Still sickly. Now measuring my movements by asking myself, Is it worth it?
This morning I literally thought to myself, Is it worth the energy required to roll my eyes in jest right here?
It was, or so I thought. But, really, I wish I’d saved the energy. Also, I am in day four of having the medicine mouth taste. Everything is shaped by the zinc stuff and the cough drops and the Nyquil and whatever else I’m trying. Food all tastes weird. Mostly like the zinc stuff and the cough drops and the Nyquil and whatever else I’ve been trying. Tomorrow will be better, or this is my new lot in life. One of the two.
Anyway, here’s some snowmelt, runoff we happened upon simply by accident last week in Andorra. Side of the road, into the woods behind a scenic overlook sort of thing. Oh, look, the Americans are in the ditch again, stuff.
Seeing it here, today, makes me realize something very important.
Just as soon as I feel better, I will be ready for my next vacation.
Happy Tuesday from a delightful little part of Europe. We’re high in the mountains, and this is the delightful little view from our delightful little balcony at the ski lodge in Arinsal. You can also see a fair amount of the village below.
If you turn your head to the left a bit, as I did, while you were enjoying your morning tea, as I was, you would see this other delightful little hill.
Everything is delightful, then. So much so, I had more than one cup of tea this morning.
The Yankee, for her part, went skiing. We’re in the Pyrenees. We’re at a ski lodge. Why wouldn’t you go skiing? She hasn’t been on skis in a few decades and was eager to give it a try. I was eager for her to start out on the bunny slopes, which she did. She rented some equipment from one of the 45 rental places in this small town, borrowed my coat, and found her ski legs again. She said she did a couple of runs down the smallest slopes, and then tried a few more challenging routes.
In my mind, she was blazing her way down this mountain.
She came back to our apartment sweaty, smiling, and extremely happy with her first ski adventures in 23 or so years, in New England.
The plan for the day, which saw rain and snow in the forecast, was to stay indoors. Turns out you can’t trust weather forecasts in the high mountains. The weather, aside from some early sunny snow fall mid-morning, was pitch perfect.
We made our way down the mountains into Andorra’s capital, Andorra la Vella, population 23,000.
Come to find out, today is Constitution Day in Andorra. This is one of their four big holidays. (Happy Constitution Day, Andorra!) All of the shopping is closed down, which is fine, that’s not our purpose, but a big part of the local economy. Most of the restaurants and other businesses were closed, too. Apparently everyone went skiing.
We had lunch in a subdued little Italian joint overlooking an empty lot where kids were chasing pigeons and kicking soccer balls. Despite a few minutes of wandering around looking for a place for lunch, it was a lovely mid-day.
Our afternoon plans were to visit Caldea Spa, the largest spa centre in Southern Europe. They have four spas in there, and on Tuesdays and Wednesdays no kids allowed. Overall, it was …
We visited the Inúu spa, which features a “great interior lagoon” with thermal waters (91 degrees) that develop into waterfalls, powerful water jets for massages and bubble beds. You can walk or swim outside, too. And, sure, it’s late winter in the mountains, but the water was warm. Also, the sun, the clean air, the views of the mountains that surround you, and the jacuzzi.
There was also a gym, a “treatments space,” and a relaxation spa, all of which we skipped. We did take part in the “reactivation space,” which offers a “complete set of services that awaken your senses.” There was a sauna, heated walls and chromatic showers at different pressures and temperatures.
We stayed for five hours. It was, as the building promised, ssspaaactacular.
Strictly because it is colorful, this is the underside of the elevated sidewalk going into the spa, which sits in the center of the valley, in the heart of Andorra la Vella.
I don’t know how often I would go to a place like this if it was near me, but I’m sure I’d find a way to add it into some sort of routine. “If anyone needs me,” I said I would say, “I’ll be at my spa.”
It was a wonderful day, a relaxing vacation day. The only problem with Constitution Day was that we had limited meal choices. Since the big city was shut down, we drove back up to Arinsal, where we are staying, because we knew Surf was serving.
Surf is where we had dinner Sunday night, the Argentinian steakhouse.
When you’re in a steakhouse, you should consider a steak which, for whatever reason, neither of us did Sunday. When you’re in an Argentinian steakhouse, you should absolutely order steaks. They were sssteaaakctacular.
I forgot to brag on this sunset from yesterday. My bad, sun. You know that big ball of fusion has been hurt by that oversight all day. And the skyline, poor emotional skyline. I’ll never be able to make it up to the skyline. And my thoughts are also with the remnants of those clouds, wherever they are a day later.
It was one of those sunsets of a fleeting sort. As I left the building I though, Take a picture, forget to post it, and give the clouds and all that some human emotions in a poorly framed joke. But by the time I got to my car, just a block away, and up to the top of the parking deck, that’s what I was left with. But, sun, you made a lovely one yesterday.
Probably today’s, too, though I didn’t have the chance to see it.
After darkness fell we walked over to the IU Auditorium to see the traveling show of Chicago. The old man sitting in front of us, and the younger man sitting behind us each obviously had no knowledge of the play. Their surprise at Ms. Sunshine was delightful.
And the performers were good. But almost everyone on stage looks so young all of a sudden. Indeed, quite a few of the people in this photo are making their national touring debut.
The audio guy had some trouble, but of the sort you’ll forget in a few days. Billy Flynn and Mama Morton and Amos and Roxie and all the rest pressed through and gave us a nice version of the musical. I think this is my third time seeing it.
I wonder which song will be stuck in my head for weeks this time.
Remember those flowers that I noted, last Wednesday, as a trick of winter?
Almost all of them have unwrapped themselves now. It’s quite a site, even at night.
Forty-five days until the bike races and the official arrival of spring, but it is starting to feel as though we’re closer than that.
It is time, once again, for the Tuesday feature that allows me to close some tabs on my browser. Some things are took good to X out of and see them disappear forever. Much better for me to memorialize them here, on the off-chance that one day they’ll come to mind, and I’ll do a good keyword search, find a particular thing, and hope the original link is still active.
It isn’t a long shot, but if the first real step is my coming up with the text from memory it might take two or three ties to find the right page.
But I digress.
I’m a sucker for all of these job interview type pieces you see on CNBC and Forbes and the like. The titles are outstanding click bait — case studies, almost — but every now and then you’ll find something good in the body of the piece.
Nailing a job interview isn’t just about listing skills and experience directly from your resume. You want to paint a picture of your accomplishments through concrete, detailed examples.
To do that successfully, you must know how to communicate effectively. As a career coach who has helped hundreds of people land six-figure jobs, I’ve found that there are certain words that will get the interviewer to pay attention.
Here are five job interview phrases that will make companies want to hire you on the spot.
I started my 12-year career at Google in 2006, where I held positions as chief of staff and executive business partner. Before that, I worked at Amazon as an executive business partner to Jeff Bezos.
After spending so much time with some of the world’s most successful and influential leaders, I learned what to look for in new candidates. In fact, Bezos hired me on the spot after my first interview with him in 2002.
Based on the hundreds of interviews I’ve conducted throughout my decades-long career, here are my top tips on how to instantly impress a hiring manager during the job interview.
See what I mean about those titles? SEO bait and plenty of optimistic gold. They’re quite well done. Speaking of …
Put up your hand if you’ve ever stared out your office window, daydreaming about launching one of your imaginative inventions, being your own boss, and getting very rich in the process.
If your hand is firmly raised, then listen up: The fantasy—which you’d be forgiven for thinking is restricted to those in Silicon Valley or movies—is not entirely unrealistic.
London-based Steph Douglas did exactly that when in 2014 she left her job as a branding marketer for EDF Energy to devote herself full-time to …
It’s an online gift company. You can order custom-made care packages and the like.
People have long stoked an urban-versus-rural rivalry, with vastly different cultures and surroundings. But a burgeoning movement—with accompanying field of science—is eroding this divide, bringing more of the country into the city. It’s called rurbanization, and it promises to provide more locally grown food, beautify the built environment, and even reduce temperatures during heat waves.
And, with that, I am now down to 28 open tabs in my phone’s browser.
I don’t remember how I got the next CD to appear in the Re-Listening project. I don’t even have the liner notes. But I never had those in this case, and I’m sure that’s part of the story, which I’ve forgotten entirely. I assume someone gave it to me, probably a radio station. “Fear” was released in 1991, but the last CD we played was from the first half of the 1997, and this one got added to my collection sometime soon thereafter.
Anyway, this is the first Toad the Wet Sprocket CD I owned, and the only one until the last year or two. “Walk on the Ocean” and “All I Want” seemed to be everywhere on everything. Both made it into the top 20. And, seriously, until looking through Toad’s entire discography just now, I thought they’d been put on multiple records for some reason. They released those and three other songs from “Fear” as singles. Eventually, in 1994, this record went platinum, having peaked at #49 on Billboard’s Top 200 Albums.
Of the deep cuts, I always enjoy the “Nightingale Song.”
Sonically, this is an acoustically perfect alt rock song.
The very next track ups the ante.
And, remembering that this was recorded in 1991, they were bringing back the organ before bringing back the organ was cool.
Or, if you want some of the modern live experience, we saw Toad twice in 2022. Somehow I’d always managed to miss their live shows, to my chagrin. They’re now adding dates for this summer, but none yet so close that we’ll be able to see them. At least not yet.
I’d go back to see a bit more of that “confident, laid back urgency,” that the band has been able to mine for decades now. If this was the summer of 1997 for me, this was my first apartment, and I was desperately trying to personify my own version of confident, laid back urgency — failing miserably at that, no doubt. It was that, going to class and filling time while everyone else was out of town. This record, and the next one we’ll hear from on the Re-Listening project, became big, big parts of filling that time.
He said in early March, not at all thinking about the summer ahead.
I’m in the middle of the three longest days of the week. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. Thursday and Friday will be postscript and epilogue. But yesterday was 10 hours, today was 10 hours and tomorrow is 12 hours. Tonight, tonight I had a bowl of soup for dinner at 9:30.
It isn’t the hardest work in the world, or overly demanding, but the hours do accumulate.
Also, despite my best efforts, no amazing anecdote emerged from the day. No outlandish story, discovery or incredible sequence of events fell into my lap. No astounding coincidence, tale with a surely fabricated punchline or other incredible thing happened. It was a Tuesday, he said, grateful that he did all of the ironing on Monday.
Some things from Mastodon, which is where all the cool kids are now that Twitter is sliding int its news inedible pot of broth.
Saw this on campus today and picked one up.
It’s a getting-on-our-feet first issue, 10 pages. Heavy on design, light on copy, but rich in information.
You wonder about the practical feasibility of research like this. It seems like we should have this and a few verifying elements of research and then, ya know, implement it.
But the corporate bosses don’t read studies like that, I’d bet.
Every time you turn around archeology is discovering a new not-so-small discovery that resets our understanding of what we understand. It says a lot about what we don’t yet understand, and all of the things there are to learn.
If you click through the link, and wait out the preroll ad, there’s a fantastic NPR package here.
I can’t go all the way to Charlottesville for a photo exhibit, but if I was at the University of Virginia, I would definitely spend some time with those displays.
It is once again time to clean up the browser a bit. These are some tabs I’ve been holding on to for … quite a while, as it turns out. Too good to close and never be found again — and bookmarks being a different, quixotic enterprise altogether, I guess — I’m collecting them here.
This one is dated 2021. Is it possible I’ve had it opened for that long?
Having these quick tests in your back pocket helps you make smarter business decisions. Why? Because the more we think about something, the more our minds will try to play tricks on us. We second-guess, we let doubt and fear creep in, we hesitate, we overthink. The purpose of the five tests below is to get past all of that and get back to the truth that you’ve known deep down all along.
This is especially true regarding two of the most important decisions that managers at my company, Compass, make: When to hire someone, and when to pass on them.
All of those will strike you as general, but not incorrect.
I stumbled upon this sometime early last year and thought, “Clearly anyone can do this.”
I am a chocolate chunk girl all the way because they melt into the cookie so much better. In contrast, chocolate chips hold their chip shape even after they are baked due to their waxy coating. I also love the size variation that the chunks give. This recipe also doesn’t make you choose between milk chocolate or dark chocolate because it has both! The inner kid in me loves milk chocolate way too much to leave it out, and I think the sweetness balances out the bitterness from the dark chocolate perfectly. Always use good-quality chocolate — especially when it is the star ingredient.
This recipe yields a slightly thin cookie with the crispiest golden edges and a gooey center — just how a chocolate chip cookie should be! It calls for mostly all-purpose flour, with a touch of buckwheat flour. This addition adds a delicate texture and a hint of nuttiness. Lastly, a finish of flaky salt on top adds the perfect amount of crunch. Flaked salt just makes everything better — what can I say?
Say “Pass the cookies, please!”
Because of an impulsive decision to close some shopping sites, a decision no doubt brought on by a distinct lack of cookies available as of this writing, I am now down to just 30 tabs on my phone’s browser.
Today we also return to the Re-Listening project, which is where I’m working my way through all of my CDs, in order of acquisition. Not reviews, but sometimes memories, and most often an excuse to revisit music — most of it great!
This installment brings us to the late spring or early summer of 1997. I bought my second Indigo Girls CD. The first was the double-live “1200 Curfews,” this was a studio record, and “Shaming of the Sun” solidified my love for the band. I saw them that May and, thanks to the web, I can see the setlist.
Thin Line
Power of Two
Don’t Give That Girl a Gun
It’s Alright
Shed Your Skin
Get Out the Map
Reunion
Mystery
Scooter Boys
Everything in Its Own Time
Shame on You
Caramia
Chickenman
Southland in the Springtime
Cut It Out
Galileo
Chiapas Bound
Here I Am
Closer to Fine
Nine of those songs are on this record. I wish I could remember if I’d already bought it by then. Probably so. (I also saw them the next year, in Atlanta. I’ve seen the Indigo Girls more than anyone else, I imagine, and almost always as a two-piece.) It became their highest-charting album, at least in the United States. It hit number 7 on the Billboard 200.
The most important memories from this record would come still a decade later. The first two tracks are songs The Yankee and I sang together on a long car ride.
This is important because I don’t really sing in front of people, or sing with people outside of church. But it had been a good week and the sun was bright and the road was long and we were actually using an actual map.
Sometime later she made me a mix CD and that song is on there, too. We’ve also seen the Indigo Girls together twice, in Atlanta and Indianapolis. But for Covid, we would have seen them in Nashville too, just to round out the map a bit more.
The still-intriguing thing about this record is that it still fits at any time. Also, there’s a lot of message music on here. Protests and the like have never especially appealed to me, or sent me away, but the messaging is obvious, even to me. When I first got this I was still mostly taken by Emily Saliers’ incredible writing, even as I was starting to pay more attention to Amy Ray’s background vocals.
It was the next record when I would really learn to dive into everything Ray did. They compliment one another so well, of course. At the time, what Saliers wrote, the way she played, it all felt so true and intently earnest. And sometimes brooding and mysterious.
I just wasn’t hearing Ray yet, which seems hilarious in retrospect. (I have her entire catalog now, and I’ll ramble on and on about it in future installments, I’m sure of it.)
Those harmonies!
That’s why you sing along with a pretty girl, even if you’re not in the habit of making such a small thing about yourself available.
Got up this morning in time to ride my bike. I got in 18 miles and about 1,500 feet of climbing. That makes four consecutive days of riding, and the rest of today, and tomorrow, and Thursday, as rest days. So tomorrow and Thursday are rest days. Little morning rides like that feel, later in the day, like they didn’t even happen.
The 2023 Zwift route tracker: 73 routes down, 51 to go. And, this weekend, three big climbs.
Later in the day, I taught someone had to tie a tie. Then he did it on the first try. Looked good, too. I’m not entirely convinced he wasn’t beginning some elaborate ploy, but if not, it was a big part of my contribution to the day.
Let’s close some tabs! These are things sitting on my phone. Some of them are too good or useful to X and forget. So we’re memorializing a few here each week. PSA: Do your browser a favor, and choose good tabs.
I don’t need this one anymore, because we had to replace some baking sheets. Some things are beyond cleaning, some things just need to be replaced. Marie Kondo speechs are being delivered. But maybe you’re not there. Maybe you’re here. How to clean a baking sheet in 3 easy steps:
Although cleaning a baking tray seems like it requires plenty of elbow-grease, it’s not that hard to do. All you need are a few household items that you’ll find in your kitchen, that will save you time and effort of scrubbing. Best of all, you don’t even need to spend a fortune on expensive cleaning products.
Anyway, that’s an old, ollllld tab. This one I found at the beginning of this month.
There’s something to this sort of material I’m profoundly interested in. I haven’t been able to understand, yet, precisely what I’m after, but it is somewhere at the intersection of culture and history and tradition of food and foodstuffs. This semi-profile dips into some of that.
“When you say her name in our community, all this love comes up — a standing ovation every time, from all the young’uns and friends who sit at her feet, whom she has blessed,” said Bonnetta Adeeb, of Ujamaa Seeds. Ms. Wallace has advised Ujamaa, a collective of Black and Indigenous growers focusing on culturally relevant seed, which just introduced its second online catalog.
Witnessing this traction is joyful for Ms. Wallace, and even a little surprising, in the best way — particularly set against the backdrop of the last century’s sharp decline in Black-owned American farms, to fewer than 1 percent today.
“The seed world is a particularly white aspect of the sustainable agriculture movement,” she said. “Where Black people were coming in at all to farming was in CSAs and that aspect of the food system — not to grow seed.”
[…]
In the way that the South’s population has evolved, so has the Southern Exposure seed list. Alongside Doe Hill golden sweet bell pepper, a pre-1900 Virginia family heirloom, is Pimiento Lago Agrio, an Ecuadorean sweet pepper with two-inch, pumpkin-shaped fruits. An Acorn Community member whose mother is from Latin America volunteered with Ecuadorean seed-saver groups, forging the connection.
“We realized that, just like the European immigrants spread their versions of different vegetables around, that the current immigrants have communities and varieties,” Ms. Wallace said. “We’re trying to make that a part of the web of American heirlooms we offer.”
I’ll figure out what it is I’m after one day. Precisely what(ever) it is, I bet Ms. Wallace has known for quite some time.
These are lovely. But when I see things like 11 of the most remote homes in the world I wonder, ‘How expensive is it to ship these materials — and get whatever machinery is required — in and out of there?’
If you’ve ever had the—completely reasonable—desire to get away from it all, perhaps the more appropriate retreat is one of the world’s many remote homes. Spread throughout the globe, these homes are often accompanied with views of near untouched nature. What’s more, isolated properties make it easy to disconnect from the distractions of everyday life while embracing simplicity and solitude. Below, AD rounds up some of the most stunning examples of remote homes, from small villages set atop mountains to islands with just one home on them. These 11 far-flung abodes prove that sometimes the most beautiful thing one can experience is the feeling of truly being alone.
Anyway, that’s a terrific collection of photographs. And that’s enough tab closing for one day. Wouldn’t want to get below 40 tabs on my phone’s browser. (I have 43 tabs still open.)
Two consecutive days of the Re-Listening project? Why, yes, you see, I had to drive to campus — we live 4.5 miles away — on Sunday and that’s somehow another fortnight in the car. What it really means is that between Friday and this morning, I worked through two CDs, and started a third. Time flies when you’re stuck at every single red light. And that’s fine, because it allows us to magically transport to, let’s say April 1996 or soon thereafter, when the Dave Matthews Band released “Crash.” Just last week we touched on the debut Under the Table and Dreaming. They sold six million copies of that, but this sophomore effort was even bigger. They moved seven million units by the end of the decade, just about the time that sales get all blurry and don’t we need a more modern metric anyway?
The record went to number two on the Billboard 200. Debuted there, behind Hootie and next bested by The Fugees (which is coming up for us soon) and it stayed on the chart for two years. They released five singles over the next 11 months. All of them charted, two — “Too Much and “Crash Into Me” — climbed into the top 10.
Here’s a jam of #41. It’s one of my god-sister-in-law’s (just go with the nomenclature) favorite songs.
That’s a 21 minute performance from 2009, and I thank you for sticking around. The album version has a modest run time of 6:39. The original song was somewhere in-between. There is, I think, an awful lot of jam compositions on this record and I would like to thank the entire music industry for hearing this, seeing the sales, and resisting the urge to remake this in countless ways for the next eight years.
Here’s the two-man performance of “Let You Down” with Tim Reynolds. (Their duo-live show will come up in a later installment of the Re-Listening project.)
We played this at our place, a lot. I’m not sure if I liked this more, or my roommate did. Maybe Charlie just tolerated it, but I have great memories of the sun coming through the pines and the blinds, listening to this on his stereo or mine, grilling out, hosting friends, having a ball.
It would have been midway through the spring quarter. We’d just had spring break, which was kind of a farce, but everything else was clicking into place nicely. I was broke, but tuition was still (comparatively) affordable. I was hanging out with a minor superstar and I knew it. One of the few things I did know, actually. It was a great time. And that’s a great gift of time. Left to think about it, you can come up with the difficulties of a time long past. But it is, somehow, a bit easier to blur some of those out. And you get to choose! I’m choosing the carefree moods of that spring. This record was a big, big part of the soundtrack. I can smile on that the rest of the night. I might, even!
Up next in the Re-Listening project, probably Thursday, more overly polished rock ‘n’ roll with no particularly overwhelming impressions.
