A Week in the Life: November 1, 2019

Happy Halloween! I acknowledge Halloween is technically over, but it’s still close enough. It has been extra spooky here and for all the wrong reasons. A cold hit me last Friday and I was sick all weekend, which was not great, but I’d rather be sick before vacation than during, so I accept it. The noise our fridge was making escalated, so we declared food bankruptcy, cleaned it out, and turned it off for two days. We had thought something needed to defrost, but it seems the culprit was the water pipe vibrating noisily against the back of the fridge. I’m glad it’s fine and not expensive to fix, but damn if that isn’t annoying. Finally, the big news: our shower is done! The contractors finished on Tuesday. When I took a shower on Tuesday night, the water couldn’t drain fast enough to keep up with the flow. When we turned the shower off, water kept trickling out. We stopped it (and by “stopped” I mean, brought it down to a slow drip) by turning off water to the whole house. Fortunately, we got them to come fix it the next day. It wasn’t draining because the amateur who laid the floor neglected to cut a hole for the drain in a sheet of paper. The faucet wouldn’t stop because of some tiny wire. To which I say: what the hell. Everything is fine now and I hope our house drama is ended because my blood pressure can’t take much more.

We are getting ready for our Peru trip! We leave next Thursday so I may not write next week unless I’m feeling extra motivated and blog a day early. When we return, I’ll write a special Peru Trip Edition of the weekly update, hopefully with lots of great photos!

This week was stressful and most of my time was spent being fucking stressed. So the blog this week doesn’t exactly follow my normal sections.

Reading

I finished reading Archaeology from Space: How the Future Shapes Our Past by Sarah Parcak. This book talks about the field of space archeology, which is not doing archaeology in space but using satellite imaging to identify sites and looting in remote areas. Parcak is an Egyptologist, which of course got my attention because that was one of my early career objectives (no, really. I took a year’s worth of hieroglyphics courses as a college freshman), but also because her style is highly accessible for a subject that is unfamiliar for most. What was really cool about this to me is Parcak’s description of her archaeology crowdsourcing project, GlobalXplorer. Anyone can join GlobalXplorer and help identify sites that have potentially been looted. The site gives you a short training on what looting normally looks like, and the user looks at images and says, yes this looks like looting or no looting here. If an image receives a certain number of positive responses, an expert reviews it. GlobalXplorer is now only working to identify sites in Peru and they have found a number of looted areas plus some new archaeological sites because regular, non-experts were able to help. So cool!

Food

I basically only made bread this week because it doesn’t require much in the way of refrigeration. For Halloween I made a “bread-o-lantern,” a round loaf scored with a jack-o-lantern face because that’s how I …. roll (lol bread jokes). I tried a rye loaf for the first time over the weekend. I told Kirk I would make a bread for his dad’s birthday and started out by trying the golden semolina “torpedo” from The Bread Bible. About halfway through I realized I may have used true semolina flour instead of the durum wheat (also called semolina) the recipe called for. Kirk told me his dad would really love a rye bread anyway so I decided to try it. The results were very tasty and I’m probably going it add it to my regular repertoire. Maybe I’ll even improve my bread scoring art (thanks for the inspiration, Great British Baking Show).

Aside from bread, I had a bizarre hankering for wedge salad so we made some of that too. Although I have eaten wedge salad, I had never before made it—not that much skill is required. I think I was craving low-effort vegetables after the fridge clean-out efforts.

• 

• 

• 

• 

Knitting and Crafts

I am making progress on the third (and final?) hooded caplet. I’m hoping to finish it before we leave on our trip, mostly because I want something a little smaller for plane knitting. I like how the yarn is coming together. I couldn’t picture it when I bought the yarn, but now that I’ve got it going, it looks really cool.

Finally, here are some cats for your nerves. I let the cats back into the master bathroom for the first time in weeks after thoroughly cleaning it and Huey seemed very happy to be reunited.

• 

• 

•