Wednesday, July 3 2019

Dear Journal,

It's a beautiful morning today - the kind of morning where it's so bright outside, it almost feels like you're being beckoned out of bed to go make coffee and get going. Yesterday's dumplings turned out really good, and I just checked them a minute ago, despite cooling down in the fridge, it looks like for the most part they didn't glob up into one giant dumpling. Making the dumplings also turned out to be a fantastic and fulfilling two person job, and it's fun to see how good you can get at rolling the little dough circles flat, or crimping them together over the filling. I think those are going to be really tasty this evening. I was planning on serving them cold right out of the cooler with a bit of soy sauce mixed with rice vinegar.

As an aside, I'm really enjoying the challenge of making cooler friendly vegetarian recipes. It's really pushing me to try things I normally wouldn't, and plus it's a great excuse to pig out on Wednesday during lunch, knowing I'm getting a healthy home cooked vegetarian dinner. But let's be honest, we both know that the second I get home, I extend the excuse and permit myself to wolf down a few leftovers from the night before. And right now there's a single taco from taco bell with my name on it.

Work was a real bummer yesterday. I spent all day trying to get something to work, and it's sill not working. I do my best to uphold my personal belief that any programming language will work and you should just keep the programming language tribalism to yourself, but that being said, I just don't understand the point of 80% of the mechanisms in ruby. All the needless object oriented behavior and stupid syntax sugar on everything just make it so painful to work with. I'm making a point to just shut up about it and get it done, because I should know how to do this stuff. And let's be honest, I've had to do much worse.

Now I'm staring out the window trying to think of the worst programming I've ever had to do, and I caught myself and decided I'd rather be in a positive place. Deep breaths. Positive thoughts.

The only thing that matters is cooking, anyway. Marissa and I sat down the other day and made a game plan, a menu, and a grocery list. Despite being on a holiday weekend, the guest list for Rodney's party is filling up! I think it will be a little more intimate this year, but I'm expecting a handful of neighbors will swing by.

So today, I'm working from home. Then we're all going to walk over to glass nickel for lunch and a beer. Then this evening, there's a special concert on the square in which - word on the street - they're going to be firing off a cannon during the 1812 overture. I think it's going to be a good day.