When I’m out of town for less than a week I tend to just let the mail pile up, but for longer vacations I will turn in the form to have my mail held.  So this month I went to the post office, found the familiar stack of yellow cards, grabbed one, filled it out, and stood in line to hand it over to a postal worker.  He plucked it out of my hand and sneered at me.  “Next time,” he said nastily, “make sure you fill out both sides of the form before getting in line.”  He flipped over the card.  “Oh, you did.”

From time to time I have complained in these pages about how technology took a huge step backward with the demise of my beloved halogen torchières: the fluorescent light from their first-generation replacements was ghastly compared to that wonderfully inviting halogen light, and while the LED lamps that followed were a bit better on this score, using them was still a pain.  Say you were waking up and wanted to turn my last lamp to 1% brightness so that your eyes could adjust.  Not allowed!  The lamp’s dimming function worked like this: you had to touch a capacitive sensor, which would turn the lamp on to 100% brightness, and then hold your finger in place for several seconds, at which point the lamp would grudgingly dim to… 50%.  Anyway, that lamp starting fritzing out, so I got a replacement, and it has improved my quality of life significantly.  It has a knob!  O blessedly intuitive design!  I wake up, I turn the knob a few degrees, and the light creeps up from 0% to 1%.  Turning it further provides more light.  And when I want to turn it off, I don’t have to tap my way through a menu of different “light temperatures” like I did with my last lamp⁠—I twist the knob to the off position, and click, the lamp is off.  The things I used to take for granted!

It’s kind of satisfying to be unable to find something (for instance, my bread knife, or the SD card that normally lives in my camera), only to eventually find it in a strange place (for instance, on a cookie sheet under a cooling rack which was covered by a sheet of parchment paper, or stuffed inside the checkbook that I now use only to pay the rent).  Like, I don’t blame myself for not checking there!

That said, it is less satisfying to be unable to find something only to eventually find it in a stupid place.  I was making some Indian food, and pulled a bag of parathas out of the freezer so I could put one on the griddle.  It was a new bag, so I took a pair of scissors out of the junk drawer and opened up the bag with a quick snip.  After I had eaten my first serving, I was still a little hungry, so I decided to go back for seconds instead of packing away the leftovers.  Good thing, too, because when I opened the freezer to take out the bag of parathas, it was gone.  I looked on every countertop, moving pans around and whatnot, and then I realized what I must have done.  Sure enough: I had taken the scissors out of the junk drawer, snipped open the bag of parathas, put the scissors back in the junk drawer, put a paratha on the griddle, and… put the bag with the remaining frozen parathas in the junk drawer beside the scissors.

Speaking of suboptimal eating experiences, I was surprised at how difficult it was to find an appealing breakfast burrito in Los Angeles.  I have been to dozens (hundreds?) of ta­querias in my lifetime and I know what the base of a burrito is: beans, rice, cheese, salsa.  You can make it super with guacamole and sour cream.  You can add meat if you’re not a vegetarian, or something like calabacitas or a chile relleno if you are.  And to make a breakfast burrito, well, you just use a scrambled egg as the “meat”.  More likely than not you also swap out the rice for roasted potatoes or some variety of hash browns.  But in L.A., it was almost impossible to find a basic vegetarian breakfast burrito.  Either the bacon and/or sausage were mandatory, or the whole thing had been made vegan with egg substitute and “impossible” fake meat, or the fillings had been pared back to the point that what was offered was just a tube of scrambled eggs and hash browns.  None of these breakfast burritos had beans in them.  What kind of monster makes a burrito without beans?  But appar­ently this is the style of the area.  I guess it goes to show that despite growing up in Southern California, I am thor­oughly Nor-Cal these days.  (Though back in Orange County in the 1980s, the standard burritos were the little frozen ones that came in your school lunch.)

On the way back from L.A., we pulled into a rest stop that had a number of vending machines inside an imposing cage⁠—you had to reach through the bars to pay for and retrieve your selected items.  One of the buttons on the soda machine had a crudely handwritten tag that said “CACTUS COOLER”, which was my favorite soda when I was a kid.  Ellie was thirsty and had never tried it before (it’s not avail­able as far north as the Bay Area, let alone Portland), so I decided to shell out the $1.50 (!) for the sake of sharing some nostalgia.  I put in the money, pushed the button, and out popped… something called a “Shasta Twist”.  Apparently some kind of 7‑Up knockoff.  Vexing!  Whoever was respon­sible for that bait and switch should be locked up in that cage along with the vending machines.

As I write this the inflation rate is the highest it’s been since I was a child, and I have encountered a fair amount of sticker shock at the grocery store in recent weeks.  But, judging from the back of this frozen pizza I bought, it seems it’s not just prices that are inflating, but the calendar as well:

I guess the bright side is that since September 31st will never arrive, this pizza will never expire!  (Not really, of course.  I’m sure the quality will have declined significantly by October 33rd or thereabouts.)

I also bought some popsicles, but I ran into the problem I always run into: once I got past the tip, the popsicles tasted like wood.  I’m not a “supertaster”, to answer the question people always ask me when I talk about this, but for some reason I am very sensitive to the taste of whatever vehicle is transporting food to my mouth, whether it be a popsicle stick or a spoon.  I don’t use metal flatware at home, because whatever I’m eating will just taste like metal to me.

Fun find of the month: a little web tool that draws on multiple sources to furnish names for the colors you select.  Since 2004 I have had a fixed monthly rotation of colors for these Calendar articles; according to this tool, here are the colors I selected:

I guess that if I ever end up moving to Australia I might have to make some adjustments…