Food, ceilings, Stanford lectures

[flexagon]

The evolution of Friday night dinners

• 3/13: Takeout from our usual Friday night restaurant
• 3/20: Takeout from another burger joint because the usual place closed; much less good
• 3/27: Burgers at home with English muffins and bacon (attempt to recreate usual restaurant) and hash browns.
• 4/3: Burgers at home with English muffins and frozen sweet-potato fries
• 4/10: Burgers at home with homemade buns and frozen sweet-potato fries
• 4/17: Burgers at home with homemade buns and fries from scratch.

Food's been somewhat less hellish at last. I started eating amaranth for breakfast after running out of steel-cut oats and it's a pleasant little seed. And I figured out that fresh food that's spoiling and thus forcing me to eat it in a hurry is the cause of a lot of my cooking/food distress. I can get ahead of that in a lot of cases with partial meal prep and/or freezing leftovers. Right now I'm relaxed because most of the fresh food is either pre-chopped and frozen, or isn't mine (the bananas are the bug's problem). Having a chest freezer might be nice right about now, but we're doing OK and this is really a good mystery to have solved.

The ceiling, Michaelangelo, the ceiling

As these 1600 square feet become my whole world, I'm finding more ways to use them. And one thing I'm noticing is the sheer three-dimensionality of the thing. It's really 14,400 cubic feet. I've been pleasantly surprised by how the projector and projector screen that we set up in the living room can transform the space into a nice theater and then go away again without cluttering the room visually; ditto for the curtain I hung up around my work-at-home area to give myself a nice background for video calls (and also create a tiny little "office" for me). So I'm wondering now if "stuff that comes down from the ceiling" is a massively under-utilized opportunity in my home.

I've bought hardware to hang gymnastics rings from the office ceiling (though finding a joist might be an issue, we'll manage, and I will eventually loooove to be able to hang full-length and do skin-the-cats), and am looking into replacing my curtain with a drop-down photography background that rolls up nicely, instead of my having to tuck a big fabric thing awkwardly to the bookshelf with a C-clamp when I want it out of the way. Although this feels like a dumb question, what else do people do with ceilings and walls?

Fortress of Solitude

Watching others on Instagram, I've been surprised at how many people have pretty significant workout setups at home. A lot of people -- and to be fair, I follow a lot of pros and serious hobbyists -- are on lockdown/quarantine with a big old frame they can hang from, many with rings or stall bars. Or poles installed at home. Or handbalancing canes. In some cases they live with their primary acro partner (the ultimate equipment) and haven't had to slow down or change their training much at all. And I wonder, as I begrudgingly buy more and more stuff for home, if I've been missing out on a really potent way to make regular exercise easier. Workouts at home seem to work for a lot of people. They never did for me before, but I'm open to growth here. Have to be! Because I still have goals, dammit.

Education

Shout-out to Robert Sapolsky's lectures on human behavioral biology, delivered at Stanford, available for free on YouTube. I watched his lecture on the biological underpinnings of religiosity a while ago and now, housebound, decided to start over from the beginning. He's a really fun lecturer, at least in the context of having long workouts and a lot of housework to do. His book Behave has also been recommended to me and he's done at least one TED talk, so there are shorter ways to get a dose of him if you're interested but not that interested.

Comments

[triesticity]

Glad to hear things have been feeling better for you, foodwise - same here, though I had to throw out some celery the other day, but it was food we didn't actually plan on having (Amazon delivery mix-up) so I don't feel too bad about it. And mmm, burgers, I don't even know when I last had one that wasn't a veggie burger of some kind - it might have been when we were on vacation in Charleston in the beginning of March. Maybe at some point I'll get ingredients for making burgers at home - I did get ground beef twice but both times we had it with rice and beans.

[flexagon]

I'm about to make rice and beans (Jamaican style). What do you do there with ground beef, just brown it and mix it in?

We've made chili con carne several times now, which is our other ground-meat go-to.

[triesticity]

I use the NY Times Cooking "no-recipe recipe" for rice + beans + ground beef, which is: Cook rice. As it's cooking: cook a diced onion in oil, add a few cloves of minced garlic + ground beef. Brown the beef, then season it (cumin, salt, pepper). Add half a cup of orange juice and let it cook down a bit, until beef is cooked through, then add drained beans and heat until they're warmed through. Serve with the rice.

[flexagon]

Orange juice! All right, thank you. I can see that lending a bit of an Asian flavor to the whole thing, and maybe I'll try it sometime.

[randysmith]

From what I've heard, _Behave_ is not a shorter way to do *anything* :-}. But thank you very much for the links. Glad to hear you're (metaphorically) hanging in there, and hope you manage to find a way to do it literally too :-}.

[flexagon]

Oh? I bet it's shorter than 25 lectures that are each about 80 minutes long.

Thanks for the well-wishes; as they say, we must all hang together or assuredly we will all hang separately.

[coraline]

i love the idea of expanding into the less-used parts of our spaces... I just wish I had something that I felt safe (very slowly and with no dynamic load) inverting on. *sigh*

[flexagon]

Me too (and I'm not even an aerialist). Between our local coach's posts on Facebook and, well, our local coach's comments on Facebook, and us being on the 3rd floor with access to the attic, the bug now wants me to use through bolts to hang up the rings I bought. Which makes me sulky because it means I can't install them TOMORROW when they come in the mail, but is I suppose safer. Somewhat.

To be honest, part of me doesn't get the kerfluffle... I'm a partner acrobat, which means I'm used to inverting on (or under) "equipment" that has no safety rating at all. But let me invert from a piece of wood and suddenly everyone loses their minds.

As for your place, given that you have at least SOME access to the whole house, is there no place you can do through-bolts or go all the way around a beam? Top floor, basement, a stairwell?

It strikes me that with a bit more effort and ceiling damage, maybe I could go all the way around a beam instead of through, too.