This month Ellie and I went to New Mexico⁠—my first visit there in over ten years.  You know you’ve picked a subopti­mal time to visit when you look at a local newspaper to see what the weather forecast looks like and find that the answer is “remorseless, unceasing winds”.

That forecast was pretty accurate, by the way.  Forget about the pandemic⁠—when we tried walking around Santa Fe without masks on, within a couple of minutes we were crunching mouthfuls of desert sand between our teeth.

The chile was pretty bland this visit, sad to say.  I really do need to start timing these trips for August or September.  Still, even off season, New Mexican food is pretty addictive, and with the Green Chile Kitchen having closed down and left the Bay Area bereft of New Mexican restaurants, I deci­ded it was finally time to learn to cook it myself.  Results have been mixed so far: my flat enchiladas are sensational if I do say so myself, but I’m still getting the hang of sopai­pillas.  I’ve made one perfect one and a lot of “almost”s.  If the perfect one were the most recent one I would be feeling pretty optimistic.  It was not.

As for Portland: while I waited for the train, a guy walking across the opposite platform was bellowing “FUCK YOU! YOU SON OF A BITCH! I HATE YOU! I’LL FUCK YOU IN HELL! JESUS CHRIST, UP THE ASS! FUCK YOU! YOU SON OF A BITCH! I HATE YOU! I’LL FUCK YOU IN HELL!” at nobody in particular.  Pretty standard fare in the modern American city.  The reason I mention it is that he had a dog on a pretty expensive-looking harness trotting ahead of him.  I couldn’t help but wonder what the dog thought of this tirade.  Did the dog find it alarming, or did it think, “Yep, that’s the sound that humans make, all right”?

Courtesy of Ellie, a couple of tales of preschool life.  Dealing with children:

Ellie: “There is a stink bug right there, and we are not going to touch it because we don’t want it to get scared and spray us.”

Child: “Oh. Can I yell at it?”

Dealing with co-workers:

Ellie: “I have to prep for art this morning but I cannot, because [another teacher] texted me to ask if I could do dropoffs”

Ellie: “The reason is that she went to get eyelash exten­sions and then got chemical burns on her eyes, so she doesn’t want parents to see her”

Youtube won’t let me embed this, but what on earth is with the dance the crowd does from about 00:15 to 01:00 in this video?  I mean, if these people were dancing to Soft Cell in 1981 I wouldn’t bat an eye.  But this is from 1964.  Apparently I’ve had the wrong idea about 1964 for some time now!

Found in a manual for some audio equipment I recently purchased:

Looks like either Greg has a good sense of humor or Troy managed to slip one in there.

I got an email from the tutoring company I work for saying that all employees had to do an online training about cyber­security.  So, an hour or so watching video clips about unfor­tunate saps who fell for phishing scams and put their own and the company’s computers at risk, followed by a bunch of statements we had to sign off on affirming that we would never ever click on any strange links we found in emails, even if they seemed to be coming from the corporate higher-ups.

A few days later we all got an email from the corporate higher-ups saying that the company was changing its background check service and that we needed to click a link to some strange web site and provide our signatures.

A few days after that we all got an email from the corporate higher-ups asking, “Why isn’t anyone clicking on the link??”