Syllabus #226

There was a Connections this past week that was plucked from my very own brain, it seems.  Although, I was utterly floored when I deduced that Fresh Air was a red herring and was not among the podcasts.

This morning I am currently, as I type this, experimenting with an Instant Pot that was rehomed to us in August.  It has been gathering dust on the kitchen floor because this dumb house lacks adequate storage and I am a slob.  I vowed that if we didn't use it by Thanksgiving, I would take it to Goodwill.  I found myself with just over a pound of small, past-their-prime apples languishing in the fridge, leftover from a recipe, and decided to kill two birds with one stone by possibly blowing up my house and using the IP to make a very small batch of apple butter.  There are 7 out of 15 minutes of high pressure cooking remaining, and I haven't been coated in shrapnel yet, so I think we might be in the clear.  

Will try to remember to report back next week on the quality of the apple butter, if I'm not in the burn unit.

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I thought we were done with this pile of equine doodoo that is changing our clocks.  Now it gets dark at like 2:30 pm.  Not really but it sure feels that way and even though it has also been weirdly warm, I just want to crawl under a weighted blanket with a loaf of warm, buttered bread and wake up in mid-April, covered in crumbs, blinking my sleep-crusted eyes at the glorious sight of trees just beginning to leaf out.  Like, the AUDACITY of humans to be like, hey, you know what we should do twice a year?  TIME TRAVEL.  And everyone except Arizona is like, great, let's do it.

Analog Reading:

Reluctantly finished Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver.  What an engaging, compelling, humane portrait of the rural South, poverty, and the effects of the opioid crisis.  The ending was hard-earned and highly satisfying.

Now I'm reading Outlive:  The science and art of longevity by Peter Attia.  I can't remember where I read a review of this book, but it sounded interesting.  I'm not sure about it yet.  A lot of books of this ilk tend to be pure quackery, but this guy seems to be pretty keen on using data to extrapolate likelihoods and generalizations, and is prescribing approaches to thinking, rather than giving precise, one-size-fits-all commands.  It's interesting so far.