others that would have been headline news otherwise, notably the one that said the federal government should just let the planet burn in order to increase corporate profits. The road to Fascism is paved with people telling me to stop overreacting, but – as above – those people can also fuck off.

4. I’m also not going to discuss the recent January 6 Committee Hearings at the moment, for much the same reasons, though I will say that there is now more than enough evidence already in the public domain to warrant extreme judicial measures against those responsible for that failed coup attempt, and that I will celebrate in a thoroughly unseemly and deplorable manner when those measures happen.

5. On a happier “future posts” note, we had Oliver’s graduation party and it went well. I don’t have the bandwidth for full-sized posts at the moment, but they will happen soon. So many promised posts!

6. We have a new oven, which has to count for something in the grand scheme of things, right? Our old one finally died about two weeks ago, though bits of it still worked. The range worked, as did the broiler, but the oven part was a no go. We had our repair guy look at it in May and he told us that they don’t make that part anymore (which is not surprising in a 26-year-old oven) and that if we wanted it repaired he could send it to Wyoming to the last place in America where such things are repaired and they’d take a month and send it back and by that point we might as well get a new oven, so the next time it died we should just skip the middle steps and get the new oven. I had hoped that it would last the summer, but no dice. So Kim and I went to a nearby Super Mega Hardware & Appliance Emporium and after some exploration pointed at the one we wanted, and two weeks and multiple installation visits later it is here and functional. It’s sleek and shiny and everything gets hot when you ask it to get hot and if it lasts as long as the previous one it will last a long time.

7. The old one was a housewarming gift from my parents when we moved into this place, though, and I will miss it even if it was indeed time for it to go.

8. On the topic of ovens, we did finally figure out how to get the pizza oven to work properly and it turns out that it makes really great pizzas. The keys are to a) start the fire at least 45 minutes prior to any baking so the oven part actually gets to 650-700F and the middle slab gets hot enough, b) make the oven part smaller by making the sides a double-thick layer of bricks on their sides rather than a layer of two bricks stacked on top of each other, and c) put a slab stone at the bottom to help radiate heat rather than just building it on the dirt. Once you’ve got all that it only takes about 3-5 minutes per pizza and they are seriously wonderful.

9. Another thing that might help in the future will be either to move the oven back a bit from the wood planks that hold up the former raised-bed garden where I built it, or to line the oven-facing side of those planks with stone slabs to absorb the heat. As things stand now, those planks have a disconcerting tendency to catch fire. Despite the fact that I am a former firefighter and do a pretty thorough job of hosing the oven down when we’re done with it, we have had rekindles as late as the following morning. On the one hand, there’s nowhere for that to go so the worst-case is that the planks give way and the former raised-bed garden subsides to no-longer-raised status. On the other hand, well, that’s suboptimal at best. It’s always something.

10. Just in case people have forgotten, Kyiv still stands.